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Here we are well served by Samantha Kelly's Companion to Medieval Ethiopia and Eritrea. Each chapter conveys a sense of discovery. As Kelly reminds us, we are dealing with a field marked by the continual expansion of the available source base due to the ongoing digitalization of Ethiopic manuscripts in Ethiopia itself and in libraries throughout the world. Yet perhaps the most exciting contribution of the Companion is a new view of Ethiopia itself. Christian Ethiopia has tended to be treated as an isolated mountain hideaway where time stood still; Edward Gibbon, at his most sonorous and most wrongheaded, wrote, Encompassed on all sides by the enemies of their religion, the Aethiopians slept near a thousand years, forgetful of the world, by whom they were forgotten . The reverse was true. Medieval Ethiopia (which includes much of modern Eritrea) was a frontier society, penetrated in all directions by routes that led from the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean deep into Equatorial Africa. This reenvisioning of medieval Ethiopia is, perhaps, the most challenging aspect of the Companion. In the words of one contributor of Kelly's volume, Let us hope that the image of an archaic, never evolving and isolated country is no longer acceptable . The Glories of Aksum , by Peter Brown, in The New York Review of Books, October 2021, accessible here.

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Samantha Kelly, Ph.D (1998, Northwestern University) is Professor of History at Rutgers University. She is a specialist of medieval Italian history and of Ethiopian-European relations to the mid-sixteenth century.

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