This volume, a product of the Harlaxton medieval congress of 2007, contains papers by twenty-one scholars on a variety of subjects. Michael Robson leads the team with a lightly revised version of his excellent paper on the foundations and organisation of the Franciscans in the custody of York. This is followed by two papers of high quality on mendicant preaching in the thirteenth century, one by Maura O'Carroll on the catechetical aims of Dominican preaching, the other by William Carpenter on the use of libri exemplorum by Franciscans. Donald Prudlo provides a scholarly and interesting study of how the Dominicans disseminated in England the surprising cultus of St Peter of Verona, a friar preacher who was assassinated by Italian Cathars in 1252. Henry Summerson capitalises on his editorial experiences with the ODNB to extract from it a useful mendicant prosopography. Several of the papers address a question much ventilated by historians of the friars – that of the conflicts between the mendicants and the secular and monastic clergy, who resented and often opposed the arrival of these newcomers on the pastoral scene. There is of course plentiful evidence of such opposition, for which Matthew Paris, ever a good hater of the friars, was a conspicuous spokesman. The authors of the symposium challenge this view and in this case arrive independently at something approaching a consensus. Thus Joan Greatrex adduces from her wide knowledge of the records of Norwich, Winchester, Worcester and Canterbury cathedrals a fourteenth-century scenario of amicable co-operation between the cathedral clergy and the friars in their ministrations to the laity; and not only to the laity: at Canterbury friars were often appointed as preachers in the cathedral and they appear in the obit rolls as masters lecturing in the claustral school. Clive Burgess argues for a similar degree of pastoral collaboration between the friars and parish clergy of Bristol in the later Middle Ages. G. M. Draper points to pastoral collaboration between the friars and parish clergy in the Cinque Ports. Anna Anisinova, while recording early hostility to mendicant settlements in monastic towns of south-east England, finds no later evidence of conflict between friars and parish clergy. The theme is brought to a suitable conclusion by Wendy Scase's paper on hostility to the friars in pamphlets by Reformation writers, which she correctly traces to a literary tradition that came from Germany but had its origins in the violent polemic between the mendicants and secular clergy in thirteenth-century Paris. A rarer and most welcome feature in the volume are two essays, illustrated by fine colour plates, one on medieval glass in mendicant churches, and the other on the retable of Thornham Parva, made for the Dominicans of Norwich. As a whole this symposium is a notable report on continuing mendicant studies.