Mark Griffith, The Battle of Maldon. A New Critical Edition. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2024, xiv, 308 pp.

Two questions arise with the appearance of a new edition of a well-known (and in this case brief) work that has been edited many times already: is a new edition justified, rather than a monograph on the work? And what should be included beyond the text itself, which is easily accessible in the latest edition of Sweet’s Reader and many other places? Mark Griffith justifies this substantial, if somewhat expensive, edition of The Battle of Maldon in his preface by noting that the most recent edition, by the late Donald Scragg, appeared in 1981, and that there has been a considerable amount of secondary work on the text published since. He claims, too, that Scragg’s edition has been superseded in that details of David Casley as the transcriber of the only text we have were not known in 1981, although in all honesty the replacement of Casley for Elphinstone in the notes does not make an enormous amount of difference.