How might the reception afforded papal legates on their first arrival in England assist in establishing the extent to which any particular legation (nearly a dozen of them across this particular time period) commanded the respect that the papacy itself increasingly demanded? Dressed in scarlet, mitred, riding a white horse, were such figures received as the pope’s alter ego, as convention now required, or were there occasions when things went awry, and practice diverged alarmingly from precept? Given the rich detail and prejudice in which the English chroniclers marinade their narratives, Christensen has no problem here in spicing up three chapters of general reflection with a series of case histories drawn from particular English chroniclers. Thus a more general survey of the ritual of adventus, the legate’s insignia and the normative expectations placed on those by whom such legates were to be greeted, yields place to detailed reflections of the ways in which such ceremonies were described by, in turn, Roger of Howden, Gervase of Canterbury, Roger of Wendover and Matthew Paris. Despite the occasional slip (‘normalcy’, ‘Bourdeaux’, and ‘archsee’ [recte ‘archdiocese’], for instance), this is a monograph written in better and clearer prose than many by those claiming the privilege of native English speakers. It is particularly useful as a survey of ritual expectations, both papal and local (including Henry ii’s presentation of a white horse to the legate Vivian: a sign, perhaps, that the continued papal insistence on supplying Ireland with legates distinct from those appointed to England accorded with English and not just papal expectations of Henry ii’s new colony). On occasion it rises to heights of greater perception, for instance on the ways in which Gervase deliberately misdates to Canterbury Cathedral and Christmas 1186 the arrival of the legate Octavian and his companion, Hugh Nonant, bishop-elect of Coventry. This serves both to emphasise the humiliation of archbishop Baldwin, and to suggest the establishment of a direct papal-monastic league in defence of Becket’s cathedral and shrine. No one writing of Anglo-papal relations can henceforth ignore this study. At the same time, they may choose to skip at least some of its recapitulations, not least when it devolves into a summary of well-known occurrences, or indeed on occasion into little more than a list of secondary readings (for example on English resistance to papal provision). Such are the perils of scholarship, now that the great buffalo herd of unpublished fact is supposedly hunted to extinction, and speculative rereading of long-published sources offers juicier carrion than any plunge into the archival thickets where the wild uncounted things still prowl. Given Christensen’s emphasis upon ceremony, the absence of Barbara Hanawalt, Neil Murphy or (apart from a brief bibliographical nod in the direction of Gordon Kipling) any of the now rich literature either on late Roman or late medieval civic reception might be considered a missed opportunity. So too the decision to end this survey in 1250, when a mere fourteen-year leap forwards would have allowed access to the extraordinary legatine register of Guy Foulquois, the future Pope Clement iv, obliged to sit out his legation in Boulogne and Gravelines whilst, across the Channel, his theoretical province remained defiantly under the thumb of Simon de Montfort. Christensen has typically intriguing speculations to offer on the ‘misdating’ by Matthew Paris of the arrival of the legate Otto to a time ‘around’ the feast of St Peter and Paul (29 June 1237). The mere grubber after facts, by contrast, might note that King Henry iii passed June and July that year mostly in Oxfordshire or the home counties, save for a brief visit to Rochester and then Ospringe from 8 to 11 June. In other words, were we looking for a location at which king met the legate and there performed proskynesis, lowering his head (as Paris tells us) to the (legate’s) knee, the ports either of Rochester or Faversham (both clearly marked on Paris’s strip-map itineraries from England to the continent) hove into view as buffaloes awaiting the fact-hunter’s gun. This is a decent, clear and useful study. If it lights its subject in sixty-watt rather than full halogen brightness, then better sixty watts than no light at all.