MLRy 100.3, 2005 759 Old English Phoenix: A Vision of a Vision of Paradise'; A. N. Doane, 'Beowulf and Scribal Performance'; John Miles Foley, 'How Genres Leak in Traditional Verse'; Timothy Graham, 'King Cnut's Grant of Sandwich to Christ Church, Canterbury: A New Reading of a Damaged Annal in Two Copies of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle'; Nicholas Howe, 'Falling into Place: Dislocation in the Junius Book'; Sarah L. Keefer, ' "Ic" and "We" in Eleventh-Century Old English Liturgical Verse'; Michael Lapidge, 'Cynewulf and the Passio S. Iulianae'; Donald Scragg, 'A Reading of Brunanburh'; and Paul Szarmach, 'iElfricRevises: The Lives of Martin and the Idea ofthe Author'. The contributors refer continuously to Irving and have clearly drafted a number of the essays specifically to respond to his work or to resonate with his approaches. The collection thus renders just service to its subject and is an impressive testimony to the impact he left not only on Old English scholarship, but on the people who knew and worked with him. Pennsylvania State University, Mont Alto Peter Dendle Writing War: Medieval Literary Responses to Warfare. Ed. by Corinne Saunders, Francoise Le Saux, and Neil Thomas. Cambridge: Brewer. 2004. x + 235 pp. ?45; $75- ISBN 0-85991-843-2. A Companion to Gower. Ed. by Sian Echard. Cambridge: Brewer. 2004. x + 286 pp. ?60; $110. ISBN 1-84384-000-6. The English Prose Treatises ofRichard Rolle. By Claire Elizabeth McIlroy. (Stu? dies in Medieval Mysticism, 4) Cambridge: Brewer. 2004. x + 212 pp. ?40; $70. ISBN 1-84384-003-0. War, love, religion: these three volumes together cover a wide area. They also differ in their approaches. Writing War is a collection of papers by historians and literary scholars. A Companion to Gower also assembles essays by differentwriters, but more systematically, in a comprehensive account of Gower and his work. The English Prose Treatises of Richard Rolle, in contrast, is a study by one author of Rolle's vernacular texts on the religious life. So we might expect these three books to light up large tracts of England's medieval literary landscape. And so they do. WritingWar is naturally the most diffuseofthe three. Rangingfrom the philosophy of Aquinas (concepts of the just war) to technological innovation (the cannon astutely positioned by Joan of Are to liberate Orleans) and war profiteering, it encompasses a vast subject. It also deals with literature beyond England. Nine of its papers were read in 2001 at a Durham conference on medieval and Renaissance responses to war, with two others (on Arthurian chronicles and Malory) appended. Christopher Allmand outlines the medieval and Renaissance fame of Vegetius, a civil servant who tried to save the declining Roman Empire with a book on the training of recruits, tactics, strategy,and fortification. Marianne Ailes informs us of the Norman chronicler Ambroise's slightly stinted admiration forRichard Coeur de Lion and other heroes of the Third Crusade. W. H. Jackson analyses warfare in the poetry of Rudolf von Ems, with its emphasis on the need for planning, discipline, and negotiating skills among the officerclass. Georges Le Brusque reports on what fifteenth-century chroniclers said of the Hundred Years War, including the Bourgeois de Paris, who described the terrible winter of 1422?3, when wolves came each night to the gates of Paris. Francoise Le Saux discusses war and knighthood in Christine de Pizan's Livre desfaits d'armes et de chevallerie, noting her pacifist opinions and emphasis on war's violence against women. Thea Summerfield sets out how Barbour in a tract for the times allocated a Messianic role to Robert the Bruce. Andrew Lynch looks at war in 760 Reviews Arthurian authors from Geoffrey of Monmouth to Malory, most of whom (with the exception of La3amon) he typifies as unthinking militarists. Simon Meecham-Jones writes on Chaucer's depiction of warfare, here quoting long passages of Vaclav Havel (given in English translation and the original Czech). K. S. Whetter details Malory's obsession with fighting. Corinne Saunders addresses herself to women and warfare in English writing fromJudith to the Paston letters, concluding that women's general attitude to war was one of passivity. Helen Cooper ends with a piece on the role...