This book, despite its title, covers a broader chronological range than just the later Middle Ages, since the discussion of parochial origins must of necessity relate to earlier material, and the events of the Reformation, especially with regard to the testimony of people who lived through it, has a bearing on earlier customs and practices. Margaret Harvey declares it to be ‘a study of the parishes and their religious life in a medium-sized city in the middle ages’, but it is clear that the circumstances, first, of the prior of Durham being a major landlord in the city and the rector of St Oswald's church and its semi-dependent chapels, and, secondly, the bishop being both spiritual pastor and secular overlord, mean that this study of Durham deals with a unique case. Some of the aspects of the religious life of the city, for example the quality of the successive vicars of the major churches, many of whom held degrees and held further office of either the bishop or the prior, were a direct result of the ecclesiatical dominance of the city. By contrast some of the distinctive practices that Harvey has uncovered, as in the case of mortuaries, have nothing to do with that dominance and serve to demonstrate that detailed local studies are very necessary to an accurate understanding of late medieval religion, highlighting as they do divergences of custom not covered in broader treatments of the subject. It is unfortunate too that for Durham, a city so dominated by ecclesiastical institutions, no churchwardens' accounts and few medieval wills survive: these might have given the ordinary people of the parishes some independent voice. Despite this Harvey is able to demonstrate, in her perceptive use of the surviving materials, the concerns and preoccupations of successive priors and bishops of Durham as landlords and rectors of the city churches, as well as the often independent attitude to religious authority displayed by the lay people of the city.