Eric J. Goldberg, . The Middle Ages Series. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020, 338 pp.

In this book, Eric Goldberg examines the hunting of animals in the Carolingian period as an expression of early medieval masculinity, as a feature of premodern political culture, and as a window onto one of the many ways that the Frankish people interacted with the natural world. Drawing evidence from a wide range of literary sources from chronicles to saints’ lives, and a host of documentary evidence like laws and administrative records, with occasional nods to art historical and archaeological testimony, Goldberg presents his study over the course of eight chapters. Some of these chapters proceed chronologically, while others treat particular topics with an emphasis on evidence from the eighth and ninth centuries. Taken together, this monograph presents a convincing mosaic of the centrality of hunting in the social and cultural worlds of Carolingian elites.