This book had its origins in a conference of the same name held in 2011. Most of the participants have been able to contribute and they are joined by a few new names to ensure a rounded treatment of the subject. Those who were lucky enough to attend the conference will remember it as a particularly stimulating event, and the resulting book lives up to this early promise: it displays a thematic coherence rare in edited volumes and each of the papers has something of interest to offer.

The subject addressed is one of substantial and growing interest: how the English of the central Middle Ages viewed their Anglo-Saxon heritage. Its importance lies not only in what this reveals about historical awareness during in the crucial years of the ‘Twelfth-century Renaissance’ (though this is rightly a major focus of many of the contributions); it also sheds much salient light on how our knowledge of the Anglo-Saxon period was preserved – after all, it is in post-Conquest copies that many of our key records of pre-Conquest England survive. Given this, it is only appropriate that the editors have assembled a crack team of pre- and post-Conquest scholars to take on the task. The resulting contributions are a testament to the legacy of two great scholars: Richard Southern and James Campbell, whose work rightly frames much of the debate. After a brief but clear introduction, laying out the aims of the volume and summarising its contents, the papers are organised into four thematic parts. The first, on ‘Anglo-Saxon saints’, boasts papers by Robert Bartlett on the ‘viking hiatus’ as presented in post-Conquest hagiography, Rosalind Love on Folcard of Saint-Bertain and the pre-Conquest saints at Thorney, and Teresa Webber on the use of Bede's Ecclesiastical history for lections in the eleventh, twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The second part, on historical narratives, includes papers by Julia Barrow on the presentation of earlier Danish attacks on monasteries, David Rollason on the gestation of Symeon of Durham's Historia de regibus anglorum, Rod Thomson on William of Malmesbury's ‘Diatribe against the Normans’ (a short, but important discussion), Elisabeth van Houts on Normandy's view of the Anglo-Saxon past, and John Gillingham on the under-studied early sections of Richard of Devizes's chronicle. The third, dedicated to laws and charters, comprises papers by Julia Crick on post-Conquest copies of pre-Conquest charters, Nicholas Vincent on the use and abuse (and non-use) of Anglo-Saxon charters in twelfth- and thirteenth-century England, and Bruce O'Brien on the twelfth-century reception of Anglo-Saxon legal materials. Finally, the fourth section, on art history and the vernacular, contains papers by Judith Weiss on Anglo-Norman Romance, Catherine Karkov on the Eadwine Psalter, and Malcolm Thurlby on post-Conquest architecture.

The focus on the use of pre-Conquest past in later years makes this more than your average edited volume. The coverage is inevitably somewhat impressionistic and contributions vary between more general surveys (Thurlby, Weiss, van Houts) and detailed case studies (Rollason, Thomson, Gillingham, O'Brien). The present reviewer – who may reveal his own biases here – was particularly struck by the contributions of Crick and Vincent: both break substantial new ground, relating this well to the volume's overarching themes. The former argues that later copies of pre-Conquest documents reveal a great deal about engagement with the early English past in the post-Conquest period. By focusing on imitative script – that is, when scribes consciously mimic the letter forms of their exemplars – she is able to show how monks and canons sought to bridge the gap between the pre- and post-Conquest worlds: by varying their letter forms they both showed a deep awareness of the gap which separated their world from that of the Anglo-Saxons and went some way towards bridging this. Long before the Renaissance and Enlightenment people were thus aware that the past was indeed a foreign country. Vincent, on the other hand, is able to show that Anglo-Saxon documents were surprisingly rarely presented to rulers of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, a fact which raises significant further questions. In particular, it throws the active industry in forging pre-Conquest documents in later years in unusual light: if original documents were so rarely deployed in court or before the king, what good was a fake (however convincing)? In part, the answer lay in providing these documents with more ‘modern’ forms of authentication such as seals. In part, however, it reflects the caesura created by the Conquest; Vincent suggests that this was seen as a new point of departure, much as Bede had earlier envisaged the Adventus Saxonum: it rendered the more distant past of largely antiquarian interest. Still, it would be wrong to reduce this book to two contributions: there is much of interest to be found throughout, be it on the engagement with Anglo-Saxon law in the twelfth century (O'Brien), the use of purported viking attacks to explain gaps in institutional memory (Bartlett, Barrow), the construction of narrative histories of the Anglo-Saxon age (Rollason, van Houts, Gillingham), or the later interest in pre-Conquest saints and their cults (Love, Webber).

The editors have done a fine job here. This volume will find a place on the bookshelves of all serious university libraries – and of many scholars too. We owe them our warmest thanks and congratulations.