Edited by Ben Guy, Georgia Henley, Owain Wyn Jones, and Rebecca Thomas, The Chronicles of Medieval Wales and the March is an excellent collection with a high standard of scholarship throughout and much of value in every chapter, sure to be widely cited for years to come. It will certainly be warmly welcomed by those working on later medieval Wales, but there is also a great deal that will interest English and Anglo-Norman historians as well as scholars of historical writing across Europe as a whole. The volume's accessibility to nonspecialists is facilitated by a series of helpful introductory chapters that offer good contextualization to the material under consideration. The collection is evenly split between such contextualizing approaches to and new studies of chronicles from Wales and the March (the first six chapters) and new editions and translations of understudied texts (the final five chapters). The volume concludes with the very useful “Appendix: List of the Chronicles of Medieval Wales and the March,” which details “a list of chronicles known to have been composed in Wales and the March from the earliest times to the sixteenth century” (421), including the years covered by each and their principal manuscripts and published editions. This collection offers an abundance of riches to scholars of the individual texts treated here and showcases the vibrancy of historical writing from this region.

The volume begins with “Synopses,” three chapters contextualizing the chronicles of Wales and the March as both medieval productions and modern objects of study. Huw Pryce's “Chronicling and its Contexts in Medieval Wales” offers a helpful survey of Welsh chronicles throughout the medieval period, giving readers a good sense of both the scope of Welsh chronicling activity and the interconnected nature of these texts. Pryce concludes with a case study of fifteenth-century chronicler Gutun Owain, whose work illustrates “the continuing vigour in late medieval Wales of the master narrative of the Britons and Welsh and its use as a framework for the history of recent events” (24). Björn Weiler's “Historical Writing in Europe, c. 1100–1300” provides a welcome comparative perspective that examines Welsh chronicling activity as part of broader European intellectual culture and concludes with some promising suggestions for future research. Finally, Ben Guy's chapter, “Historical Scholars and Dishonest Charlatans: Studying the Chronicles of Medieval Wales,” provides a thorough and necessary overview of the many challenges posed by this material and will be indispensable reading for students and scholars new to the field.

The next three chapters, “Detailed Studies,” offer more focused approaches that underscore these chronicles’ complexity. Henry Gough-Cooper's “Meet the Ancestors? Evidence for Antecedent Texts in the Late Thirteenth-Century Welsh Latin Chronicles” focuses on the interrelationships between the three principal Welsh Latin annalistic chronicles, finding that the Breviate and Cottonian chronicles were compiled in different manners but “developed from a common stock which is detectable up to and just beyond the end of the twelfth century” (135). Barry J. Lewis's “Bonedd y Saint, Brenhinedd y Saesson, and Historical Scholarship at Valle Crucis Abbey” makes a strong case that all surviving copies of the hagiographical genealogical tract Bonedd y Saint can be traced to a now-lost archetype created at the Cistercian abbey of Valle Crucis in northeast Wales in the second half of the thirteenth century. David Stephenson's “The Continuation of Brut y Tywysogyon in NLW, MS Peniarth 20 Revisited” suggests that Madog ap Llywelyn of Bromfield had a central role in shaping this material in the early fourteenth century.

The second half of this volume, “Editions,” offers a valuable series of new high-quality editions, translations, and textual studies of Welsh and Marcher chronicle material. Jones introduces “O Oes Gwrtheyrn: A Medieval Welsh Chronicle” by noting that this text is remarkable in several ways: it is the only monastic chronicle to survive from medieval Gwynedd (Jones locates it to the Cistercian monastery of Aberconwy in the second decade of the thirteenth century); it was likely originally composed in Welsh; and it includes unique recordings of notable events such as the death of the Norwegian Erlendr píkr at Llanfaes in 1209. Henley's edition of “The Cardiff Chronicle in London, British Library, MS Royal 6 B XI” sheds light on patterns of intellectual transmission between Marcher monasteries and those in Wales, showing how the information in Marcher chronicles was adapted into vernacular Welsh historical writing via a series of interconnected monastic networks.

Joshua Byron Smith's “The Chronicle of Gregory of Caerwent” is one of many contributions to underscore the importance of regional identity in historical writing, introducing us as it does to this “modest chronicle” whose scope is “generally local, often regional, and only occasionally national” (290) composed by a monk of St Peter's Abbey, Gloucester, from his entrance into the novitiate in 1237 until his apparent death in 1290. Also of interest is that Gregory's chronicle survives only in a copy made by the antiquarian Laurence Nowell (British Library, London, Cotton MS Vespasian A V, British Library, London). Rebecca Try's “A Forgotten Welsh Chronology in Aberystwyth, National Library of Wales, MS 5267B, in MS Peniarth 50, and in the Red Book of Hergest” compares three versions of a Welsh chronology, exploring dating differences and textual omissions to shed light on manuscript circulation and intellectual networks in medieval Glamorgan. Finally, Guy's “Brut Ieuan Brechfa: A Welsh Poet Writes the Early Middle Ages” is an impressive piece of detective work that redeems a chronicle compiled by Ieuan Brechfa in the late fifteenth or early sixteenth century from its tainted association as a publication of antiquarian and notorious forger Iolo Morganwg.

The editors note that the book emerged from the collaborative work of the Welsh Chronicles Research Group, and it can only be hoped that they will continue to publish many more such studies in the future.