Elizabeth Walgenbach, . The Northern World, 92. Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2021, pp. xi, 178.

Adding a careful reading of European legal contexts and local influence to the many previous studies on the topic, Walgenbach’s short, revised 2016 Yale dissertation fulfills a lingering desideratum in the field. Walgenbach argues in depth for a revision of the direction and chronology of influence between, on the one hand, ‘old’ ‘Germanic’ manifestations of outlawry and the terms and motifs that accompany it, and on the other, changing ecclesiastical and secular legal thought on excommunication and adjacent conditions. While still noticeably engaged with its own methodological limitations (such connections, as the author acknowledges, cannot be ‘proven’ under strict evidential criteria), the study suggestively traces parallel developments that seem plausible as markers of direct influence and unlikely attributable to chance resemblance.