130ARTHURIANA to her statting point at Cluny in 1095. The Merovingian period enshrined exemption and the central feature ofaristocratic negotiations over sacred spaces. In the Carolingian period exemptions continued but were usually joined with protection in such a way as, paradoxically, to confer strict control over persistence ofthe basic practices related to immunities but also witnessed the slow, steady disappearance of the royal court from the process. Gradually, immunities became 'divergent': they might mean concessions, or they might mean declaring certain lands sacred and therefore inviolate. Cluny wound up defended by its own sacrality. It must be said that Rosenwein pauses to interpret, in detail and in context, only a small number of the surviving immunity charters. Thank heavens! Teutonic thoroughness would have deprived this book of its admirable clarity and readability without adding anything to its methodology or central argument. Rosenwein has, in fact, blazed a trail that many can follow in researches devoted to immunities. For what Rosenwein has shown beyond any contradiction or qualification is that immunities changed over time and that virtually every immunity is the product of a specific human community grappling with very concrete problems. Immunity as a form suggested ways of framing discussions but never dictated the outcome. THOMAS F. X. NOBLE Unviersity of Notre Dame Sylvia Tomasch and sealy gilles, Text and Territory: Geographical Imaginations in the European Middle Ages. The Middle Ages Series. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998. Pp. 330. isbn: 0—8122-1635-0. $19.95. The quest for territory and knowledge is rarely ifever a neutral act, and traces ofthe process reside in the documents generated—or reconfigured—en route. Whether the territory claimed is an imaginary realm or an actual physical space, a history, an empire, a body, or a genealogy, the twelve essays in Text and Territory expose ways in which desire and exclusion are embedded in geographical and textual representation. One of the delights in a collection of this order is that it engages topics at the intersection ofacademic fields, crossing disciplines to illuminate the object ofstudy further. A potential risk is that the essays may seem to lack common purpose. Such a criticism cannot easily be leveled at Text and Territory, as its editors have artfully unified divergent topics within four coherent groups: 'Centers and Margins,' 'Place and the Politics of Identity,' 'Gender, Sexuality, Geography,' and 'The Territory of Texts.' In her Introduction, Sylvia Tomasch provides an overlay for these broad headings, referencing the concepts developed by Derek Gregory in Geographical Imaginations—'representation,' 'articulation,' 'spatialization,' and 'authorization.' One might read any of these remarkable essays by the light of Gregory's precepts. The 'Centers and Margins' section of the collection opens with Mary Blaine Campbell's elegant study of the Purgatorio-as-trave\ogue, disclosing the primacy of Dante's central canticle. We then move from imaginary to actual space; in 'Defining the Earth's Center in a Medieval "Multi-Text,"' Iain Macleod Higgins explicates The BookofJohnMandevilleas a verbal analogue' to theJerusalem-centered mappae mundi. REVIEWS131 Higgins's essay pairs well with Scott D. Westrem's stimulating cattographic analysis, 'Against Gog and Magog,' which traces these vague geographical signifiers as they become a repository for anti-Semitic paranoia. The first two essays in 'Place and the Politics ofIdentity' illustrate the geographicaltextual process of constructing cultural self. Sealy Gilles's contribution, 'Territorial Interpolations in the Old English Orosius,' describes a course ofself-definition that spans several centuries, as Orosius's Latin geogtaphy is rewritten to include those people vital to the Anglo-Saxon identity. A reverse strategy, uncovered by Robert M. Stein in 'Making History English,' is employed by William of Malmesbury, who simplifies history, diminishing heterogeneity to reconfigure diversity as social and spatial unity. With a similar agenda, Lagamon's Brut 'converts succession narratives into stories of alliance' (110). Christine Chism's compelling analysis, 'Too Close for Comfort,' skillfully probes 'interpénétrations of eastern and western cultures' (136) in the Wars ofAlexander, revealing that Alexander's conquests and hybrid identity mirror the desires and doubts of Btitish gentry at the end of the crusades. 'Gender, Sexuality, Geography,' the volume's third section, begins with an historical analysis ofthe spatial and social oppression ofmedieval...