Writing the Oral Tradition: Oral Poetics and Literate Culture in Medieval England. by Mark C. Amodio. Poetics of Orality and Literacy. Notre Dame, IN: Univ. of Notre Dame Press, 2004. Pp. ix + 298. $55 (cloth); $25 (paper).

Setting a high standard for the University of Notre Dame Press's new series Poetics of Orality and Literacy, Mark Amodio's Writing the Oral Tradition offers an innovative, convincing, and thoroughly engaging "study of the oral tradition's influence on the vernacular verse produced in England from the beginnings of the Anglo-Saxon period in the fifth century c.e. through the close of the Middle Ages in the early fifteenth" (p. xv).

Lori Ann Garner
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign