[DD's preferred] Dumville succeeds in his ambitious aim of bringing clarity into an area of great complexity and obscurity... [He] applies a very valuable multidisciplinary treatment to what is extremely difficult source material [and] by deploying historical and linguistic skills succeeds in stripping the evidence of ill-founded accretions and weighing up the issues with admirable objectivity. Clarity of treatment, careful balance, scrupulous attention to the sources, and a finely tuned insight are all plentifully in evidence.