Via Crucis: Essays on Early Medieval Sources and Ideas in Memory of J. E. Cross. Edited by Thomas N. Hall. With assistance from Thomas D. Hill and Charles D. Wright. Morgantown: West Virginia University Press, 2002. Pp. xvii + 449. $45.

In his preface to the volume, Thomas N. Hall informs readers that "this book originated as a series of papers delivered at a Symposium on Irish and Anglo-Saxon Literary Culture in Honor of J.E. Cross held in conjunction with the 30th International Congress on Medieval Studies at Kalamazoo in May 1996. The purpose of that symposium was to bring together a number of friends and admirers of Professor Cross to celebrate his remarkably rich career as a scholar of Old English and Insular Latin literature, Anglo-Saxon manuscripts, and medieval sermons, saints' Lives [sic] and apocrypha " (p. xi). Hall comments that originally the intention had been to produce a festschrift to honor recent and ground-breaking publications by Cross. Since, sadly, Cross passed away in December 1996, half a year after the Kalamazoo symposium, the volume became not a festschrift, however, but a memorial volume.

Kirsten Wolf
University of Wisconsin, Madison