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specificities, may in fact be an artefact of the methodology Olsen employs. She acknowledges an explicit debt to Antonina Harbus’s ‘conceptual metaphor theory’ (which she renames ‘cognitive metaphor theory’ but elsewhere in the book refers to in Harbus’s terms) and aligns her approach with cognitive psychologists who over recent decades have turned their attention to literary studies. Certainly there appears to be a substantial body of work in this field analysing cultural production as indicative of cognitive processes, but Olsen notes that this approach is more commonly used by cognitive scientists and anthropologists who can conduct empirical research with language users, and rare in medieval literature studies. In comparison, medievalists need to reconstruct cultural contexts for the often fragmentary available evidence, which for such disparate poetic sources is an especially difficult task. Perhaps without such empirical support available, a quest for cultural specificity and difference will be highly disadvantaged, for how can such variation in metaphor be ascribed to cultural relevance without access to the writer, redactor, speaker, or interlocutor, and knowledge of their conditions of production? Olsen herself acknowledges such uncertainties surrounding the attribution of cultural embeddedness of medieval metaphors, recognizing the possibility that they might simply be poetic idiosyncracies and therefore not necessarily explanatory of cultural specificity. There is much in this volume to stimulate further discussion, in particular regarding methodological approaches that Olsen uses, but also in terms of her textual selections. Given the topics covered this volume — conflict, alterity, marginalization — and current interests in intersectional approaches to literature that embrace a number of disciplines, including linguistics, psychology, anthropology, literary criticism, and semiotics (to name just a few), this work is a useful contribution, and while it may in places appear overly ambitious, the approach is worthy of scholarly attention and anticipates future debate on methodologies for critical analysis of medieval texts. rodericK mcdoNald, University of Nottingham