Kings and Kingship in Medieval Europe.

An international conference on kingship at King's College London in 1992 was apparently designed to emphasise the 'differences in scale and practice between different regions and different periods' and to 'focus attention' on some less well-known monarchies (early Celtic, Hungarian and Norwegian). Though the fourteen papers presented - half of them by non-British scholars-must have stimulated ideas and discussion at the time, they cohere awkwardly into a book. It does not help that the two French contributions have been left untranslated and the spelling of proper names in the two Hungarian pieces has not been standardised (given that the history of that monarchy is less …