In the 1260s a register (court book) of cases litigated at the episcopal court was compiled in the diocese of Mende for Bishop Odilon de Mercoeur. Based on the surviving manuscript, Bulman offers a detailed picture of this register and its uses. He describes the history of the Gévaudan to the thirteenth century, in order to contextualise his study. In particular, he traces the emergence of episcopal secular lordship, and the strategies employed to strengthen and expand it. During the first half of the thirteenth century, baronial families posed a serious threat to the maintenance of the bishop's secular power. Bishop Étienne de Brioude therefore called upon the royal seneschal of Beaucaire to restore order. Military protection against the barons turned into persistent interference and the bishops of Mende began to lose their rights of lordship not to the barons, but to the Capetian kings of France. Successive bishops tried to resist royal encroachment upon their rights in various ways. The creation of the court book itself seems to be linked to the beginning of the bishop's suit in parlement (1269), where he argued against the interference of royal agents in episcopal seigneurial jurisdiction. Bulman gives a full description of the court book, and analyses its organisation as well as the types of cases it includes. He demonstrates that the majority of cases recorded in the book were civil and criminal matters (debts, assaults and rights of lordship for example), while only 3·6 per cent of the cases concerned marriage and ecclesiastical issues. He also describes legal experts at the episcopal court and gives detailed examples of how cases were conducted. He argues that the purpose of the court book was to create a searchable archive for the bishop. In the early 1300s, in the process of legal struggles with the king for the conservation of the bishop's autonomy, Guillaume Durand the Younger extracted some of the cases and used them with other material in his Mémoire relatif au paréage. He was preparing a compromise solution with King Philip iv by offering proofs of the bishops' secular lordship over the centuries. References to a royal charter of 1161 and hagiography (associating the bishop with the patron saint, St Privat) also served the episcopal struggle to retain secular lordship, but Bulman highlights how the strategy using the court cases was a singular one. Whereas in reality episcopal secular lordship was challenged by baronial families within the Gévaudan and royal agents from without, both the court book and Guillaume Durand constructed a version of the past that would unambiguously buttress episcopal claims. In this way, Bulman's study is an example of the creation and use of historical memory. The book contributes to the understanding of episcopal strategies in the age of expanding Capetian royal power.