Text and Picture in Anglo-Saxon England: Narrative Strategies in the Junius 11 Manuscript. By Catherine Karkov. Cambridge Studies in Anglo-Saxon England, 31. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Pp. xii + 225; 61 illustrations. $69.95.

Much of the scholarship on Oxford, Bodleian Library, Junius 11 has been fragmentary, focusing on part of one of the poems or on the manuscript's illustrations. Catherine Karkov's Text and Picture in Anglo-Saxon England: Narrative Strategies in the Junius 11 Manuscript is a more inclusive study. Central to the book is the claim that "the manuscript was not only carefully compiled to create a series of interrelated narratives, but that the illustrations were meant to be an integral part of that narrative and an aid in establishing the overall unity of the manuscript " (p. 16). Karkov's assessments of the potential interactions and techniques of narrative across the manuscript, and her emphasis on the manuscript as a book rather than as several discrete units, offer a comprehensive sense of how Junius 11 might have functioned. Text and Picture in Anglo- Saxon England both complements existing studies of portions of the manuscript and presents valuable new considerations of manuscript context and unity in the sole surviving example of vernacular poem and illustration in Anglo-Saxon England.

Janet Schrunk Ericksen
University of Minnesota, Morris