Reviews Dan Veach, Beowulf & Beyond: Classic Anglo-Saxon Poems, Stories, Sayings, Spells, and Riddles (Columbus GA: Lockwood Press, 2021). pp. viii + 224. $19.95. ISBN: 978-1-948-48861-7, reviewed by Abigail Greaves Reinhard Hennig, Emily Lethbridge, and Michael Schulte, eds, Ecocriticism and Old Norse Studies: Nature and the Environment in Old Norse Literature and Culture (Turnhout: Brepols, 2023). pp. 312. €90.00. ISBN: 978-2-503-60484-8, reviewed by Emma E. Horne Joseph Grossi, Angles on a Kingdom: East Anglian Identities from Bede to Ælfric (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2021). pp. xiv + 385. $85. ISBN: 978-1-487-50573-8, reviewed by Rory Naismith Mauro Mormino, Pietro Siculo, Omelie contro i pauliciani: testo e traduzione. Nuovi testi patristici 4 (Rome: Città Nuova, 2023). pp. 216. €30.00. ISBN: 978-8-831-12704-2, reviewed by Carl Dixon Tom Horne, Elizabeth Pierce, and Rachel Barrowman, eds, The Viking Age in Scotland: Studies in Scottish Scandinavian Archaeology (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2023). pp. xx + 340. £90.00. ISBN: 978-1-474-48582-1, reviewed by Tom Fairfax Judith A. Green, The Normans: Power, Conquest and Culture in 11th-Century Europe (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2022). pp. 351. £25.00. ISBN: 978-0-300-18033-6, reviewed by David Bates Alex Mallett, ed., Franks and Crusades in Medieval Eastern Christian Historiography (Turnhout: Brepols, 2020). pp. 351. €84.00. ISBN: 978-2-503-56581-1, reviewed by Lucas McMahon Nicholas Morton, The Crusader States and their Neighbours: A Military History, 1099–1187 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020). pp. 320. £60. ISBN: 978-0-198-82454-1, reviewed by Andrew D. Buck Helen J. Nicholson and Jochen Burgtorf, eds, The Templars, the Hospitallers and the Crusades: Essays in Homage to Alan J. Forey (Abingdon: Routledge, 2022). pp. xiii + 244. ISBN: 978-0-367-49687-6, reviewed by Rory Maclellan Carl F. Petry, The Mamluk Sultanate: A History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022), pp. xix + 358. £69.99. ISBN: 978-1-108-47104-6, reviewed by Nicholas Morton Claire Weeda, Ethnicity in Medieval Europe, 950–1250: Medicine, Power and Religion (Woodbridge: York Medieval Press, 2021). pp. 356. £65.00. ISBN: 978-1-914-04901-9, reviewed by Levi Roach Ruth J. Salter, Saints, Cure-Seekers and Miraculous Healing in Twelfth-Century England (Woodbridge: York Medieval Press, 2021). pp. 248. £68.90. ISBN: 978-1-914-04900-2, reviewed by Simon Yarrow James Titterton, Deception in Medieval Warfare: Trickery and Cunning in the Central Middle Ages (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 2022). pp. 292. £75. ISBN: 978-1-783-27678-3, reviewed by Robert W. Jones Sarah Ifft Decker, The Fruit of Her Hands: Jewish and Christian Women’s work in Medieval Catalan Cities (Pennsylvania: Penn State University Press, 2022). pp. 233. £90.95. ISBN: 978-0-271-09330-7, reviewed by Anna Rich-Abad Nicholas Orme, Going to Church in Medieval England (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2021). pp. xii + 483. £20.00. ISBN: 978-0-300-25650-5, reviewed by Claire Kennan Krista A. Murchison, Manuals for Penitents in Medieval England: From Ancrene Wisse to the Parson’s Tale (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer). pp. xiii + 175. £65. ISBN: 978-1-843-84608-6, reviewed by Sarah Wood Arvind Thomas, Piers Plowman and the Reinvention of Church Law in the Late Middle Ages (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2019). pp. 288. $85. ISBN: 978-1-487-50246-1, reviewed by Mike Rodman Jones Thorlac Turville-Petre, ed. Pearl (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2021). pp. 224. £85. ISBN: 978-1-800-85999-9, reviewed by David Aers Ian Forrest and Christopher Whittick, ed. and trans, The Visitation of Hereford Diocese in 1397, Canterbury & York Society, 111 (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2021). pp. liii + 271. £24.99. ISBN: 978-0-907-23984-0, reviewed by Joel T. Rosenthal Robert L. J. Shaw, The Celestine Monks of France, c. 1350–1450 (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2018). pp. 294. €129. ISBN: 978-9-462-98678-7, reviewed by Daniel Hobbins Kara L. McShane and Mark J. B Wright, eds, The Destruction of Jerusalem, or Titus and Vespasian (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 2021). pp. 228. £26.50. ISBN: 978-1-580-44487-3, reviewed by Lauren Sisson

It is common for undergraduate students who have not studied medieval history before (or have not done so in any great depth) to be nervous and potentially unenthusiastic about approaching it for the first time at university. To help students overcome these potential barriers, during the time I have been at the University of Nottingham I have developed a series of ‘active learning’ activities, including some role-plays, designed to foster greater student engagement and attainment with this subject. In this article, I outline what these activities are and reflect on the (broadly positive) impact they have had on my students.

In the midst of the Third Crusade (1187–1192), an anonymous author composed a poetic account of the Siege of Acre. This Latin poem, the Carmen de Accone oppugnatione, has been largely overlooked in modern scholarship, but it offers a crucial perspective of the first three years of the crusade. An examination of the Carmen’s origins and perspectives reveals both the speed with which crusade authors attempted to explain the actions of prominent figures within coherent, elevated narratives, as well as the power which such narratives have had in shaping modern perceptions of crusaders such as Conrad of Montferrat.

This essay considers two little known Scottish royal women, Margaret of Scotland (d. 1445) and Madeleine of Valois (1520-1537), and interrogates examples of male-authored verse (in Scots, French, and Latin) composed on the occasion of their marriages and deaths. It discusses how the female voice of these two women was ventriloquized for notably political purposes, and how the textual construction of the royal female voice was linked inextricably to the broader crafting of these women’s identities. Such analysis in turn encourages further consideration of how speech in medieval and early modern European literature was imagined within specifically gendered contexts, and raises further crucial questions of agency and autonomy, in particular concerning who has responsibility for the memorialization of these women and what control women more generally had over their own voice - and bodies - in life and death.

The representation of women is often used as a critical touchstone for the re-assessment of many medieval texts: this is also true of discussions of Robert Henryson’s The Testament of Cresseid and Gavin Douglas’s Eneados. This essay compares these poems’ representation of female figures, specifically Cresseid and Dido, but also others, both mortal and immortal. It reflects briefly on the differences between the Scottish poems and their Chaucerian models, Troilus and Criseyde, The House of Fame, and The Legend of Good Women and considers in more depth the frames provided for their narrative of women’s experience. Finally, it explores the provision of speech to female figures, and the relationship between women’s voices, and their agency and experience, and the masculine frames of judgement in which they are set. The essay concludes by suggesting that having a voice may be considered as a proxy for moral agency, and brings culpability in its wake.

This article considers how writings that address the pursuit of heresy in England might have prepared their readers for heretical self-defense, and it surveys the emotional scripts of the Lanterne of Light, Wordes of Poule, Letter of Richard Wyche, and Testimony of William Thorpe, suggesting many lollard writings offer training in feeling as much as argument. This essay closely examines the advice on self-defense in the Sixteen Points, proposing that it aims to teach readers the simple strategy of denying anything they do not know to be true. However, teaching readers to doubt, as in the Dialogue between Reson and Gabbyng, is as important as teaching them to deny. The article finishes with the longest lollard defensive text, the Thirty-Seven Conclusions, showing how it uses doubt to construct its arguments, and even defend Wyclif himself.

This chapter investigates the heresiological techniques employed by the Valentinians, one of the most popular forms of early Christian theology, later refuted by so called ‘Church Fathers’. The cha...