Here we have the long-awaited successors in title to the work published between 1926 and 1928 by Paul Kehr and Carl Erdmann on pre-1198 papal correspondence with the Spanish peninsula, and the beginning of the process of incorporating the churches of the kingdoms of León and Castile within the Papsturkunden scheme. Starting with two dioceses better provided than most with archival pioneers, by contrast with the work of ninety years ago, the present editors present the papal texts published not in extenso but summarised, and with all editorial material in Latin, not German. The contents of each item, many of which have survived only in medieval cartularies and chronicles or later copies (with the likelihood of forgery having correspondingly to be allowed for) are distributed between as many entries as may be required by the number of places or interested parties mentioned (including in both volumes the laity of the two dioceses concerned), and with cross-references to a vast array of forthcoming volumes covering regions further afield, although archives further afield have already been conscientiously consulted for the purposes of the present volumes: an arrangement well beyond the resources of the papal chancery of the time, involving the fragmentation of items and the repetition of a considerable amount of descriptive detail as well as implying the rapid progress of the project. Thus, in the case of León Cathedral in vol. ii, better particulars of fifty-five of the sixty-two items listed have to be sought elsewhere in the volume, as with thirty-five of seventy-three and nine of ten for the monasteries of Sahagún and Eslonza, and well over half of the 103 credited to Burgos Cathedral and the houses of Cardeña, Arlanza, Oña and Silos, often (for example, vol. ii, nos*78–*80) with such commentary as there is reduplicated. With the presentation of material provided by papal, legatine, conciliar and canonical collections, lapidary inscriptions (some of it perished) and inferences therefrom, even, indeed, revealing a glimmer of Germanic humour, the Brothers Grimm (‘etsi sub colore fabulae … tamen haud omnino fides neganda est’: i. 183), underpinned by a dense bibliographical undergrowth, lavish though not quite exhaustive, and with page references to what sometimes turn out to be … just further page references, the reader is confronted with a heavily populated text. The level of diplomatic detail (for example, i. 31, ‘in eschatocollo – spatio quamvis sufficienti intermisso – nec rota nec monogramma sed sola datatio privilegiorum invenitur’) is admirable, in so far as originals are at issue, but the benefit of the absence of indices such as might have enabled the material to be presented as it was ninety years ago must appear questionable. At a technical level the new volumes deserve high praise, the variation between ‘Oximensis’ and ‘Oxomensis’ (for Osma) and the rendering of ‘Petraza’ as Riaza (i. 42, 55) providing rare exceptions to otherwise impeccable editing. Likewise for vol. ii, where the same determination to wring the last drop of informative juice from the evidence is apparent in, for example, the inclusion as items *32 and *33 of a bishop of León's appearance as witness of a royal privilege in 1123. It is perhaps to be hoped that those in charge of this splendid resumed initiative will not feel themselves too fully obliged to all the models adopted in these two volumes, whose usefulness will surely grow with time by providing an essential starting point for further work on the history of the medieval Spanish Church.