This interesting book is a study of the Church of England's bishops and their families in the recent past. With a sociological approach and on the basis of interviews, it examines the cultural impact of Christianity upon their personal development.

There are useful data about the churchmanship of bishops. They had grown up in “a broad balance of Evangelical (23 per cent) and Catholic [in the Anglican sense] (25 per cent) around a solid Central core position (42 per cent)” (36). By ordination Catholics had increased, at the expense of Central churchmanship, which had all but disappeared. By retirement there had been a striking movement, first to more liberal forms of Catholicism, but also to “vague churchmanship” (an attitude present in significant numbers even at the time of ordination; 37). Although “vague churchmanship” sounds like a criticism, the authors point out that it may in fact be a positive form of inclusiveness in which the bishop avoids identification with any one of the parties or traditions but remains “a multivocal symbol” (179).

While churchmanship receives considerable attention as a variable, the bishops’ attitude to what counts as theological orthodoxy does not. This surprised me given that it was surely becoming an issue in the period covered by these bishops’ careers.

Chapter 5 deals with bishops’ wives. In the generation Davies and Guest mainly deal with, clergy wives generally identified with their husbands’ careers; the independent spouse is a more recent phenomenon, with Archbishop Runcie's wife apparently serving as an important role model. The bishop's wife, who possessed “ascribed status,” often mirrored the function of her husband in a parallel and informal structure. On the significance of the support role, it is interesting to read that 35 percent of bishops’ wives believed they had an integral role in their husbands’ ministry, but only 18 percent of bishops believed their wives had such a role (104 n. 16).

Several chapters deal with bishops’ children. For clergy households, there is the question of how to combine access to the clergyman with the children's need for a home. Some households were open to the world of ministry, but some were so insulated that the children were apparently hardly even given a Christian upbringing, if their recollections can be trusted. The odd thing is that, for each type of home, some children found the experience positive and some negative; and this is not dependent on religious belief—an atheist is cited who attributes his social concern to his upbringing in an “uninsulated” vicarage (153–54).

A stereotype has clergy children either imitating their parents or reacting against it. In fact, it seems, the large majority remain identified with Christianity, with quite high levels of church attendance, but frequently with a shift of focus that may be taken as marking autonomy. Atheism and agnosticism are represented at nationally average levels. The two most interesting findings, however, are a large group (17 percent) describing themselves as “Christian (no denomination)” (127) and a notable absence of “New Age” beliefs (145).

The children's career choices seem, unsurprisingly, to be influenced by their upbringing; many are in the caring professions, few in business. A more interesting finding is that 45 percent have worked in the creative fields at some point (150). Those who do go into the business world may, paradoxically, have more opportunities to display countercultural values (159–60). Of long-term significance is the disengagement from the armed forces: the clergy used to be one of several professions whose members intermarried, but this has ended (149).

The historical background presented is limited and slightly idiosyncratic. William Temple is treated critically, while Bishop Barnes, who, the Concise Dictionary of National Biography notes, “attacked [the] doctrine of [the] Real Presence and had no understanding of sacramentalism,” is dignified as “an opponent of doctrinal and liturgical obfuscation” (49).

The concept of “spiritual capital” used in this study derives from social capital theory. For a historian without a specialist background, it was not clear to me exactly how it should be understood. Both the Punam/Coleman “public good” concept of social capital and the Bourdieu private power concept are referred to, but the latter seems to be that followed. In practice, a survey of the indexed references shows that (at least for clergy children) “spiritual capital” mainly refers to the inner resources and characteristics acquired by upbringing.

The authors seek to include “a broader account of church and social life” in order to find “meaning and significance” (10). This is promising, but for a historian the result seems etiolated. Quotations from informants are generally anonymous and the time referred to is often unclear, which makes it hard to connect the information in the way historians expect, though these quotations are nevertheless high points. Of course, if historians wish to use books from other disciplines, we cannot complain if they use their own methods.

Early in the book (11–12) the authors discuss modern approaches to interviews, suggesting ways in which they may go beyond simple uncomplicated narrative of “fact.” Oral technique and theory are always interesting to us in Africa, so I was disappointed not to read more about how these ideas related to their own interviews. In addition, the authors appear, from various references, to accept or at least wish to consider Callum Brown's analysis (in The Death of Christian Britain) of a fairly sudden religious discontinuity in the 1960s. If this is the case, their interview material would appear to straddle this divide, but with a few exceptions they do not address this complication.

The authors write, “We have presented sufficient evidence that the family itself serves as a kind of validating arena from which the bishop moves out into his ecclesiastical and social ministry” (172). To me, the emphasis seems more on how the bishop's role affected the wife and children.