Joan Greatrex's authoritative study of the nine English Benedictine cathedral priories during the ‘long fourteenth century’ is an important work that throws much light on the workings of these houses, their staff, their practices and their day-to-day lives. Based on the author's very extensive research in the vast corpus of documentary sources, this volume is, in her words, the ‘sequel’ to her Biographical register of the English cathedral priories. In the opening pages of this book Greatrex justifies the chronological and thematic boundaries of her book, which none the less succeeds admirably in providing the reader with a wide-ranging and detailed study of a fascinating and complex monastic phenomenon. Structured according to the chronology of the lives and careers of Benedictine monks at the cathedral priories of Canterbury, Winchester, Rochester, Bath, Worcester, Coventry, Ely, Norwich and Durham, this study moreover seeks to identify individual monks at these communities. Greatrex examines, first of all, the early lives of the brethren, from the moment of their admission into the monastery to their entry into the novitiate, and proceeds to follow their careers as professed novices and junior monks via their individual duties as obedientaries and throughout the liturgical year, to their old age, infirmity and death. She addresses the inevitable conflicts facing communities of cathedral monks trying to consolidate their supposedly tranquil routine and contemplative existence with the bustle of the life in and around a medieval cathedral. The result of her work is a commendable well-contextualised, rich and colourful account of the daily lives, inside as well as outside the choir, of these particular black monks in their very particular context.