To the growing interest in the representation and interpretation of violence in medieval literature this volume of fifteen essays collected and introduced by Albrecht Classen makes a significant contribution. The essays range across Middle High German, Old French, Middle English, Italian, and even Old Georgian literature and include analyses of manuscript illumination and musical settings as well as texts in the several literary languages. If the essays are (inevitably) uneven, they generally speak to the theme usefully and often with insight. Their language is clear and largely free of jargon. It is interesting to note that more contributors find inspiration (or at least ideas to contest) from the work of Norbert Elias or René Girard than from theories of Foucault or Althüsser. Classen's introductory essay sets out themes for the book and makes a case (necessary for the readers? for the contributors?) for the relevance of studying medieval literature as a source of insight--or even more--in living with and dealing with the violence that troubles the modern world. His wide knowledge and obvious personal concern combine in interesting comments; yet they set a high bar for expectations of directly linking medieval and modern violence in the essays to follow. Most readers will come to this volume not primarily out of a search for modern answers, but in order to understand the medieval world; most will probably already share a sense that knowing that world helps in a broad sense to inform us about violence in any age. Nearly all of the essays stress the ambiguity of the view of violence taken in the texts they examine. Violence instrumental to approved causes or launched by approved authorities will be accepted, even praised to the skies. Yet these same texts also reveal dark fears of being victimized by the violence or even suffering the destruction of the social fabric sustaining civilized life. Love emerges as a sub-theme of many essays since it appears in a close and complicated interaction with violence, sometimes its cure, often its spur. Classen's own contribution (chapter 6) to the essays argues, against other interpretations, that Wolfram von Eschenbach's romances sought "the creation of public discourse on violence in the context of courtly love and the religious conflicts of his time" (144). Less optimistically, Raymond Cormier argues from several Old French romances (four "Antique" and one Arthurian, in chapter 2) that the advent of courtly literature in no way tamed the taste for brutality among the chivalrous. He sees change coming only in the thirteenth-century influence of St Francis and works such as Raoul de Hodenc's Roman des eles . With a focus on one "Antique" German romance, the Eneide of Heinrich von Veldeke, and on the character of Turnus in that work (in chapter 3), William McDonald makes his case for violence seen as a choice and for a suggestion of limits to hostilities in war. Drawing on Middle High German works, Scott Pincikowski (Chapter 4) sees violence continuing to be essential to courtly as it had been to heroic literature, but finds a dialogue about control at work. Nancy Black studies especially the illuminations in MS Yale 229 of La Queste del Saint Graal and La Mort le roi Artu (in chapter 7) to show complexity of views: an apocalyptic sense of violence is pressed especially in the former (under Cistercian influence) and yet an elegiac sense of the world of chivalric heroes and their wars appears in the latter. Stacy Hahn (chapter 9) finds violence in Mélusine is praised when it supports the family, the church, or public order, but that it is condemned when family members turn devastatingly on each other. The Old Georgian romance, Lord of the Panther-Skin , as Gisbertus Koolemans Beynen shows (chapter 8) is a violent tale, but suggests that human communication can prevent violence. Marcella Munson shows that in Christine de Pisan's prose letters "the radical ambiguity of the human body as symbol has been transposed onto the space of the nation" that is shaped by its citizens and also makes demands of them. Jean Jost asks why Middle English literature is so violent (in chapter 12) and suggests, among much else, that lads were educated with Latin texts treating rape casually and that the church viewed women as Eve, before turning to analyze four romances in which chivalry violates its own "norms." (Question: has Barbara Tuchman, quoted and cited here, been accepted as a medieval scholar?) Michael Harney surveys violence in Spanish chivalric romance (in chapter 15), urging readers to avoid "facile psychological or sociological determinism" or "overeager Platonism" (336). Fabian Alfie turns to violence in the Italian tradition of comic poetry (chapter 10); in the example chosen, the poet subverts the cultural definition of motherhood and inverts poetic standards. Background for the views found in literature is provided by Leo Lefebure who enriches the oft-told story of evolving Christian views on violence by setting it in the context of the other two Abrahamic religions, Islam and Judaism (chapter 1). An extension of the issue of violence into the realm of magic appears in Corinne Saunders study of Middle English romances both as a violent practice and as a learned courtly art (chapter 11). Raising the question of the stylization of violence, Siegfried Christolph concludes (chapter 5) that "the question is perhaps not whether the violence described is realistic, but rather how its stylized representation helps to affirm or reaffirm, the legitimacy of an idealized social and moral order." Using the ideas of René Girard, Julia Shinnick analyzes (chapter14) a musical sequence for the mass that recalls the martyrdom of Thomas Becket; the liturgy educated performers and participants in a view of Becket as Girardian scapegoat.