In 2003 Peter Meadows and Nigel Ramsay edited a collection of essays entitled A history of Ely Cathedral, devoted to the cultural aspects of this building: its relation to the town, its liturgy, its art, music, archive and architecture. The present volume, also produced by the Boydell Press, follows with a series of essays by distinguished authors on the diocese and especially its bishops, all arranged chronologically, and published just after the anniversary of the diocese first established in 1109, and described memorably by Nicholas Vincent (p. 26) as ‘one of the smallest and richest, certainly the flattest and wettest, and quite possibly the coldest in medieval England’. In that year the diocese achieved independence from the mighty see of Lincoln. It was a cathedral priory owing its foundation to St Etheldreda and its reform to St Ethelwold. Its standing – as its religious and cultural history shows – was considerable, not least in virtue of its wealth, approaching that of Winchester and Durham. Ely was also remarkable for the tenacity of its monastic ideals: it sprang free of diocesan control based at Lincoln, and throughout the first two hundred years of its existence showed a marked preference for monk-bishops, at a time when secular clergy and administrators were in the ascendant in the episcopate. The history of the medieval bishops is set out in five authoritative chapters. Nicholas Karn discusses the first century, and Nicholas Vincent the thirteenth century, down to the foundation under Ely's tutelage of the first college in Cambridge; Benjamin Thompson, Peter Meadows and Felicity Heal take the story down to the reign of Elizabeth. These are all weighty and rewarding chapters, full of information on the particular administrative and personal issues facing the cathedral and its estates, though perhaps occasionally proceeding as if the Church was not also seeing some of the greatest feats of church building anywhere in Europe. How were these funded? Still, the administrative and political histories of the diocese set out in these chapters will make the book remarkably useful. Ian Atherton, Evelyn Lord, Peter Meadows, Frances Knight and Brian Watchorn take the story down to the present day, and an altogether different economic and religious climate. Brian Watchorn usefully reminds us (p. 320) that ‘a diocese is made not by its bishops but by its parishes’: perhaps this suggests the topic for a third volume?