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206 Reviews Parergon 21.1 (2004) of a paragraph piles example upon example without necessarily constructing a coherent and forceful explanatory thread. The repetitive nature of this approach can tend to make the book’s contents feel more like a catalogue than an argument in parts (especially in the later chapters) and may prompt readers to wish for more variety of stylistic approach. Furthermore, where evidence for a particular point is lacking the argument occasionally lapses into speculation (one brief paragraph on p. 182 contains the phrases ‘it is plausible to believe’, ‘despite the silence of the sources, one might expect’, and ‘one might be justified in believing’, among others). Despite these criticisms, the volume succeeds in giving a sense of the complicated nature of the reconquest and the relationships of the various political entities involved. The Spanish crusades were far from a simple opposition of religious foes, a Christian ‘us’ against an Islamic ‘them’. For some time that iconic figure of the reconquista, El Cid, fought in alliance with Moslem powers against other Christians. In the late twelfth century, Alfonso IX of León entered an alliance with the Almohads against Castile, thus prompting an offer of indulgences from Pope Celestine III for those willing to fight against the Christian monarch. In a later campaign, Alfonso declared himself a crusader and was rewarded with remission of sins, thus making him probably ‘the only figure of his time to be both the object of … and the leader of a crusade’ (p. 83). It is in the recognition of such complexities and in the consistency of O’Callaghan’s thematic approach that the volume’s strengths lie. Lindsay Diggelmann Department of History University of Auckland Orchard, Andy, A Critical Companion to Beowulf, Cambridge, D.S. Brewer, 2003; cloth; pp. xix, 396; 3 b/w illustrations, 6 b/w plates; RRP US$75; ISBN 0859917665. This book is presented as an synthesis of critical scholarship on all aspects of the best known and most studied Old English poem, Beowulf, a text of unknown date and authorship. Orchard presents a more global and yet more highly individualistic perspective on this fine poem than other recent reference compendia, such as A Beowulf Handbook by Robert E. Bjork and John D. Niles (Nebraska, 1997), with which it shares some ground. Orchard makes a virtue, Reviews 207 Parergon 21.1 (2004) rather then the object of concealment, of the book’s subjective, even idiosyncratic aspect:’‘not all the views expressed here are mainstream’ (p. 8). Orchard’s book is a highly organised collection of digests: on the unique manuscript in which the text is found; its literary, religious, legendary and heroic dimensions; and its extensive use of direct speech. These topics are categorised into chapters and the chapters grouped thematically. Chapters 2 and 3 encompass ‘visual and verbal aspects of the poem’; 4 and 5 ‘its cultural and literary background’; 6 and 7 ‘narrative themes and technique’; and 8 the poem’s encouragement of multiple views by readers (p. 11). Within each of these chapters are informed discussions on the history and current state of scholarship in these fields, mediated by Orchard’s own take on the text and responses to it. His handling of the vast amount of material published on Beowulf goes beyond collection and even synthesis of scholarship, to provide the author’s own views on the poem and its critical reception, within his self-professed brief for the book to act as ‘an incitement to more’ scholarship (p. 8). These sheer size of the book’s apparatus and the amount of scholarship it treats might appear to work against that goal. As an aid to the student of Beowulf, Orchard provides maps, genealogies, a plot summary, appendices listing repeated formulaic phrases and manuscript foliation, a lengthy sectionalised bibliography, and indices of passages and scholars cited, as well as a general index. In its capacity as a reference tool, these features of the book provide a useful range of pathways into the plentiful published material on Beowulf. Perhaps their sheer number, though, in the context of the book’s overriding metaphor of the need to control and negotiate the burgeoning material, make the...

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