Ann Bagnall Yardley's wide-ranging and rich study of musical culture in medieval English nunneries clearly is a labour of love. Her central thesis is ‘that the performance of the liturgy’, the transformation of the liturgical texts into a live experience, ‘inscribes a particular piety upon the body of the nun through the sounds, sights, and actions of the rituals’ (p. 13); piety understood here as ‘a practice, and active response to the demands of the spirit’, including ‘social and communal values’ (p. 10). Yardley describes her task as the reconstruction of a mosaic floor from a few cracked and chipped tiles, with only occasional glimpses of the original beauty, since the extant sources from English convents are fragmentary and scattered. She brings together virtually every scrap of material from the Anglo-Saxon foundations to the dissolution in the 1530s, and lists the manuscripts in several useful tables. A bias towards southern England, where more sources survived from more affluent nunneries, is unavoidable. Likewise the ‘musical culture’ of the title is predominantly a liturgical culture, with music for mass and office taking centre stage. The focus on chant shifts only briefly to hint at prohibitions on secular music; sources of polyphony are mentioned at the end of chapter iv. The book carefully balances the norms and prescriptions concerning liturgy and monastic life with the practicalities of musical performance, persuasively integrating liturgical, spiritual, social and economic aspects. Chapters i and ii focus upon the normative framework extracted from monastic rules and descriptions of musical leadership roles such as the cantrix. Chapters iii and iv contrast the norms with evidence from actual day-to-day practice, drawing mainly upon visitation reports and manuscripts with musical notation. Chapters v and vi introduce special events such as processions, the Visitatio sepulchri plays at Easter and the consecration of nuns, a ritual exclusive to religious women. The final chapters, vii and viii, are respectively case studies of Barking Abbey (osb) and of Syon Abbey, England's only Bridgettine nunnery. Some overlap is inevitable, and several relevant sources return in various chapters. Yardley's study provides rich material for musicologists and chant specialists, with music examples of little-known or previously unedited material, but her book is equally attractive for scholars from other disciplines as well as a wider readership. The historical background and the liturgical basics are elucidated in the introduction, and translations of all Latin, Anglo-Norman or middle English texts make the argument accessible to the non-specialist. Yardley compares English liturgical practices with continental sources, an aspect that could have been extended to highlight some crucial differences, for example the fact that English nunneries seem to have been uniformly under the jurisdiction of the local bishop, rather than a father abbot. Similarly the occasional side-glance at male religious practices, which Yardley consciously eschews (p. 3), would have contextualised the special features of women's convent culture. Nevertheless Yardley's book is a major contribution and highly recommended to readers interested in English ecclesiastical history, monastic spirituality and musical practices in the Middle Ages.