This volume of essays is the product of a conference held in 2005 to mark the six-hundredth anniversary of Richard Scrope's execution for his part in an unsuccessful rising against Henry iv. The contributors are well chosen, the essays are all of a high quality and the theme provides sufficient unity for the collection to be very successful as a book. Indeed it would be hard to imagine a single-author monograph commanding the interest across such a range of fields that this collection achieves. Richard Scrope was archbishop of York from 1398 until his execution. He had been born into a powerful northern aristocratic family and was arguably a natural figurehead for regional discontent in the wake of the Lancastrian usurpation. After his death he was revered as a martyr by the Yorkists during the civil wars of the mid-fifteenth century, and as an (uncanonised) saint he became a focus for devotion in the northern province. As a major figure in the politics and religious life of the early fifteenth century, Scrope has, until recently, not received the attention one might have expected. The present volume highlights not only the current state of research into the man, his political actions and environment, and his religious legacy, but also demonstrates that much more is possible given the survival of a wide range of records relating to his work as archbishop and to the life and thought of the northern province, and in particular the city of York, in the decades after his death. Of particular interest is the question of how a cult originates and spreads: who are the vectors of transmission? What are the media of transmission? How are these connected? What determines the success and extent of a cult? Following an introduction by Jeremy Goldberg and a biographical sketch by Robert Swanson, the volume contains essays on Scrope as political rebel by Mark Ormrod, Melanie Devine and Christian Liddy, on Scrope as archbishop by Patricia Cullam, and on the posthumous cult by Danna Piroyansky, Stephen Wright, Christopher Norton and Sarah Rees Jones. Many of these authors are associated with the University of York, and this local concentration of medievalists is notable for making wonderful use of local historical resources, so that in the present volume we can see in detail into the parishes and families of the fifteenth-century city. Records of a similar quality are available for other medieval cathedral cities – Hereford and Lincoln spring to mind – but without the local concentration of scholarship similar projects may be harder to pursue.