The Footsteps of Israel: Understanding Jews in Anglo-Saxon England. By Andrew P. Scheil. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004. Pp. vii + 371. $65.

Christianity's polemical reaction to Judaism in the Middle Ages has drawn and continues to draw attention from scholars. This book, however, departs from the perception that "no one has taken an extensive, in-depth look at representations of Jews in pre-Conquest England" (p. 7). The topic, first explored, admits the author, in a chapter on Ælfric and the Jews in his PhD dissertation, has here been expanded into a lengthy four-part study, with each part comprising an introduction and two chapters and focusing on Anglo-Saxon writings in both Latin and the vernacular. Even so, the general introduction to the book frames the study as necessarily selective, arguing that the materials examined, although far from exhaustive, still represent "a large enough sample of texts and traditions to map out some basic hypotheses" (p. 18). A focus on written texts, the general introduction further explains, is necessitated by the fact that Jews, never physically present in Anglo-Saxon England, "were nevertheless present as imaginative, textual constructions" (p. 3) in a good many extant writings from the period. Scheil's announced project is thus to examine the multitude of "rhetorical effects" and "representational strategies" (p. 3) that kept Jews and Judaism alive in the Anglo- Saxon literary imagination, and to lay bare the ends toward which such effects and strategies were directed.

Scott DeGregorio
University of Michigan-Dearborn