The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism. Volume II: The Middle Ages. Edited by Alastair Minnis and Ian Johnson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Pp. xvi + 865. $160.

This volume is testimony to a gargantuan effort on the part of its contributors, and especially its editors. by editorial implication a project that took many years to complete, it required much ingenuity as well to assimilate the particularities of medieval cultural and textual production to the overall parameters established by the "Founding Editors" for individual volumes of The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism and, even more broadly, to the modern understanding of what constitutes the practice of literary criticism, where and how it is practiced, and who are its practitioners.

R. W. Hanning
Columbia University