This volume is a collection of essays somewhat loosely assembled around the theme “leaders of the Anglo-Saxon Church.” Since the time period in question exceeds 450 years, since the term “leaders” can refer either to bishops (including archbishops), abbots, abbesses, or even a lowly scholar monk like Bede, and since the authors here approach their theme from a variety of disciplinary interests, the thread connecting these essays together is very loose indeed. I originally suspected that the book's genesis was a scholarly conference entitled “Leaders of the Anglo-Saxon Church,” or something of the sort, but had to question that theory as being at best uncertain when I found no mention of a corresponding conference in the preface or anywhere else in the volume. The book's origin thus remains something of a puzzle. Given the fact that its editor, Alexander Rumble, and three of the eight other contributors (Nick Higham, Gale Owen-Crocker, and Martin Ryan) do research and lecture at the Manchester Centre for Anglo-Saxon Studies, I wondered if the idea for it was hatched one afternoon at tea.

To return to the issue of unity, it must be said that Rumble tries to articulate a unifying theme in his one-page preface, where he says that the new conclusions expressed in these essays “will demonstrate the influence of powerful personalities not only on the developing institutions of the English church but also on the secular politics of their time” (ix). If this is the chief insight that these essays collectively generate, then few medievalists would find it either new or surprising. Yet Rumble can hardly be faulted for making so general an observation in trying to tie these essays together. The editor of a volume like this faces a difficult task in trying to enforce unity upon his or her contributors. The best one can do is throw the topic out there, invite papers, hope for the best, and then valiantly (and usually vainly) try to forge some unifying theme.

As one might expect of any multi-authored book of essays, the gold is to be found not in the rich vein of the book's totality, but in the occasional nuggets one stumbles upon in its separate chapters. As a scholar of Bede and one interested in questions of gender and spirituality, I found two essays of particular interest: Higham's “Bede and the Early Church” and Cassandra Rhodes's “Abbatial Responsibility as Spiritual Labor.” Higham's piece offers the interesting conclusion that Bede, who is most famous for writing the Ecclesiastical History of the English People, really had little use in that work for the term “church of the English” as connoting a single church into which all the English peoples were incorporated. Though such a notion of an all-encompassing “church of the English” was embraced at Canterbury and Rome, and implied Canterbury's hegemony over all, Bede's Northumbrian and Gregorian perspective led him to see a more plural view of the English church as consisting either of several regional churches united under the umbrella of the universal church, or of a single English church governed in tandem by the Archbishops of Canterbury and York, more in accordance with Pope Gregory's original plan. Cassandra Rhodes's essay compares how the male ecclesiastical authors Ælfric, Rudolf of Fulda, and Aldhelm used “mother” metaphors to describe the spiritual vocation of, respectively, two Anglo-Saxon abbesses—Æthelthryth and Leoba—and one abbot, Wilfrid. Rhodes concludes the essay by noting the odd irony that of these three monastic leaders, who are all described as in some sense “mothers” of their communities, the explicit imagery of nursing the spiritual children under their care is ascribed only to the male, Wilfrid. She suggests, following Caroline Walker Bynum, that these male authors’ reluctance to apply the metaphor of spiritual nursing to the abbesses can be explained by the logical implication of their doing so—an implication that they could not countenance, namely, that abbesses too might properly offer the spiritual nourishment of preaching to those under their care.

These two essays, however, are in some ways uncharacteristic of the entire volume. More pages are devoted to the latter Anglo-Saxon period, especially the Benedictine Reform, than to the Age of Bede; and are concerned more with the intersection of religious and political power than with questions of spirituality or gender. Essays in the latter category include Allan Scott McKinley's “Understanding the Earliest Bishops or Worcester, c. 660–860,” Dominik Wassenhoven's “The Role of Bishops in Anglo-Saxon Succession Struggles, 955-978” and Rumble's fascinating essay on two late Archbishops of Canterbury—Ælfheah and Stigand—who, though they shared much in common (including an ill-fated death), nevertheless earned quite different reputations in succeeding centuries. And probably, Rumble thinks, for no good reason.

In the four remaining essays, Ryan explores the background and function of Archbishop Ecgberht's Dialogus, Owen-Crocker considers the Anglo-Saxon period's artistic representations of its church leaders, Debby Banham traces the usage of monastic sign-language in England to Bishop Aelthelwold and the tenth-century Benedictine reform, and Joyce Hill considers how Bishop of Wulfsige of Sherborne, perhaps in the hope that the recent Viking invasions might move his secular clergy to take their pastoral duties more seriously, sent out to them, under his own name, a Pastoral Letter written by Ælfric.