Late Anglo-Saxon Worcester offers rich pickings to the church historian: the homilies of bishop Wulfstan, pontificals and other liturgical manuscripts, saints' lives, church fabric, and, above all, three eleventh-century cartularies providing a wealth of information about the church's landed endowment. There have been many fine studies of portions of this material, exemplified by Emma Mason's biography of St. Wulfstan, the last Anglo-Saxon bishop of Worcester (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), but Francesca Tinti is the first to attempt a history of the church of Worcester encompassing the whole of the late Anglo-Saxon period. Tinti begins her study in the late ninth century, when significant documentation of the church's estates first survives, and carries it through to the end of the eleventh century.

The book consists of five chapters and a short conclusion. The first chapter briefly introduces the book's subject, sources and methodology. In the second chapter, Tinti surveys the history and “personnel” of Worcester from the late ninth to the late eleventh century. Each bishop of Worcester from Wærferth (d.907) to St. Wulfstan (d.1095) receives his own subsection, with special attention paid to Oswald (d.992), one of the leaders of the Benedictine monastic reform movement, Ealdred (d.1062), and St. Wulfstan, whose episcopate spanned the Norman Conquest. Tinti also makes important observations about the creation, size, and endowment of the late Anglo-Saxon monastic community at Worcester. By means of careful analysis of witness lists, she is able to demonstrate that the clerics who became monks at Worcester in the course of the late tenth-century reform movement were those already in higher clerical orders; Tinti speculates that perhaps their education and commitment to celibacy made them good monastic candidates. She sees no sign of a “purge” of secular clerics of Worcester, but rather views the period as one of continuity and of growth. The community shrunk in the early eleventh century, but grew again under bishop Ealdred, who actively worked to enlarge the community. Under St. Wulfstan, the community expanded further and gained a greater sense of autonomy. At the close of the chapter, Tinti conducts an interesting study of the terminology used to describe the head of the monastic community. During the monastic reform movement, the head was termed primus. In the eleventh century, decanus was often the word used: prior only became common after the Conquest.

In the third chapter, the book's strongest, Tinti examines Worcester's record-keeping practices through a careful study of Worcester's surviving single-sheet leases and its three famous eleventh-century cartularies: the Liber Wigorniensis, generally accepted as the first cartulary to be compiled in England, the Nero-Middleton cartulary, and Hemming's Cartulary. Through a painstaking study of the contents, structure, scribal hands, foliation, interpolations, and later additions to these cartularies, Tinti elucidates the clockwise topographical organization of these texts; develops a convincing “working plan” for the creation of the Liber Wigorniensis; provides a new reconstruction of the fragmentary Nero-Middleton cartulary; highlights the “sacral” context of this cartulary (it was copied into a large and centuries-old Bible); and discusses how the division of the monastic estates from those of the bishop in Hemming's Cartulary reflects a new sense of corporate self-identity in the Worcester monastic community. The intricacies of the documents preserved in the Worcester cartularies are the subject of the book's fourth chapter, which examines the administration and tenurial history of Worcester's estates in the late Anglo-Saxon and early Norman period. The church of Worcester was “by far the largest landlord in the diocese” (224), and in this chapter Tinti methodically works through the location and individual histories of the church's estates in Worcestershire, Warwickshire, Gloucestershire, and Oxfordshire. She shows that while Worcester suffered some losses of its estates, in general it kept a firm grip on its property throughout the tenth and eleventh centuries, including the decades following the Norman Conquest.

In the final chapter, Tinti turns to ecclesiastical organization and pastoral care in the diocese of Worcester in the late Anglo-Saxon period. Here, Tinti utilizes a remarkable range of sources, including not just the cartularies and charters examined in earlier chapters but also late Saxon church fabric, hagiography, homilies, liturgical manuscripts, and sculpture. She investigates a wide range of subjects, including saints' cults in the diocese, the payment of church dues, the foundation of local churches in the diocese at large and the city of Worcester itself, the pastoral travels and activities of Worcester's bishops, and specific pastoral duties such as baptism, confession, and burial of the dead. Two highlights of this chapter are Tinti's discussion of Bodleian Laud Misc. 482, a manuscript that “may have been employed in the field to provide pastoral care for the sick and the dying” (306), and her examination of burial payments in the diocese, from which she concludes the late Anglo-Saxon church appears to have been more determined to control burials than baptisms—a contrast to Continental practice. Tinti could have given more flesh to her discussion had she delved more deeply into the texts of Worcester's surviving homilies, liturgies, saint's lives and other narrative sources, but her survey of this material nevertheless succeeds in illuminating many notable and otherwise inaccessible aspects of late Anglo-Saxon pastoral care.

Tinti is to be congratulated for the variety of material examined in this book, the meticulous care with which she treats very complex sources, and her many judicious correctives to the secondary literature. The book includes numerous maps and black-and-white images of the documents, manuscripts, and church fabric Tinti discusses in the text. It also features footnotes rather than endnotes, many helpful tables, excellent indices, and a full bibliography. Specialists in the Anglo-Saxon church will find much of importance and interest in this volume.