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first and foremost a language specialist and brings out nuances in these
texts that few others working with them would notice.

Now to the second aspect of the book, Howlett’s thesis that these

inscriptions can reveal another level of encoding through the use of
numerical patterns that were so tacitly embedded in the cultures that
produced them that they have left us no record of these cultures’
appreciation of these codes. A short review is not the place to enter
into a detailed critique of this theory, suffice to say that it has found
few scholars who are willing to support it, and this reviewer views it
with scepticism. If you want a thorough critique see H. McKee and
J. McKee, ‘Counter Arguments and Numerical Patterns in Early Celtic
Inscriptions: A Re-examination of Christian Celts: Messages and Images’,
Medieval Archaeology 46 (2002), pp. 29–40. Furthermore, this book
extends the method culturally, linguistically and chronologically, but it
does not seem to bother Howlett that with every extension of the range
of the applicability of his method, its possible value as an explicative
model for medieval texts is correspondingly reduced.

The University of Wales Lampeter

THOMAS O’LOUGHLIN

Viking Pirates and Christian Princes: Dynasty, Religion and Empire
in the North Atlantic. By Benjamin Hudson. New York: Oxford Uni-
versity Press. 2005. xiv

+ 278 pp. £38.99. ISBN 0 19 516237 4.

Readers who enjoyed Alfred Smyth’s two volumes on Scandinavian
York and Dublin (1975 and 1979), will welcome Ben Hudson’s
new book which is, in all but name, their sequel. Where Smyth
abandoned his narrative of the Irish-Sea Vikings, the Uí Ímair dynasty,
following their loss of York under Olaf Cúarán, Hudson takes up
the story and carries it into the early twelfth century, by which time
native Irish dynasties had come to dominate Dublin and detach it
from the Isle of Man and the other maritime provinces which remained
in the hands of the dynasty. A narrative of this sort which cuts across
the traditional period divisions imposed by national historiographies
which have fetishised the battles of Clontarf and Hastings is to be
welcomed. Hudson attempts to structure his narrative, instead, upon
the rivalry between the direct descendants of Olaf (d. 981) and the
descendants of two sons of Harald who first appear on the scene in the
early 970s. Unfortunately far less is recorded of the dynasty Hudson
describes as the ‘Haraldssons’ than of the ‘Olafssons’ which makes
this structure somewhat unbalanced. Readers may also find, as this
reviewer did, that Hudson’s argument that the eponymous Harald

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Book reviews

was identical with the Hagrold active in Normandy in the 940s lacks
plausibility.

The strength of this volume lies in Hudson’s unparalleled familiarity

with an exceedingly broad range of sources; archaeological, literary and
historical, and readers will find a great many valuable nuggets concealed
in the pages of this volume. They are, however, well concealed. Hud-
son’s awareness of recent secondary literature seems surprisingly selec-
tive. One is immediately struck by his unproblematic use of the name
‘Magnus’ for the first of the Haraldssons to appear on the scene. It has
long been known that this was an erroneous expansion by O’Donovan,
the nineteenth-century editor of the Annals of the Four Masters, and that
the individual concerned was in fact called Maccus, yet there is no hint
here that this is even an issue and no reference to David Thornton’s
important article (1997) on the subject. Heimskringla, the title given to
Snorri Sturluson’s compendium of kings’ sagas, is translated as ‘World
Encircler’ (p. 14), while in fact the open words of the text, from which
the title derives, are simply a vernacular rendition of orbis terrarum. On
the same page Ari and Sæmundr, the fathers of Icelandic history, are
ascribed to the eleventh rather than the twelfth century. The Cuthber-
tine abbot Eadred is promoted to the episcopacy on p. 20, and on
p. 43 we are told that ‘there are no martins [sic]’ in the north of England,
which is not quite true today and was certainly not true in the Viking
Age. To list all such errors would take considerably more space than the
review editors would allow.

More generally, in this work, as in much of Hudson’s oeuvre, there

is an unwillingness to abandon late literary sources where they tell a
good story (another feature which makes this volume a fitting sequel to
those of Smyth). We are told (p. 35) that Egils saga ‘remembers’ the
Viking Age, for example, whatever that means. Hudson’s account of
Clontarf (1014) is very heavily dependent upon the twelfth-century
Cocad Gáedel re Gallaib, a text which has been thoroughly critiqued
elsewhere. One example of this will suffice; Hudson follows the Cocad
in describing how Donnchad mac Briain led the Munstermen who
survived the battle in a hard-fought retreat across country (p. 102),
when in fact his parents had married less that twelve years previously
(1002) and it is unlikely that he was even present at the battle.

This book is very much a curate’s egg and one comes away wonder-

ing about its conception. Hudson’s insistence on letting a good story
get the better of his own critical faculties on too many occasions,
together with his overuse of the term ‘Viking’ in its pseudo-ethnic
sense, make one wonder if there are two books here; one aimed at a
very popular market and one more scholarly. It is also apparent that
although published by OUP this work does not appear to have been

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simultaneously issued in Britain or heavily marketed in Britain and
Ireland (with which it is principally concerned). One wonders if
Hudson and his publishers knew that it would not be well received in
these islands? This book, like its prequels, should be in every library,
but a responsible adult should go through the library copy with a red
pen before putting it on any reading lists.

School of History, University of St Andrews

ALEX WOOLF

Augustine and the Disciplines From Cassiciacum to Confessions.
Edited by Karla Pohlmann and Mark Vessey. Oxford and New York:
Oxford University Press. 2005. xi

+ 258 pp. £45. ISBN 0 19 927485 1.

Early medievalists encounter the genealogy of the seven liberal arts and
their subsequent development and Christianization. These arts clearly
belong in courses on Western Civilisation, but they have dropped out
of our new cultural histories. These essays on Augustine and the De
Doctrina Christiana, cover a wider range, and should be consulted by
all of us prone to underestimate Varro. They originated in a conference
held at Villanova in November 2000, of which the cream (described as
‘disgraceful self-indulgence’ by Robert Markus) has been skimmed into
separate articles: ‘The Study of Augustine 1950–2000: Evolving Discip-
linary Contexts’, Augustinian Studies 32 (2001), pp. 177–206. The best
of that cream, Peter Brown’s description of ‘that most solemn and
elevating of all track events: the relay race of the formation of Western
Christian civilisation’ is recalled by Mark Vessey at the start of his
Introduction to this volume, reminding us of the disadvantages of the
long view, and the reasons why its triumphalism has been rejected. The
essays here discuss aspects of Augustine’s development from a theory of
the liberal arts, propounded at Cassiciacum in 386, to a theory of biblical
interpretation. This was a moment when what was conventional and
what was novel changed places: the classical curriculum was toppled.

In the opening paper Neil McLynn compares Augustine and Gregory

Nazianzen, drawing helpful distinctions between Athens and Carthage
and asserting that ‘the vaunted uniformity of paideia was inevitably a
mirage’. Catherine Conybeare investigates Augustine’s De Ordine and its
types of liminality with a special concentration on memory. Danuta
Shanzer’s paper on Augustine’s Disciplines demolishes Ilsetraut Hadot’s
attempt to source Augustine’s De Ordine in a lost work of Porphyry and
to ignore Varro. Shanzer argues that Varro’s lost work was entitled Musae,
that it was in nine books, that it was known to Augustine, Sidonius,
Claudianus Mamertus and Martianus Capella, and that Augustine and