The Medieval Review 11.02.06 Jean-Claude Schmitt, Alex J. Novikoff, trans. The Conversion of Herman the Jew, Autobiography, History, and Fiction in the Twelfth Century. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010. Pp. 312. $59.95 ISBN 9780812242546. Reviewed by: Ryan Szpiech University of Michigan szpiech@umich.edu This review is both woefully overdue and oddly unnecessary. Unnecessary because this penetrating book by Jean-Claude Schmitt, first published in French as La Conversion d'Hermann le Juif (Paris, 2003), is now already a well-known and oft- cited study of the twelfth-century Latin work Opusculum de conversione sua (Little Work about His Conversion), attributed to the convert Herman, known as (according to the text) Judah before his conversion. Overdue because Schmitt's original French text, important as it is, curiously never received a review in this forum. Although the work has already been translated twice--once into Italian (Rome, 2005) and once into German (Stuttgart, 2006)--the publication of this new English translation by Alex Novikoff, professor of medieval history at Rhodes College, thus provides a felicitous opportunity to amend this oversight and give this study the attention it continues to merit. Viewed at a distance, this book seems to be a natural outgrowth of Schmitt's earlier work, which more than transcends the formidable shadow of his mentor, Annales historian Jacques Le Goff. From his early treatment of medieval suicide and heresy, especially his original study of "saint" Guinefort, the "holy" greyhound (Paris, 1979), to later work on dreams, gestures, and ghosts in the Middle Ages, to his most recent essay on the history of the birthday, Schmitt has consistently addressed subjects that deal with the uncertain line between subjectivity and objectivity and that provoke methodological reflections on the practice of