This collection of essays traces its origin to a conference held at Christ Church Canterbury University in December 2007 on the theme of bishops and conflict in the Anglo-Norman period. The introduction by the three editors is one of the most useful pieces in the volume. Instead of simply rehearsing the arguments of the essays that comprise the book, they have provided a historical synthesis that grounds the reader with relevant information about the impact of the Norman conquest on religious communities in England. They also lay out the agenda for the book: bishops stood at the center of a web of religious and political networks while maintaining close and sometimes complicated relationships with a host of different communities, monastic and secular. Their complex roles in Anglo-Norman society often brought them into conflict with those around them over a wide range of possible issues. This is an ambitious and worthwhile theme around which to organize the collection, but it is not fully realized by the contents of the volume.

The twelve papers are organized roughly in chronological order. In the first essay, Anne Williams shows how monks of late twelfth-century Glastonbury Abbey rediscovered the remains of Saint Dunstan in their abbey after a devastating fire in 1184 and made the claim for its authenticity on the basis of an earlier account by a monk named Osbern of the sack of Canterbury in 1011 by the army of Thorkell the Tall. At issue here are competing claims to the holy remains of a saintly prelate by the two religious communities with which he was affiliated in his lifetime, first as abbot, then as archbishop. Charles Insley treats the ambitions of Leofric, bishop of Exeter (1050–72), to “reshape the past” of the communities in his see through the use of forged charters, a relic list, and other materials copied into liturgical books. C. P. Lewis tells the strange tale of the peregrination of a bishopric to three different sees in the late eleventh century, establishing the date of each relocation and positing some of the possible reasons for each move. Conflict comes to the fore in Richard Allen’s examination of the Acta archiepiscoporum Rotomagensium, a history of the bishops of Rouen surviving in two recensions that highlight the rivalry between the cathedral community and the local monks of St-Ouen de Rouen. This rivalry was played out not only in texts but in architectural expression, as the exceptionally clear photos in this article make plain. John Reuben Davies shows how Welsh bishops made use of hagiography and “secondary relics” like large Gospel books to bolster the cults of Welsh saints in their cathedrals. Conflict returns in Thomas Roche’s anatomy of the career of a shadowy and contentious bishop of the twelfth century, Philip of Bayeux, viewed through the lens of a later medieval cartulary. Paul Dalton’s article asks how religious communities dealt with violence and defended their own interests during the anarchy of King Stephen’s reign. He shows that they had a wide range of options at their disposal to protect themselves in times when royal justice was absent, from the evocation of the punitive power of God and his saints to strategies of reconciliation with their secular enemies. Stephen Marritt looks at the patronage habits of Anglo-Norman aristocrats and concludes that “secular cathedrals were not as central to baronial piety as monasticism, and it would be foolish to argue otherwise” (167).

The last four essays in the collection all concern Canterbury. Michael Staunton revisits the hagiography of Thomas Becket to investigate his activities in Canterbury, which have long been overshadowed by the events surrounding his exile and martyrdom. Sheila Sweetinburgh examines the acrimonious conflict between Archbishop Baldwin of Canterbury and his cathedral monks, who bitterly opposed his plan to establish a large community of secular canons nearby at Hackington. Paul Webster adds a new dimension to King John by arguing that Canterbury was an important pilgrimage destination for the monarch in the early years of his reign, and his grants to the community imply his reverence for the saints interred there. And finally, Nicholas Vincent draws attention to the meager French estates held by English monasteries, in contrast to the vast holdings of the Norman Church in England. Canterbury plays a vital role in this discussion because it held more French lands than any other religious institution in England and kept them well into the later Middle Ages.

For all of the merits of the introduction and the individual papers, this collection does not amount to the sum of its parts because the organizing principle of “conflict” is not consistently engaged with by all of the contributors. As a result, it lacks the impressive focus and argumentative force of a recent collection of articles on the social and political clout of medieval bishops in the aftermath of the Gregorian reform—John S. Ott and Anna Trumbore Jones, eds., The Bishop Reformed: Studies in Episcopal Power and Culture in the Central Middle Ages (Aldershot, 2007)—the contents of which successfully dismantled the traditional dichotomy of Gregorian-era bishops as either loyal supporters of the pope or secular imperialists with no allegiance to Rome, by situating episcopal activity squarely in the complexities of its local milieu. Without a cohesive theme to rally around, this collection does not rise to its higher purpose, but it nonetheless remains a useful compilation of narrow studies of episcopal activity in Anglo-Norman England (with some nods to France) between 1050 and 1220 or so, in which conflict of some sort sometimes played a role.