Charles Henery describes this study of the early Episcopal Church as ‘the first detailed collective examination of the episcopal order in the United States’. His work is richly informed by a thorough reading of consecration sermons, charges, correspondence and diaries, and reflects the conviction of Episcopalian bishops that their Church was organised upon the model of the ‘primitive Church’ and according to ‘the maxims of the apostolic age’, the first episcopate since Constantine to be free of civil entanglement. Samuel Seabury, the first bishop, was instrumental in establishing a missionary and sacramental model of the episcopal office which endured throughout this period. Through the ministry of its first one hundred bishops, the Episcopal Church came to view the bishop (in the words of Evangelical bishop Alexander Viets Griswold) as ‘the bond of union and the mainspring of energy in his diocese’. Henery has deliberately eschewed exploring the impact that varieties of churchmanship had on understandings of episcopal ministry, restricting himself to what all held in common. If this focus on unity has a refreshing novelty, it nevertheless renders a potentially lively topic curiously bland and colourless. A reader with no background in the subject is given no clue that bishops had anything to say about the division of nation and Church during the American Civil War or that different ecclesiologies led to a major schism with the formation of the Reformed Episcopal Church in 1873. Neither event is even mentioned. The author's reverential, unanalytical and uncritical approach to his subjects gives this study an old-fashioned feel, reminiscent of pre-1960s denominational histories. The bibliography cites no secondary work from the twenty-first century, and very few since 1980. Thus the work is innocent of any influence from the historiographical transformation of Anglican and Episcopal studies since then. The Episcopal Church exists here as if in a vacuum, isolated from any outside theological influence, whether from Britain or Canada or other denominations. Episcopalian attachment to the primitive Church and a ‘purely ecclesiastical episcopacy’ becomes a post-Revolutionary War discovery of William White rather than a theme that the Church of England had been exploring for a century and more. The Oxford Movement's Tracts for the times had a profound impact on the Episcopal Church, but neither Keble nor Newman nor Pusey appears here. Henery is so convinced that the pioneer missionary and apostolic spirit of the episcopate characteristic of the Church in the new nation is essentially unaltered throughout the period of his study that he is inattentive to the change in character by its end. The ideal centralising ‘cathedral model’ which by the 1860s appealed so strongly to bishops even in the unsettled West, with its bishop's church, school, seminary, hospital, home for the aged, orphanage and other organised works of mercy, owed much more to the medieval than it did to the primitive Church.