Any historian of medieval bishops must feel satisfaction at the wealth of scholarship that has emerged in the last two decades—it is truly a flourishing subfield within medieval history. This volume is another valuable contribution to that field: it arose from a project funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (UK), which culminated in a conference focused on how individual candidates negotiated the path to the late medieval episcopate. The essays gathered here address a broad geographical range of dioceses, from Portugal to Poland, Croatia to Norway. The authors of the essays represent a similarly wide range of countries—this volume will no doubt introduce many new European scholarly voices to an English-speaking audience. It is worth noting that despite the invocation of “medieval Europe” in the title, the volume focuses exclusively on the later Middle Ages.

The organization of this collection is well thought out, beginning with Sarah Thomas's introduction, which offers an invaluable overview and conceptual framework. The essays are organized into four thematic sections: prosopography of bishops and their entourages; episcopal networks and network analysis; biographies of individual bishops; and relations with the papacy. In practice, these distinctions do not hold in an absolute way, as a paper in the “individual bishops” section might employ network maps of entourages, and the papacy appears as a force throughout the book. Still, the sections provide a general organizational structure, and the introduction's discussion of each theme—including a concise overview of historiography—is welcome. Equally welcome are Thomas's thoughts on the value of the different methodologies employed by the contributors, notably prosopography, network analysis, and biography. Turning to the scholarly apparatus accompanying the essays themselves: individual bibliographies follow each piece, which will no doubt serve as starting points for scholars venturing into new approaches to studying bishops, or into the historiography of a given geographical region. Furthermore, a number of the essays include appendices of documents or data that enrich the reader's understanding of the piece.

Katherine Harvey opens the first section of the book, on prosopography, with a thoughtful consideration of how the skills possessed by a so-called “courtier bishop”—never favored in reform rhetoric—were nonetheless appreciated by many contemporaries in thirteenth-century England. Hermínia Vasconcelos Vilar investigates how Portuguese bishops in the mid-thirteenth century mobilized ties to the papacy as part of ongoing political negotiations with their king. Stefano G. Magni raises a practice for which bishops were much maligned—nepotism—and then digs beyond rhetoric to see how it influenced election outcomes in specific cases. Finally, Christine Barralis tracks changing patterns in the identities of the bishops of Meaux—and in the method of their appointments—from the twelfth to the sixteenth centuries.

Part II, entitled “Episcopal Networks,” opens with Jacek Maciejewski's investigation of how elite noble kinship networks worked to influence episcopal elections; such networks proved more consistently important, in the Polish church of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, than royal or papal support. Aída Portilla González studies how benefices from cathedral estates in the Castilian diocese of Sigüenza were granted in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, finding that the chapter and bishop were the most significant forces in making such grants, although papal and royal interventions did occur. Steinar Imsen tracks the efforts by the archbishops of Nidaros (Trondheim) to exert metropolitan authority over their far-flung dioceses, which stretched westward into the Atlantic as far as Greenland.

In Part III, the authors demonstrate the value of close consideration of the careers of individual bishops. Jacopo Paganello investigates Alberto Scolari, bishop of Volterra (1261–1269) as a case study of rural lordship in Tuscany—a region where scholars have generally focused on episcopal involvement in city politics. Fernando Gutiérrez Baños studies the early fourteenth-century bishop Pedro Pérez de Monroy, asking how Pedro came to be the first bishop of Salamanca named by the pope against the unanimous vote of the chapter. Susana Guijarro closes this section with an essay on Luis de Acuña, bishop of Burgos (1456–1495), focusing on his path to the episcopate and his policies once in power, particularly his defense of episcopal property, his assertion of jurisdiction over the chapter, and his support of church reform and humanism.

The final section of the volume focuses on bishops and the papacy—although, as noted, Rome and Avignon played a key role in many of the earlier essays. Fabrizio Pagnoni tracks the rising papal intervention in northern Italian episcopal appointments under Pope John XXII, as well as the profile of the candidates John supported for elevation. Miso Petrovic discusses the involvement of the papacy in selecting archbishops of Split from the late thirteenth to early fifteenth centuries, finding that while papal support was essential for successful candidates, such support did not stem from a grand papal political strategy in the region but rather responded to local petitions. Kirsi Salonen closes the volume with a consideration of late medieval Swedish bishops who did not particularly seek close contact with the papacy, at least if measured by visits to Rome; the demands on their time from their large and politically complex dioceses meant that they rarely travelled south beyond what was absolutely required.

Any critiques of this volume are really occupational hazards of this type of collection: some essays fail to give an adequate introduction to the particular context examined, which means that the lay reader can feel a bit lost in a given case study. There are resonances between essays that remain tacit and unexplored—for example, the distance between contemporary rhetoric about episcopal office (courtier bishops, nepotism, etc.) and complex reality—which might have benefitted from a conclusion bookending Thomas's strong introduction and highlighting such recurring themes. Still, this remains a strong contribution to the field of late medieval episcopal studies and is particularly to be commended for its organizational structure, the geographical breadth of its detailed case studies, and the apparatus allowing for further exploration by readers.