This is a welcome addition to a trend of research on medieval religious culture that uses subjectivist categories like gender, the body and space to reinterpret sources traditionally studied from an institutional perspective. The book's subject is not, as might be inferred, the activities of religious communities but rather the geographical, architectural and performative settings and arrangements through which were brokered their relations with lay patrons, pilgrims, servants and recipients of charity. Hicks places this development in a very broadly interpreted historical context of Gregorian reform, seen as that movement within the Church that sought political and administrative autonomy from the exercise of authority that secular rulers and elites had enjoyed over it. The central organising concept of the study is ‘spatial practice’, borrowed from the Marxist cultural theorist, Henri Lefebvre, whose insight is that relations of production are prompted and reinforced by the symbolic staging of social interactions in culturally constructed spaces. Hicks attaches to this idea of spatial practice the concept of habitus coined by Pierre Bourdieu, and defines it as ‘a system of rules governing social behaviour’ (p. 3). My worry with this definition is that it excludes the creative element that Bourdieu intended habitus to imply.

The idea of spatial practice is taken on in four chapters entitled ‘Display’, ‘Reception and Intrusion’, ‘Enclosure’ and ‘Family’. ‘Display’ looks at how the topography and architectural features of churches helped to convey to audiences a sense of corporate identity among different religious orders, and at how dress, processions, chapter and the liturgy reinforced the communal identity of monasteries and attracted the donations and attentions of the laity. Chapter ii discusses the practical difficulties faced by religious communities and secular priests in encouraging what might be called spatial propriety in their interactions with the laity. The subject of enclosure in chapter iii restates some of the findings of the previous chapter in concluding that religious communities of all stripes were faced with different practical difficulties in attempting to strike a sustainable balance between their particular vocational ideals and their need to attract material and financial support from the laity. The fourth, and arguably strongest, chapter concerns the family and the conversion and retirement of its members into monasteries and lay burials undertaken in monastic spaces. It includes a particularly interesting discussion of the motives and experiences of women retiring into male religious communities.

The book puts to good use an impressive array of sources including archiepiscopal visitation records, monastic rules, letter and miracle collections, and chronicles, as well as architectural and archaeological evidence, and takes on a chronologically ambitious remit. Parts of it really show the potential of this kind of approach, such as Hicks's fascinating reconstruction of the miraculous experience of a depressed woman from Lisieux at the abbey of St Amand in Rouen. But the transition intended from institutional to new subjectivist history feels only partially achieved. The choice of such a long period and the inclusion of many different religious orders do not help towards an in-depth treatment of the subject, even granting that the study is confined geographically to Normandy. The predominantly prescriptive nature of the sources also makes it difficult for Hicks to run her subjects to ground, as she intends, in their own ‘socially constructed and historically specific’(p. 4) contexts. In fairness to her, this is a problem that others have not even attempted to address. But, as I have suggested above, I fear the author's conflation of habitus with the notion of ‘social rules’ tends unintentionally to privilege a static, institutionally conservative reading of ‘spatial practice’, with the agency part of habitus recast as failure to meet ideals, rather than as cultural creativity, a true example of which Hicks gives in Barbara Hanawalt's work on the spatial practices of the Beguines. As a result it becomes very difficult to identify agency in anything other than the ‘deviant’ terms implied in the normative sources. It is no surprise that the best parts of the book reprise gender as an analytical tool for rescuing agency on its own terms from these normative constructions.

Overall this book is original in its conceptual approach and unfussily interdisciplinary, and it includes three invaluable appendices profiling the religious institutions of Normandy. However its chronological parameters are too broad and theoretical promise not quite realised.