This is a handsome, beautifully illustrated but hefty volume, compiled to celebrate the sexcentenary of the foundation of Manchester Collegiate Church in 1421. Thirteen contributors, expertly led by the editor Jeremy Gregory, provide an introduction, seven chronological chapters, and five thematic essays spanning the pre-collegiate church through to 2020. The volume is the first scholarly study of its subject, drawing on institutional archives which only recently have been properly sorted and catalogued, and should succeed in its avowed aim to appeal to both academic and general readers alike. We might regard the book as merely an addition to the recent renaissance in cathedral studies, but in fact, Manchester Cathedral’s complex history as a parish church from before the Norman Conquest, collegiate church from 1421 to 1847 (including its dissolution in 1547 and 1649 and refoundation in 1556, 1578, 1635, and 1660), and cathedral from 1847 to the present day, gives it a quite distinct character. Collegiate churches, as Ian Atherton notes (121), are best regarded as a species of cathedral, but they are understudied and often overlooked, with the notable exception of Westminster Abbey in the volume edited by David Cannadine in 2019 (Westminster Abbey: A Church in History), so the attention Manchester Collegiate Church receives here is especially welcome.

The first substantial chapter, by Lucy Wooding, covers the period from the foundation to the Reformation. The founders were Bishop Langley of Durham, a local by birth, and Thomas de la Warre, lord of Manchester, but from the start parishioners were involved, with the foundation charter listing two churchwardens, two knights, and nineteen local gentry. This intertwining of church, town, and region runs through the whole volume. The parish church worshipped in the nave, while the new collegiate church flourished in the quire, establishing a rich musical tradition, offering the round of divine offices and some educational provision, attracting chantries, and securing benefactions, including the magnificent choir stalls of c.1500–6, whose misericords are analyzed in a later chapter (424–45). All this was jeopardized or lost as the collegiate church was dissolved under the Chantry Act of 1547, only to be restored under Mary I in 1556. Ian Atherton takes the story forward in a splendid chapter running up to 1660. The “undead college” of 1558–76, as he neatly tags it (79), was refounded in 1578 as the “College of Christ” after the intervention of the Lancastrian, Alexander Nowell, Dean of St Paul's (and why is there not a modern biography of such an influential figure in the Elizabethan church?), and became the “puritan college,” conspicuous for its evangelism and nonconformity. Archbishop Laud failed to tame it in the 1630s, notwithstanding another refoundation in 1635; and uniquely among cathedrals and collegiate churches, Manchester Collegiate Church supported Parliament in the 1640s, though it was dissolved with the rest in 1649. By that time, the college was also the center of regional Presbyterianism, which thrived through to 1660 in contrast to elsewhere in the country, with the exception of London. The period 1660–62 was a critical watershed for the collegiate church: once again refounded, but this time firmly and irreversibly Anglican, with the return of music, a choir, and the creation of a railed altar. The college became associated with Toryism and Jacobitism, and the Young Pretender worshipped in the church during his ill-fated incursion south in 1745. Thereafter, the college came to embrace church and state, and symbolic of this turn was the image of the collegiate church on buttons of the King and Country Club of the 1790s (403). Beyond that, it is clear that the college played a significant role in the “public collective identity of the town” (164). Arthur Burns provides an excellent chapter on the critical transformation from collegiate church to cathedral, from 1830 to 1914. He does so by examining the complex and contested interplay of parish, collegiate church, cathedral (from 1847), and bishop, played out in the context of “Cottonopolis,” of Manchester as now England's second city. As late as 1880, Dean Cowie commented, the “organization of a cathedral on a real basis ought to come first. At present we are only a college, hampered by being a parish church” (226). There were disputes over ritualism and finance between cathedral and parish, and the latter retained the loyalty of many locals, including wealthy merchants, who attended the open vestry and dug deep into their pockets to finance the rebuilding of the west tower, then the nave in the 1860s and 1880s (224; see also 335–6). Overall, Burns concludes, Manchester Cathedral’s troubled history in the later nineteenth century can be read as evidence of commitment and engagement, which other cathedrals were fast losing. Matthew Grimley and Jeremy Morris wrap up the chronology for the century after 1914 with persuasive accounts of the cathedral's successful adjustment in the face of change, by engaging with ecumenism and social justice, and providing an effective focal point for cultural events and commemorations. The volume closes with five thematic chapters on architecture, music, memorials, misericords, and stained glass. In a short review, it is hard to do justice to the richness of this collection, which is institutional history at its best: careful scholarship, sensitivity to the shifting local, national, and even international context, informed by different disciplinary studies, attentive to the impact of key individuals, and wonderfully illuminated with nearly a hundred photographs, paintings, satires, engravings, and maps. Only the index fails: omissions of both national figures (Archbishop Laud: 104, 106–7) and prominent locals (John Edward Taylor: 174, 177, 192–3) as well as incomplete entries (Alexander Nowell: there for pages 80–90, but not for page 350). The volume is very attractively priced, and deserves to sell well.