Dublin Protestants can hardly complain of a shortage of cathedrals, having two within half a mile of each other, each endowed with a lengthy and eventful history. But they could justly have complained about the coverage of that history, with neither cathedral possessing an authoritative modern account. That lack has now been remedied, first by the publication of Christ Church Cathedral Dublin: a history, edited by Kenneth Milne (Dublin 2000), and now by this volume. As a collaborative work, the quality of the new history of St Patrick's faces a number of challenges, most notably in assembling suitably skilled contributors, and then ensuring that the various parts cohere. The former has been convincingly met, with an impressive range of distinguished professional historians, most notably Howard Clarke, Raymond Gillespie, Toby Barnard and John Crawford, and, equally importantly, expert coverage of musical, liturgical and architectural developments from Michael O'Neill, Alan Fletcher and Kerry Houston. The second challenge is more problematic. For all the excellence of the individual chapters, their approaches, inevitably, differ, and coherence, as a result, suffers. To take just one example, cathedrals offer an obvious opportunity for a consistent prosopographical treatment. Specific contributors do indeed provide us with analyses of dignitaries and canons. But these efforts seldom ask the same questions and, while some are sophisticated in their methodology, others sometimes degenerate into little more than lists of names. As a result, we get no coherent overview of the changing composition of the chapter over time or, in more recent years, of the lay members of the board. But the other virtues of this volume – most particularly the way in which the cathedral's own archives have been explored and exploited, in many cases for the first time, and the quality of the individual contributions – more than offsets such reservations. This is, and will remain for a considerable period of time, the standard academic account of the history of Dublin's second cathedral.