The Anglo-Saxon Library. By Michael Lapidge. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. Pp. xiv + 407. $125.

The central argument of this magnificent book is that like most of the libraries of classical antiquity, the once-great libraries of Anglo-Saxon England have vanished almost without a trace but can be reconstructed in large part with the aid of surviving manuscripts, literary borrowings, and inventories of medieval book collections. the marshaling of this evidence is what makes the book such a stunning achievement. Earlier scholars have expended considerable energy trying to reconstruct the libraries of individual authors such as Bede (Laistner) or Aldhelm (Ehwald) or Ælfric (Godden and Pope), or more ambitiously trying to identify all the books and authors known in Anglo-Saxon England (Ogilvy); but these efforts pale in comparison to what Lapidge has accomplished in this one volume, which in many ways represents a culmination of his own field-defining studies of the history of Anglo-Saxon literature. two opening chapters on the vanished libraries of classical antiquity and of Anglo-Saxon England tell the remarkable story of how the principal book collections of these two eras came together only to be dispersed or destroyed without record. three chapters follow detailing the process by which the contents of lost Anglo-Saxon libraries can nevertheless be recovered using inventories, manuscripts, and citations. then comes the most extraordinary set of appendices to grace any book-length study of Anglo-Saxon literature. Appendix A is a revision of Lapidge's 1985 "Surviving booklists from Anglo-Saxon England," which edits and discusses six inventories of Latin books from Anglo-Saxon libraries (excluding vernacular or liturgical books since these are not relevant to Lapidge's main concern, the Latin books available for individual or classroom study). Appendix b examines three eighth-century lists of books from the region of the Anglo-Saxon missions in Germany. Appendix C inventories over a hundred manuscripts produced in or imported into the same Anglo-Saxon mission territories in the eighth century. Appendix D inventories eighty manuscripts of continental origin with a pre-Conquest English provenance, keyed to Gneuss's Handlist and bischoff's catalogue of ninth-century manuscripts. Appendix E catalogues the Latin works quoted or alluded to by twelve of the best-known Anglo- Saxon authors, from theodore and Hadrian to byrhtferth of Ramsey. Then, as an appendix to the appendices, follows a sixty-seven-page catalogue of Classical and patristic authors and works written before 700 known in Anglo-Saxon England, drawing on the data assembled in the foregoing appendices. The result is by far the fullest, the most detailed, the most original, and the most reliable study of the literary world of the Anglo-Saxons ever produced.

Thomas N. Hall
University of Notre Dame