This is the first book specifically about bishops in later Anglo-Saxon England, that is in the period 900–1066. The author, who under her former name, Mary Frances Smith, has published several studies of eleventh-century English clergy, notably Stigand, has set out to avoid looking at the pre-Conquest English episcopate through the prism of post-Conquest historians such as William of Malmesbury, whose judgements – coloured by the need to attribute the Norman Conquest to ecclesiastical decadence and also by Gregorian ideas – have too often been accepted unquestioningly by historians of the English Church writing in the last century. The book is organised thematically. After an introduction to set out her agenda the author proceeds in chapter i to look at the aims, methods and standpoints of the twelfth-century historians, a useful debunking exercise. After this come chapters on bishops in royal service, particularly at court and in their role as the organisers of coronations, on the culture of cathedrals (particularly their liturgical organisation), on the role of bishops in supervising pastoral care, on episcopal wealth and finally on the relationship between bishops and the local communities within which they operated. The book succeeds best in synthesising and explaining the extensive recent secondary literature on, in particular, manuscripts and liturgical developments; the chapter on cathedral culture is an effective discussion of the activities of cathedral communities, in particular stressing the importance of the Office. Direct work from primary sources is much less in evidence, apart from chapter v (based on analysis of Domesday entries for bishops) and chapter vi (largely based on charters and legal texts). Narrative sources tend to be referred to through secondary authorities: had the author carried out a detailed analysis of tenth-century Lives of English bishops, rather than simply applying to them Stephen Jaeger's findings on German episcopal Lives, she would have been able to identify more correctly the points of comparison and contrast with continental episcopal Lives (often the point of origin for the English ones – B. wrote in Liège; Byrhtferth had been taught by Abbo); education and building are more important themes than beauty and grace. Even chapter v, with its Domesday analysis, could have benefited from fuller investigation: above all the author should have tried to establish how many of the episcopal holdings (presented globally as such in Domesday) in fact already formed endowments especially for the cathedral communities. Much fuller use could have been made of charter material, especially from the see of Worcester (this might have prevented the error on p. 133 where Rochester is said to be the see with the largest number of genuine pre-Conquest documents). Wider reading would have resolved the author's puzzlement (p. 130) at finding the bishop of Hereford in 1086 holding land at Writtle in Essex and at Prestbury and Lydney in Gloucestershire: Writtle was a personal grant to the bishop of land previously held by one of Harold's priests, and never passed to the see, Prestbury formed part of a large estate near Cheltenham held by the see of Hereford since at least the early ninth century (cf. S 1431) and Lydney is in the Forest of Dean, part of the see of Hereford down to the sixteenth century. More reading on York and Yorkshire would have helped too: lacking here are references to Stephen Baxter's recent work on the estates of the church of York and David Palliser's analysis of the post-Conquest text, the ‘Rights and customs of the archbishops of York’. To sum up, the book synthesises the material fairly well but needs to question it much more.