If the first volume of the Heads of religious houses: England and Wales was, as its editors noted in their preface, ‘long in the making’, this third and final instalment seems to have appeared very quickly. For the first time the material has been assembled by a single editor, who has had to confront an Everest of potentially germane documents, printed sources and theses: even with text of 10-point font size, the bibliography runs to eighty pages. Inevitably, not everything has been reviewed. As David Smith points out in his introduction (p. 2), various classes of court record have only been sampled due to their amplitude. However, except in the case of some small, slightly documented dependencies, there are few gaps in the lists, and one cannot think that exhaustive scrutiny would have added much to what has been produced. The lists contribute much new information about a complicated and academically contested period of English and Welsh monastic history. They commence during the Carthusian Gründerzeit of the later fourteenth century (there are thus more-or-less comprehensive lists for all charterhouses except Witham and Hinton) and inevitably conclude with the personalities and circumstances of the Dissolution. While this is not analytical history, some of the entries include long passages of prose and, as with Heads, volume ii, there are pockets of rich and entertaining biographical detail: for example, the abbot of Bury incarcerated at Nottingham for sculduggery (pp. 23–4); the de facto ruler of Beaulieu excommunicated for seizing power with the aid of lay accomplices (p. 275); the appropriately named prior Mekeness of Axholme, whose monks considered him ‘of no learning and too simple to govern a house’ (p. 354); the head of Trinitarian Knaresborough disenfranchised by deceitfully obtained papal letters (p. 611); such details make the volume a great pleasure to browse. On a different note, it seems worth mentioning that the publication of Heads, volume iii, fulfils an enterprise begun in 1929 with prosopographical notes recorded on file cards by David Knowles. Thus, the last ‘live’ Knowles-initiated project has been completed: a small but significant historiographical milestone which should not pass unrecognised. Presumably Knowles never envisaged Heads coming to such a voluminous and fruitful conclusion, but the result could only have pleased him, even if he would have baulked at the sedulous archival work (never his greatest interest) needed to see it through to 1540. David Smith's immensely impressive effort of research has produced a definitive study which will be useful for decades: that is perhaps the greatest accolade one can pay to a book in the current publish-or-perish environment.