This volume emerged from a 2019 conference of the same name in honor of Patrick Geary and has some of the characteristics of a Festschrift. These include both fulsome praise of the subject as well as a somewhat diffuse collection of studies. In their introduction to the volume, the editors provide a short but useful discussion of the medieval concept of identity, arguing that it comprised an amalgam of physical, behavioral, and social characteristics. It is this conception of identitas that was intended to give a unifying theme for the individual contributions.

The volume is organized into five sections, each of which comprises three essays. The first section, entitled »Ethnic Identities«, begins with a study by Jean-Pierre Poly, who takes as his starting point the view that the Roman army of the later 4^th century was thoroughly barbarized. He attempts to demonstrate the validity of this thesis through an analysis of inscriptions on the graves of 40 lower ranking officers buried at Concordia in Northern Italy, and four Roman general officers interred at Trier. Poly provides considerable detail about the units from which the officers were drawn as well as their ethnic identities, insofar as this could be determined on the basis of the information that was provided in the grave inscriptions. Among the notable findings is Poly’s demonstration that of the officers and their family members listed on the tombs, 26 had Latin names, 22 had Germanic names, and four had non-Latin names: 1 Greek, 1 Hebrew, 1 Celtic, and 1 Illyrian. It is not clear, however, that the information adduced by Poly, and particularly the fact that the officers were overwhelmingly Roman citizens and Christians, supports the contention that the army in this period had been barbarized.

The second essay in this section, by Helmut Reimitz, focuses on differences between the treatment of ethnicity by Isidore of Seville (died 636) and Gregory of Tours (died 594). The former sought to present the Goths as a premier gen alongside the Romans in an effort to raise the overall status of the Gothic people within the political context of the Visigothic kingdom of the early 7^th century. By contrast, Gregory actively played down the idea of the superiority of the Frankish gens and focused instead on the importance of creating a world of Christians. Reimitz argues that these competing types of identities, ethnic and religious, were available to both authors and to their audiences, and their choices illuminate important aspects of their views of the way the world should be.

The final essay in section one, by Herwig Wolfram, begins with an observation about the use of the ethnonym Nemitzioi by emperor Constantine VII (913–959) in his »De Ceremoniis« in the context of describing the »king of Bagria«. Wolfram’s main questions in this context are what Bavaria (Bagria) meant at the Byzantine court in the first half of the 10^th century and how Nemcy, the Slavic term for German speakers, made its way to Constantinople. After providing a tour of the horizon regarding the political and intellectual connections among the Franks, Bulgars, Moravians, and Byzantines, Wolfram concludes that Bavaria likely meant the entire East Frankish kingdom and that the term Nemcy was brought to Constantinople in the context of the eastern mission to the Slavs led by Methodius. He also argues that the king of Bavaria to whom Constantine VII was referring was Arnulf of Carinthia (887–899) rather than his uncle Charles III (881–887), as previous scholars had concluded.

The second section, »Inheritance and Identity«, includes two essays that focus on Italy. The first of these by Edward Schoolman examines the ways in which the local elites in Ravenna expressed both their status and their conceptions of their heredity in documentary sources from the period 850–1100. The extensive corpus of surviving documents permits Schoolman to draw a number of conclusions, including that ethnic self-identification in charters served an ideological function separate from membership in a group, or from legal status. Thus, for example, high-ranking members of the new Carolingian elite in the 9^th century often identified themselves as being ex genere Francorum rather than through their occupations, which was the norm otherwise for important people in the city. However, practices changed over time so that by the period of Ottonian dominance in Ravenna in the 10^th century, the highest members of society eschewed ethnic identification in their charters and instead described themselves as coming from families that dominated political and military offices in the city, i. e. ex genere magistri militum or ex genere ducum.

The second Italian essay, by Sarah Whitten, focuses on the ways in which surviving legal documents reflect the varying relationships of different communities to Lombard authority in southern Italy. Using a corpus of some 120 texts, Whitten shows that although documents dealing with property held by men rarely mentioned specific law codes, all of the documents involving the disposition of property held by women made explicit references to Lombard law, indicating the need of women to demonstrate that they were following the letter of the law when alienating property. The final essay in this section, by Hans Hummer, examines the relationship between kinship and the disposition of property. After an analysis of the treatment of inheritance in the so-called barbarian law codes, Carolingian capitularies, as well as the commentary by Rabanus Maurus (died 856) on Isidore of Seville’s »Etymologiae«, Hummer concludes that affective relationships played as important a role in decisions about the distribution of assets as did kinship by blood or marriage.

Section three, »Religious Identities«, begins with a study by Carrie Benes on Jacobus de Voragine (died 1298), the author of the »Golden Legend«, and his treatment of relic translations, with a focus on his discussions of the movement of relics that had particular valency in Genoa. She concludes that these discussion of relic translations highlight the intertwined nature of religious experiences in the cities of later medieval Italy, and that Jacobus’ work was a form of political rhetoric for the purpose of helping to develop a sense of community. Boris Todorov’s essay, the second in this section, focuses on a miscellany of pious readings that was produced c. 1348 in Bulgaria and likely was presented to the Bulgarian Tsar John Alexander (1331–1371). Todorov argues that the composition of this miscellany, and particularly its hagiographic elements, were intended to offer advice to John Alexander about dealing with the pressing issues of the day. The final essay, by Dana Palanichka, offers a reexamination of Dhuoda’s book of advice on behalf of her son William, with a focus on what the Carolingian aristocrat has to say about the role of priests and ecclesiastical institutions. Palanichka concludes that this analysis reveals a growing divide between clergy and laity in the mid-9^th century, pointing out, for example, that Dhuoda did not stress the importance of regular attendance at mass. While this essay makes a number of interesting points, it is not clear that Dhuoda was representative of contemporary thinking or that her choices about what aspects of religious life to emphasize can bear the weight that Polanichka places on them.

In section four, »Legal and Political Identities«, Geoffrey Koziol makes the persuasive case that the turn away from legal sources in the study of early medieval dispute settlement has gone too far. To illuminate this point, he draws comparisons between the processes of resolving conflicts that were set out in later Carolingian capitularies and those found in the statutes of peace assemblies in the context of the Peace of God. He concludes that in both periods, programmatic statements of public policy coexisted with pragmatic descriptions of and injunctions for legal processes that were less formal and more flexible. In the second essay, Warren Brown examines the conceptions of contemporary violence and public disorder in the period encompassing the turn of the millennium and the transition from Capetian to Valois rule in the 14^th century. Brown seeks to show very different conceptions, at least among contemporary writers, regarding both military self-help and the overall disorder of society. He argues that in the later 10^th and early 11^th century, contemporaries accepted military self-help as legitimate and saw their society as well ordered. By contrast, he argues, at the end of the Capetian period, writers rejected the legitimacy of military self-help and saw their society as disordered. While Brown certainly is correct with regard to his treatment of the 14^th century, it is less clear that contemporaries were as accepting of military self-help at the turn of the millennium. Powerful regional rulers, such as the counts of Anjou, certainly rejected efforts of their subordinates to exercise military violence without comital approval. The final essay in this section, by Cosmin Popa-Gorjanu, turns from France to Hungary, with the intention of bringing to bear the concept of corruption as an analytical tool to examine the thinking of government officials in the 13^th century. He argues that Hungarian royal decrees from this period make clear that the government sought to pursue anti-corruption efforts and were particularly concerned to keep government officials from abusing their positions of authority.

In the final section, »Memories, Texts, and Identities«, Maya Maskarinec analyzes what purports to be a multi-period inscription on the church of Saints John and Paul in Rome, part of which is presented as coming from c. 800 and a second part that supposedly dates from c. 1000. However, Maskarinec’s analysis of the text indicates that the priests of this church crafted this ostensible composite inscription in the early 12^th century in the context of a property dispute with the neighboring monastery of Saints Andrew and Gregory, with the aim of invoking the memory of Pope Gregory the Great on their own behalf. The next essay in this section, by John Eldevik, examines a number of composite texts, produced in 12^th-century Bavaria, that included information about a forged letter from the mythical Prester John to the Byzantine emperor Manuel I Comnenus (1143–1180). This letter offered a military alliance with the Byzantines against the Seljuk Turks. Through an analysis of the manuscripts containing information about this letter, Eldevik proposes that it is possible to trace the movement of the story of Prester John’s letter within Bavaria, as well as the travel of information regarding the defeat of the Seljuk Turks by the Qara Kitai in the western Eurasian steppes in 1141. The final essay, by Courtney Booker, considers the Nachleben of the removal of the Merovingian dynasty in 751 with a focus on the memory of these events in the 16^th century. Booker closely examines a political treatise by François Hotman (died 1590), a supporter of the Protestant Henry IV of France, regarding the proper basis of royal rule and this author’s use of the forged »Oratio ad Pippinum«. Booker is able to show that following the accession of Henry IV Hotman had to alter his treatment of the »Oratio« to highlight the central importance of the king in governing the realm rather than the role of the nobility in bringing a king to power.

The disparate topics included in this volume defy a neat summary, and readers likely will not agree with all of the conclusions drawn by the authors. In sum, however, these essays offer a fitting tribute to the scholarship of Patrick Geary and his work on questions relating to ethnogenesis, ethnic identities, memory, and living with the dead.