This is a fascinating short work on a large and important subject, the influence of Christian belief on violent behaviour in the Middle Ages. Thiery avoids the relatively well studied areas of upper-class and military violence, and instead looks at how Christianity helped to inform interpersonal violence at parish level. His sources are sermons and other normative works by ecclesiastical authors, and various legal records, especially the archives of the ecclesiastical courts. He uses these to open his subject up, and to show how the propensity to violence was, in the medieval period, modified and restrained by both learned and popular reactions to the Church's teachings on the subject. His overall contention is that, although violent behaviour is well-documented enough in medieval England (as it is in most periods and cultures) his sources convince him (as they do the reader) that the violent propensities of the period were curbed by ideas of restraint and fellowship, certainly in churches and churchyards, perhaps also in other locations. Rituals of peacemaking were welcome and accepted among parishioners, and individual parishes possessed a variety of methods and mechanisms by means of which a potentially dangerous outbreak of violence between parishioners might be averted. Medieval Christianity might have regarded divine vengeance (sometimes enacted by human agents) as of central importance, but it also had to adjust to the notion of Christianity as a religion of peace, love, compassion and forgiveness. This, obviously, created ambiguities and inconsistencies in interpersonal behaviour and human relations, but it did provide the potential for the suppression of violent impulses and the reimposition of non-violent relationships. Apart from the thoughtful scholarship brought imaginatively to bear on sometimes very vivid sources, Thiery's book has three main strengths. The first of these is to establish a relationship between what has been written on violence by historians of medieval England and their early modernist counterparts: with violence as with so many other topics, it is important to maintain a dialogue which might help break down chronological compartmentalisation. Secondly, he has a keen awareness of emerging theoretical positions on violence. And, taking one of these more specifically, his insight that the notion of a ‘civilising process’ made familiar by the work of Norbert Elias is deficient in its accommodation of religion to its overall framework is of fundamental importance: if I have one criticism of Thiery's approach, it is that this insight is not followed through with sufficient rigour. But, this comment apart, this is an excellent book which deserves to be widely read.