The first 132 pages of this ambitious volume are based upon the E. A. Lowe Lectures in Palaeography, delivered by Michael Lapidge in Oxford in 2002, and are deeply indebted to Lowe's own masterwork, Codices latini antiquiores (11 volumes and supplement, Oxford 1934–72), which surveyed extant manuscripts written in Latin prior to the year 800. The parameters of such major projects are always difficult to decide upon and such date restrictions are inevitably arbitrary, however necessary. It is, therefore, not surprising that the title of Lapidge's work, The Anglo-Saxon library, should have attracted some comment as over-stating the extent of its content. For this is not a thorough-going study of the nature of book production and collecting in early England, but rather an assessment of the evidence of which works composed during classical antiquity and the post-Roman period to about 700 may have been available to Anglo-Saxon scholars, at home and abroad in the Germanic mission-fields, prior to the era of the Norman Conquest.

This first section of the book explores the methodologies that can be used to reconstruct Anglo-Saxon libraries from the evidence of inventories, from actual manuscripts and from citations. The rest of the book (pp. 133–342) consists of five appendices: ‘Six inventories of Latin books from Anglo-Saxon libraries’; ‘Eighth-century inventories of Latin books from the area of the Anglo-Saxon mission in Germany’; ‘Surviving eighth-century manuscripts from the area of the Anglo-Saxon mission in Germany’; ‘Ninth-century manuscripts of continental origin having pre-Conquest English provenance’. These are followed by a ‘Catalogue of classical and patristic authors and works composed before ad 700 and known in Anglo-Saxon England’. This important body of data underpins the discussion in the first part of the book. It concludes with a useful bibliography, an index of manuscripts and a general index. A surprising omission from the bibliography, however, is an important article by T. J. (Julian) Brown – one of the great English palaeographers – ‘An historical introduction to the use of classical Latin authors in the British Isles from the fifth to the eleventh century’, Settimane di studio del centro italiano di studi sull'alto medioevo xxii (Spoleto 1975), 237–99, reprinted in J. Bately, J. Roberts and M. P. Brown (eds), A palaeographer's view: selected writings of Julian Brown (London 1993), 141–78.

The work is couched, to some extent, in terms of library/book history, an area of study that is receiving growing attention, not least with the recent publication of Simon Eliot and Jonathan Rose (eds), The Blackwell companion to the book, Oxford 2007, and the work currently underway on two complementary series published by Cambridge University Press: The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain and The Cambridge History of Libraries in Britain and Ireland. The first volume of the former is eagerly awaited, whilst the first volume of the latter, covering the period to 1640, and edited by Elisabeth Leedham-Green and Teresa Webber, appeared in 2006 and allows Lapidge's contribution to be viewed in context. His introduction and first two chapters, ‘Vanished libraries of classical antiquity’ and ‘Vanished libraries of Anglo-Saxon England’, provide in themselves a succinct, readable overview of the early history of the library which, for Lapidge, is ‘a collection of books acquired and arranged for the purposes of study and the pursuit of knowledge’. His definition is used to preclude biblical and liturgical volumes, but includes patristic commentary. This serves to exclude consideration of the more usual Anglo-Saxon library – the collections of books necessary to sustain the liturgical life and lectio divina of religious foundations – and to slant the discussion in favour of atypical authors and repositories. It also presents an anomaly. The very term ‘library’ stems from the Latin ‘bibliotheca’ – a receptacle for storing books, amongst the most prominent of which was the Bible, in its many codicological and textual forms. The great library established by Cassiodorus at his villa monastery of Vivarium was dedicated to its study and copying, and yet, although Cassiodoran exegesis is included, his several influential biblical editions are not. Likewise, the reading material available to Bede at Monkwearmouth/Jarrow forms a particular focus, but to consider what shaped and informed Bede's own remarkable writings without including the scriptural editions and variants upon which he based his own commentaries, like the church Fathers whose works he also consulted (Jerome, Origen, Ambrose, Augustine, Gregory etc.), is to omit what Bede would have considered his own most valuable primary sources. Discussion (most recently by Meyvaert, Chazelle and others) concerning access to copies of Cassiodorus's biblical editions, the Codex grandior, Novem codices and Codex minutiae manu, have played a significant part in the study of Anglo-Saxon ecclesiastical learning. Such availability would have shaped the remarkable feat of editorial scholarship that produced the Ceolfrith Bibles, which probably owed much to Bede's guiding hand. This hand also participated in the physical act of writing as an act of evangelism (for as Bede himself says, in monastic humility he served as ‘author, notary and scribe’, the functions of copyist/secretary and transmitter of Scripture being clearly distinguished). These Bibles are as much a witness to the strengths (spiritual, intellectual and economic) of the Monkwearmouth/Jarrow library as Bede's works on history (indebted to Eusebius, Josephus and Arator) and natural sciences (informed by Pliny and Isidore), which are not treated as independent genres but as complementary attempts to explore God's master-plan.

This work thus serves to perpetuate a common-place generalisation in book history and cultural studies: that the Insular contribution was primarily to serve as a limited preservation and transmission mechanism, enabling some examples of classical learning to pass to Carolingian scholars in a direct line of transmission, whilst others were lost and had to await recovery during successive continental waves of humanism, often termed ‘renaissances’. This is to underestimate the complex and distinctive nature of Insular literary culture and downplays its remarkable success in effectively integrating ecclesiastical learning and vernacular, often secular, literatures.

That having been said, this book remains a tour de force and represents the distillation of a lifetime of careful study and unparalleled knowledge of Anglo-Latin literature. Lapidge's ground-breaking work on the contribution of Theodore and Hadrian, their Canterbury school and its influence upon Aldhelm and Bede pervades the central discussion, as does his knowledge of Byhrtferth of Ramsey and Abbo of Fleury. Boniface and Alcuin are also considered, as are Lindisfarne, Ripon, Hexham, Breedon, Peterborough, King Alfred's circle and those of the Benedictine reformers. There is, perhaps, a danger that the valuable data contained in the appendices may be misinterpreted by some readers who may not be able to subject them to Lapidge's own carefully nuanced reading, seen, for example, in his masterly discussion of Bede's consultation of Lucan and the Vergilian influences detectable in the metrical Life of St Cuthbert. For the inclusion of a work composed prior to 700 within this resource does not necessarily mean that it was widely available for consultation in early England – or that it was present there at all, some items (such as works by Jordanes and Chromatius) occuring only in the continental book-lists. The editorial policy adopted in respect of these lists is revealing, for biblical and liturgical items are excluded, whereas the continental lists are otherwise inclusive, with no attempt made to indicate which of the works listed are likely, from other evidence, actually to have been available in England.

Notwithstanding such quibbles, this epic and elegant work stands as the most thorough-going and authoritative account to date of the early sources that informed and helped enable the formation of a distinctive English literary culture. It should be used judiciously, along with what is currently available of the Fontes Anglo-Saxonici project (issued as a CD-Rom, version 1.1, in 2002 and available in updated version at http://fontes.english.ox.ac.uk).