Caen: Presses Universitaires de Caen, 2002.

The twenty, contributors to this handsomely produced volume, equal numbers of French and foreign scholars, gathered on the Norman peninsula of La Hague to explore the Scandinavian impact on the coasts of early medieval Europe. La Hague is judged

to have been one of the areas where this impact was greatest in terms of permanent settlement, as opposed to the sparser settlement of, say, the Hebrides or the largely urban presence in the port towns of Ireland. But, as Pierre Bouet observes, although Normandy was the sole Scandinavian settlement to have survived the invasion period, it offers the scholar little evidence of its Nordic origins. Is this the product of a rapid assimilation or is the impression due to inadequacies of our scholarly, basically archaeological, inquiry? Thus, the composition of the conference can also be viewed as an effort to bring non-Norman evidence and expertise to bear on local issues, even provide comparanda, methodology, and theory for a renewed scrutiny of the Viking past on the northern French coastline. After Barbara E. Crawford's wide-ranging introductory essay on Scandinavian expansion in western Europe from the eighth to eleventh centuries, the resulting essays are grouped under the headings of contact, exchange, and integration of the Vikings with and in various European communities, the Viking ship and European naval traditions, the continuing Viking mark in the languages of western Europe, and a concluding essay by Guy Nondier on the paradoxes of the Viking myth in Normandy. The contributions of non-French scholars have all been skillfully translated into French.

Bouet's observation is borne out by a good number of the essays: where we have reasonably hard evidence for the maritime economy (James H. Barrett) and house construction in Scandinavian Scotland (Olwyn Owen), when we can readily trace Viking activity in Ireland through the Irish annals (Colman Etchingham), we are limited to the more diffuse and intangible evidence of toponymy and technical vocabulary when we turn to Normandy (Elisabeth Ridel, Rene Lepelley). But even here, in the study of place names, the volume and quality of earlier and current research in the British Isles, as compared with Normandy, is strikingly evident in the essays by Doreen J. Waugh (Shetland), Gillian Fellows-Jensen (England, Wales, Man), Richard A. V. Cox (Gaelic Scotland), and Donall Mac Giolla Easpaig (Ireland).

Perhaps the sphere in which the British and Irish evidence is most closely comparable to the Norman is one in which the Vikings were known to have excelled: naval architecture and nautical technology. Onto the background of the evolution of the ship in Scandinavia from the Stone Age to the Viking Age (Christian Lemee), sailing scenes in the sagas (Jean Renaud), and the meticulous analysis of the medieval wrecks recovered from Roskilde Fjord, complemented by the construction and sailing of replicas (Tinna Damgard-Sorensen), we can now profitably project the more problematic archaeological evidence of ship burials in Orkney (Anne Allen), iconographical representations of ships in the Hebrides (Denis Rixson), and the linguistic evidence for ships on Scandinavian models in Norman and Anglo-Norman literature (Ridel). And it is not only in maritime lexis that the Viking heritage is still in evidence; ship-building in Normandy in later centuries continued to display an unbroken Scandinavian influence (compare Eric Rieth's observations on clinker-built vessels in late medieval Rouen with Francois Renault's findings for the nineteenth and twentieth centuries).

At the other end of the spectrum from the practicalities of boat-building are ideological matters. How did the chroniclers of a later Normandy accommodate and justify the duchy's violent origins in the invasions of an often militarily superior, pagan, not yet fully European, foreign people? Pierre Bouet and Catherine Bougy address the complex questions of initial impressions and later apologetics in reviews of the Latin chronicles, Frangois Neveux the difficult to trace influence of the invaders on the later organization and administration of the duchy.

The editorial and production standards of the volume are extremely high. It is richly complemented by numerous maps, drawings, and photographs, including a most attractive selection of color plates at the center of the book. English summaries of all essays are gathered at the end, and there is a selective collective bibliography drawing on the references of individual essays. In one sense the conference offered the relatively small number of French scholars engaged in medieval Normandy to compare their fields of research and their cumulative achievement with those of colleagues in Scandinavia and the British Isles, where, as noted, there is both a richer body of evidence and a longer and fuller history of scholarship meeting rigorous modern standards. Thus, there is in the nature of an implicit research program, subjacent to the conference and evident in its make-up, and more richly exposed in the resulting collection of papers, which the present generation of scholars is now well qualified to bring to the Norman past. The greatest challenge, both because of the nature of the available evidence and because of a certain under-theorization in its approach thus far, will be to address the many remaining questions implied in Neveux's topic, the Viking heritage in ducal Normandy: the several syntheses that emerged subsequent to the introduction of Scandinavian models of social organization, economy, taxation, law, military service, coastal defense, etc., and the role of the coastal areas in the duchy as a whole. This, in turn, will set the stage for a renewed and better informed inquiry into the following surge of Norman expansion, into Britain, Sicily, the Holy Land.

William Sayers

Cornell University