This collection of essays originated in a conference on the topic held at the University of York in March 2004, although it would seem that three of the original contributions do not appear in this volume and five others have subsequently been added. Like all such collections the contents vary greatly both in character and in content, not to say quality. Indeed, apart from a common subject matter, widely interpreted, it is not easy to identify a uniform approach, save perhaps for an occasionally self-serving – and not entirely justified – complaint that the subject itself has been undeservedly neglected. Such familiar complaints can at times too readily appear both truculently self-justificatory and also derogatory of earlier scholars. But, of course, what matters about a subject is less its novelty than how intelligently it is treated. In this respect the results in this volume are as mixed as its contents. Some of the various contributions are notably specific, dealing with individual colleges, such as Anne Sutton's highly detailed account of the Hospital of St Thomas of Acre on Cheapside. Others are concerned merely with a single theme in the life of a particular college. Winifred Harwood concentrates on the efficiently managed administration of William Wykeham's foundation of Winchester College, while David Skinner focuses on the last years of the Yorkist mausoleum at Fotheringhay, and particularly on its musical life. Elsewhere contributions examine a specific topic across a broad range of collegiate institutions. Hence Julian Luxford describes the funerary monuments to be found in collegiate churches, deftly portraying their role in fostering the communion of the living and the dead within their societies. By deploying evidence from a wide variety of sources James Willoughby demonstrates that the numerous small collections of books to be found in collegiate churches were far from random but accurately mirrored the particular concerns of their members, ‘devoted to the practical arts; they were working collections for secular priests’. In somewhat similar vein Helen Brown examines the collegiate churches of later medieval Scotland, emphasising how many projected foundations came to nothing and how little interest the Scottish monarchs showed in such institutions, in notable contrast to contemporary English kings.

Such studies add bricks to the edifice, but it is their place in the whole building and their relationship to the more general contributions in the volume which are of particular interest. And in this respect it is impossible to avoid a certain sense of dislocation and discontinuity, quite apart from the sheer variety of topics treated. This fractured quality arises primarily from a conflict between the contents of the first, introductory chapter, which is written by Clive Burgess, one of the two editors, and what follows. Burgess's tone, setting the scene, varies between the confident and the defensive. But fundamental to his theme is an emphasis on the malleability of collegiate foundations, an emphasis which at times comes close to assessing the worth of a religious institution in terms of its current social utility. In particular, this emphasis is sometimes achieved by means of a contrast with regular foundations which are characterised as ‘“turned away” from the world’. Monasteries display ‘rigid structures’; they are ‘flat-footed’. It is unfortunate that this analysis is soon followed by a perceptive and balanced account from Martin Heale which analyses with precision and delicacy the true subtleties of the relationships between monastery and college, emphasising both overlap and complementarity. Likewise Burgess's decision to exclude the colleges of Oxford and Cambridge from his analysis on the grounds that they were ‘unusually specialised and atypical’ in ‘housing and supporting those engaged in advanced scholarship’ seems oddly misjudged, the more so because the same exclusion is applied to the account of the Scottish colleges. In fact, of course, the vast majority of those studying in these institutions were scarcely involved in ‘advanced scholarship’ in any very meaningful sense and in reality many went on to serve the church in the most integral and fundamental way by becoming parish priests. The scale of King's College chapel, for example, by far the most important part of the college to be built at least in part during the founder's lifetime, accurately mirrors the priorities quite specifically envisaged in Henry vi's statutes, and they are certainly not those of advanced scholarship. The very design of the chapel with its multiplication of altars and side chapels speaks volumes for a religious culture which is ‘atypical’ only in its scale. And if ‘malleability’ is to be taken as an importantly defining feature of collegiate foundations, then university colleges would seem to illustrate such an attribute in abundance.

Subsequent contributions also belie the editor's simple exclusions. A fine survey by Fr Bertram of the European context for collegiate foundations not only contextualises their early origins at Aachen and Regensburg but also stresses the indivisibility of devotion and learning in their later lives. The college at Erfurt actually developed into the university. Nearly all European colleges came to have an educational function and many were themselves university colleges. Other connections were more indirect but none the less pervasive. In his survey of patronage in medieval colleges A. K.McHardy stresses the important role that they played in providing benefices for university graduates who were involved in ecclesiastical and royal administration. Anne Sutton shows how significant the Hospital of St Thomas of Acre was in the London campaign for schools, with its culmination in the eventual foundation of William Bingham's college at Cambridge. James Willoughby demonstrates that the provision of books to colleges was an indivisible spectrum, as it were, with the university colleges, or Eton and Winchester, at one end, the colleges at Rotherham or Fotheringhay possessing respectable libraries in the middle, and small colleges with only a handful of volumes at the other extreme. Even Julian Luxford's survey of tombs in collegiate churches finds a central place for the university memorials of New College and Magdalen College. Because of their survival, their subsequent and changing importance and the weight of evidence about them, university colleges are certainly difficult to handle in this context, but their exclusion serves to distort the picture. The relationship between devotion and learning, as Anselm reminds us, is a seamless web.

Burgess also draws attention to the emblematic importance of the twin late-medieval royal collegiate foundations of St Stephen's at Westminster and St George's at Windsor. Because of their associations with the monarchy and, in the case of St George's, also with the leading members of the nobility as the chapel of the Garter knights, both fostered emulation. A string of smaller-scale noble foundations followed. But because both Westminster and Windsor were founded in the shadow of la Sainte Chapelle and against the background of a new and aggressive war with France, both also fostered a distinctively English, not to say nationalistic, piety – ‘Worship assisted in winning battles’, we are told – which is characteristic of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Again the argument appears too exclusive. The essential functions of worship and intercession transcend both time and place. Fr Bertram's reminder of the distant Carolingian antecedents of the collegiate church is salutary, as are his final recollections of the remote collegiate churches in Riga, in Poland, in Albania and even in Mexico and New Spain, and the foundation made as late as the mid-eighteenth century near Segovia. Horizons need to be lifted.

Many of these studies stress the vigour and variety, the adaptability of the colleges. They are characterised as ‘chameleons’, demonstrating qualities of ‘creative manipulation’ which enabled them to coincide with changing and widespread devotional mentalities, all in – often explicit – contrast with the stasis of monastic life. It is even suggested that colleges were the basic form of Christian organisation in the west. During this period they grew rapidly in numbers, greatly outdoing their virtually static monastic counterparts. It is perhaps these preconceptions which explain why we are not provided with any sustained explanation in these studies of how it was that such institutions, within a decade or so, would largely come to share the fate of the monasteries.