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| Writers of the Reign of Henry II: Twelve Essays. Edited by Ruth Kennedy and Simon Meecham-Jones. The New Middle Ages. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. Pp. viii + 280. $69.95. The significance of the twelfth century in European, and particularly british, history has long been recognized. Charles Homer Haskins wrote his Renaissance of the Twelfth Century in 1955; Christopher Brooke's Twelfth Century Renaissance and C. Warren Hollister's collection with the same title appeared almost simultaneously in 1969 and 1970; and by the end of the twentieth century there was a new overview, in R. N. Swanson's Twelfth Century Renaissance. The current essay collection is one of many that have followed in recent years, and so it might seem at first that the persistent references to neglect which characterize many of the essays in this volume are in some way misplaced. It is true that much has been written, in both large and small-scale studies, on this period, and it is one of the (minor) irritations of this volume that many of the writers fail to engage as fully as they might with some of that recent scholarship. However, it is also the case that persistent barriers remain when it comes to our ability to appreciate fully the scope and depth of the Angevin literary achievement. Each of the essays in this volume has something interesting to offer about some particular text or texts, but the true importance of the volume lies in its cumulative insistence on sweeping away some of those barriers.
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