Frank Barlow has studied biography in the high Middle Ages intensively, and has written biographies himself. He has become widely known for his Edward the Confessor (1987) and Thomas Becket (1987). ‘Biography is, however, a genre which continually seems to promote condemnation and shame, to be seen as dated, positivist, imprecise, too easy’ write the three editors in their introduction (p. 11). Barlow has never troubled himself with such charges. His Becket biography brings the conflicting testimonies of the eye-witnesses to the murder in the cathedral into harmony, and finds a new motive for the fatal assault: ‘The barons were obviously drunk’ – an opinion apparently first advanced by T. S. Eliot. The sixteen studies in this volume, presented at a conference on ‘The limits of medieval biography’ held at Exeter in 2003, are arranged in chronological order: J. L. Nelson, ‘Did Charlemagne have a private life?; R. Fleming, ‘Bones for historians: putting the body back into biography’; B. Yorke, ‘Writing the biographies of Anglo-Saxon female saints’; R. Abels, ‘Alfred and his biographers’; S. Keynes, ‘King Æthelred the Unready’; P. Stafford, ‘Writing the biography of eleventh-century queens’; E. van Houts, ‘The Flemish contribution to biographical writing in England’; D. Bates, ‘The Conqueror's earliest historians’; J. Martindale, ‘The autobiographies of Count Fulk le Réchin and Count William of Poitou’; C. Holdsworth, ‘Bernard of Clairvaux and his miracles’; L. Grant, ‘Geoffrey of Lèves, bishop of Chartres’; M. Chibnall, ‘The Empress Matilda as a subject for biography’; E. King, ‘The Gesta Stephani’; J. Gillingham, ‘Writing the biography of Roger of Howden’; D. Crouch, ‘The “History” of William Marshal’; N. Vincent, ‘The strange case of the missing biographies: the lives of the Plantagenet kings of England, 1154–1272’. Two of the papers concern what is not said: Fleming's ‘Bones for historians’ (pp. 29–48) shows what can be learned from paleoanthropology about life and death in an early medieval English village. Forensic examination of skeletons yields data on life-expectancy and the history of illness, so providing historians with an insight into the lives of local inhabitants – on which all biographies are silent. Indeed, there is no account of the life of a peasant in western Europe from the whole of antiquity or from the earlier and high Middle Ages. In the twelfth century the French peasant-girl Alpais of Cudot and the German peasant Gottschalk attracted biographical notice, though this was as visionaries. Not only peasants but also kings could find no biographer. Vincent (pp. 237–57) asks why there are no medieval biographies of the Plantagenet kings who ruled England for a hundred and eighteen years. He holds that one reason for this silence is the murder in the cathedral in 1170. There is an index of medieval names, and a portrait of Frank Barlow as the frontispiece. This is a fine volume which the reader will pick up with pleasure, and be slow to set down.