The collection of essays under review had its genesis at a conference on oral communication in medieval monastic communities organised at the University in Ghent (Belgium) in 2008 by the indefatigable Steven Vanderputten. While most of the papers focus on topics between the tenth and thirteenth centuries, many of the authors also cast their nets back to late antiquity, to the grave intonations of the desert Fathers in the Apothegmata patrum and the venerable words of Benedict in his Regula. Vanderputten lays out the overarching argument of the book in his brief introduction: historians tend to characterise medieval cloisters as literate environments, but thereby run the risk of neglecting the degree to which male and female religious relied on the spoken word for practical and didactic purposes. This misconception is understandable, both because normative texts produced in medieval abbeys place a strong emphasis on the cultivation of silence, and because we glean almost all of the information that we have about oral practices in a monastic context from written sources. The volume comprises sixteen papers in English, French and German, which Vanderputten has organised into five thematic sections to cast light on the broad range of contexts in which male and female religious made use of oral modes of communication in their cloisters. The first section shows the various ways in which monks reached consensus on contested issues with kings and laymen by recourse to oral discussion. The second section excavates traces of oral interaction that underlay liturgical training and celebration. The third section illuminates the role of story-telling in the transmission of information that eventually made its way into exempla collections, hagiography and commemorative texts. The final two sections address the practical uses of oral discourse in the cloister, particularly the function of dialogue as a didactic medium. Several papers raise a fascinating but difficult question: which language(s) did medieval monks use when they spoke to one another in their abbeys. Latin was clearly the medium of the liturgy, but a surprising number of monks expressed their practical and devotional concerns in vernacular languages as well, a tendency which increased between the tenth and thirteenth centuries. On the whole, the volume succeeds admirably in making the case for medieval monasteries as places where oral communication remained an important vehicle for instruction and conflict resolution, despite the restrictions imposed by rules against speaking. Some of the papers make the case more convincingly or directly than others, and more than one of the papers in English would have benefitted from a stronger editorial hand by a native speaker. Moreover, the volume unfortunately lacks both an index and comprehensive bibliography. Neither of these deficiencies diminishes the contribution of the volume as a whole, but they do make it a bit more unwieldy than necessary as a resource for future research on this important topic in medieval monastic history.