Anglo-Saxon Styles. Edited by Catherine E. Karkov and George Hardin Brown. Binghamton: State University of New York Press, 2003. Pp. vii + 320. $71.50 (cloth); $23.95 (paper).

Karkov and Brown are to be congratulated on recruiting for their collection a distinguished array of scholars with interesting essays on Anglo-Saxon art and artifacts (both great and small), architecture, scribal activity, and literature. A ten-page introduction worries about constraining each essay into conformity with the volume's stated theme of "style. " The essays don't all fit into this preordained theme, and it doesn't matter. Readers will welcome good essays on interesting topics even if they don't all together constitute a building argument toward a definition of style in Anglo-Saxon culture.

Fred C. Robinson
Yale University