Carola Hicks has produced a major study of depictions of animals in the British Isles from the sixth to eleventh centuries AD. Readers of Pictish Arts Soc J will find the sections on Scotland (pp.41-55; 97-105; 139-59; 217-26) of particular interest but the other chapters are also important as Pictish sculpture did not exist in a vacuum. In general this is an excellent and authoritative work, well illustrated with both photographs and drawings, though only 15 of the 87 illustrations are in the sections on Scotland.

My main quibbles are organisational. The work is divided into chapters based on date (6th century; 7th century; 8th and early 9th centuries; later 9th and 1Oth centuries; 1lth century) but many of the pieces discussed, particularly the Pictish sculpture, cannot be decisively dated to a particular century. Chapters are subdivided by modern land divisions (England; Ireland; Scotland; Isle of Man) when in fact some pieces are not located in the area they are discussed under. On a personal level I particularly object to having Jedburgh (pp.120-21) placed in England -- ethnic titles such as Anglo-Saxon and Pictish might have been preferable. Animals of course do not exist in isolation but in conjunction with other types of art. This causes some problems because the book cannot tidily discuss animals without addressing a number of other topics not directly related to animals but crucial to understanding them.

The book's Index is unreliable. For example, the Ardross wolf (p.92) is not listed under wolf, and the Burghead bulls are not listed under bulls in one instance (p.92) or under Burghead in another (p.94). The Conclusion is rather disappointing, mainly because I was hoping for overall summaries of the main species of animal depicted artistically. This, combined with the incomplete index, makes the book difficult to dip into for specific information.

Other quibbles are minor: there are not nine Pictish bulls (p.45) - examples from sites other than Burghead are oxen or steers; is Eggerness really in Dalriadan territory (p.51), and given that five Class I animals are only known from a single example, can we be sure that animals which only occur on Class II stones were not originally part of the Class I repertoire (p. 100)?

Apart from organisational problems, which are largely unavoidable given the vagaries of the material, and some minor points, this book can be warmly recommended.

Craig Cessford