REVIEWS125 the twelfth century. Her Life, with which readers are by now well familiar, recounts a world of familial and social extremes set against Christina's personal relationship with Christ and her desire to maintain her virginity. The events ofher life read like hagiographical romance: Ranulph, bishop of Durham, who had a long affair with Christina's aunt, Alveva, by whom he had a number of children (after which he found for her a suitable husband), soon desired Christina, whom he solicits. She rejects him, ofcourse, and we learn that the only way he could take revenge was by depriving Christina of her virginity, either by himself or by someone else' (43). That 'someone else' is Burthred, a young nobleman egged on by the bishop to seek Christina's hand. When Christina spurns marriage to Burthred, het parents drive her naked from the house, after which her mother persecutes het with 'unheard-of cruelty' (73): 'In the end she swore she would not care who deflowered her daughter, provided that some way of deflowering her could be found' (73-4). Events such as these make for absorbing reading. But against them must be placed Christina's life of dedication, self-mortification, immense sacrifice, and combats with the devil, as well as her visionary experiences. For Christina, the struggle to free herself from painful social and familial consttaints gives way to spiritual struggle and reward. With the welcome reprinting of Talbot's edition, reader's can continue to let the powerful narrative of this early recluse overwhelm them. PHILLIP PU1.SIANO Villanova University Judith Weiss, ed. and trans., Wace's 'Roman de Brut': A History ofthe British. Exetet Medieval English Texts and Studies. Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1999. Pp. xxix, 385. Bibliography. Index ofPersonal Names, isbn: 0-85989-591-2. £16.99 / $29.95. Imagine an extraordinary medieval text filled with nostalgia and seductions, domestic betrayals and sovereign assassinations, battles and duels, magic and potions, shame, disgrace. This is a raconteur's dream of nightmarish greed and wise generosity, of human vanity and holy humility. At once ironic and sardonic, the yarn's wide narrative net captures rich and brawny descriptions of events, depicts individuals, theit personal motivations and moral weaknesses, and porttays diverse peoples and whole ttibes. It boasts, too, ofvivid and roaring rhetorical figures, invents puns and etymologies, and, en passant redeems proverbs, folklore motifs, and place-name lore. Even while recounting the sad but famous career of the 'New Trojans' as they limp, one generation after anothet, from bleak, distant wasteland to the fertile abode called Albion, and thence decline into fratricide, famine, and plague—skillful storyteller Maistre Wace, cleric of Caen, almost always finds a way to generate resonance with contemporary events (ca. 1150-1155), those usually gloomy and violent and chaotic storms that swirl about dukes, empresses, and prelates. Judith Weiss of Robinson College, Cambridge, has performed a monumental fear: completing a new edition and a brand new rranslarion ofWace's sprightly Old French 'Brutus Romance'—the first complete and sustained extant vernacular hisrory (however imaginary) of Britain. Presented in large parallel formar, her modern iz6ARTHURIANA English prose translares the French chronicle in verse—which irself freely adapts the Latin prose amalgamation ofthe Norman-Welshman Geoffrey of Monmouth, Historia regum Britanniae (ca. 1136—1138), a daringly politicized and innovative fabrication (which some consider a hoax as tremendous as MacPhetson's Ossian). Wace himself, like some jaded Hollywood critic, observes regarding Arthurian fable: Ne tut mençunge, ne tut veir.l Tut folie ne tut saveir—'not all lies, not all truth, neither total folly nor total wisdom' (w. 9793-94; cf. p. xxi). These texts, along with Lawman's (or Lagamon's) subsequent early thitteenththcentury adaptation of Le Roman de Brut into alliterative Middle English (S.-W Midlands dialect), propose a hermeneutic holiday. British historians see the plausible panorama as indeed part real fact, part imaginary fiction, sweeping us from the arrival of Aeneas's offspring, Brutus, the island's eponymous national founder, up to Cadwallader and the Anglo-Saxon invasion and colonization (seventh century). All this seemingly to answer the query—why and how did the Britons yield theit dominion over the land? Gathered...