This outstanding volume contains twelve substantial chapters by leading scholars on the growth and life of the medieval English and Scottish Dominican Provinces in the British Isles. It covers the period from the friars’ first arrival in England during the summer of 1221 to the suppression of the friars in the 16th century at the hands of the English crown and Scottish Protestant Reformers, though less attention is given to the late 14th, 15th, and 16th centuries than to the earlier period. An initial introductory chapter by the editors, Eleanor Giraud and Cornelia Linde, offers a succinct historical overview, notes the previous historiography (in particular the debt owed by modern scholars to the Victorian English friar, Fr Raymund Palmer OP, and that owed to the 20^th-century American friar, Fr William Hinnebusch OP), and surveys the few extant primary sources. A useful table gives the dates at or by which the various houses of the province were founded. The book is then divided into four parts: (i) ‘Space and Place’; (ii) ‘Preaching and Pastoral Care’; (iii) ‘Education and Intellectual Life’; and (iv) ‘Devotional Cultures’.

The different sections and chapters will no doubt be of particular interest to different readers. Undergraduate and graduate students may gain most from the early more general chapters: Jens Rohrkästen's chapter on the friars’ relationship to the English crown; those on the priories in their English and Irish settings by Anne-Julie Lafaye; on Wales by Janet Burton and Karen Stöber; on Scotland by Richard Oram; as well as that on the friars’ pastoral mission by Andrew Reeves. Lafaye not only draws on contemporary archaeological studies, but provides a wealth of drawings, plans, and photographs. However, the more specialist reader will also gain from these chapters. Rohrkästen, for example, uses largely unpublished Exchequer material which gives a fresh insight into the friars’ role within ‘the royal household, and its orbit’ (p.35). Rohrkästen also reconstructs or plausibly hypothesises how beyond that immediate orbit Edward I sought to ‘consolidate an English presence at the Curia with the help of the English Dominican elite’ (p.51). Lafaye draws on the recent scholarship of Caroline Bruzelius, (in particular her 2014 study, Preaching, Building, and Burying) to look at how the friars may have ‘instrumentalised’ the long drawn-out and piecemeal process of building their monastic complexes. A ‘culture of incompletion’ both manifested their voluntary poverty and advertised their continuing need for generous donors (pp.83-85).

Specialists may gain more from the later chapters. The discussion of Jordan's English sermons by Steven Watts benefits from the 2005 edition of Jordan's sermons by P.-B. Hodel, though Watts’ unglossed translation of ‘parochiani’ as ‘parishioners’ may be open to question (p.205). Cornelia Linde's chapter on the ‘educational landscape’ of the province builds on, but also goes beyond, the earlier work of Maura O'Carroll SND. Of especial value is Linde's examination of who was eligible and who in fact held the different posts of regent master, sententiarius and biblicus in the studia generalia at Oxford and Cambridge. While the studium generale at Oxford served the whole Order, its regent masters were invariably drawn from the English Province, whereas there is evidence from the mid-14^th century onwards that ‘the positions of sententiarius and also biblicus at the studia generalia of Oxford and Cambridge were assigned to extranei at regular intervals’ (p.258). John T. Slotemaker and Jeffrey C. Witt discuss the English Dominicans’ intellectual tradition from the early 13^th to the mid-14^th century and make a plausible case for rejecting the notion of a single English Dominican school. They also point to the shift which occurred in the early 14^th century when Trevet renewed an earlier Dominican concern with the relationship between moral theology and preaching, and when Holcot advocated a theological method which drew on the so-called ‘obligational arts’, forms of disputation and logical reasoning (pp.292-97). The final three chapters by Alexander Collins, Eleanor Giraud, and Nigel Morgan treat respectively the visual arts, chant, and liturgical manuscripts.

The work is particularly to be commended for not limiting itself to England but in covering the entirety of the province (though Nigel Morgan's rich study of English Dominican liturgical manuscripts omits works from Scotland and Ireland). Each chapter is meticulously researched, generally up-to-date, and has its own bibliography at the end. Although some overlap in material is inevitable across closely related perspectives (such as the Oxford foundation in 1221, the entry into the Order of Robert Bacon in 1229/30, or the standardisation of the Order's liturgies in the mid-13th century), there is little superfluous duplication.

Inevitably some topics are not treated for reasons of space, or are not examined in any depth. The editors sensibly chose not to replicate the findings of Paul Lee from his comprehensive 2001 monograph on the Dominican nuns at Dartford. Nor is there much on how others saw, and sometimes opposed, the friars, as explored by Penn R. Szittya's 1986 study The Antifraternal Tradition in Medieval Literature, though Collins quotes extensively from the fictive description of a Dominican church in Piers the Plowman's Crede. The Order's double suppression in England and Wales, and its brief re-establishment in London and Oxford under Mary Tudor, receive scant attention. Little is found on English Dominican theologians after the mid-14^th century. Readers interested in the retable at Leeds Castle should perhaps have been pointed towards the 2018 study by Michaela Straub and Lucy Wrapson (‘The Battel Hall Retable: history, technique and conservation’, in Hamilton Kerr Institute Bulletin no. 7). There might also have been merit in discussing the images of Dominican saints in churches other than those of the Order, as in St Winwalloe's at East Portlemouth. Finally, it is to be regretted that the eye-watering price of the hardback edition may unduly limit the volume's readership beyond those with access to an academic library. These are very minor points, however, in what is an essential reference work for English mendicant studies and a worthy marker of the Province's eight hundredth anniversary of foundation.