Tobie Matthew has appeared in several volumes on the post-Reformation English Church and been the subject of a few articles, but has never been accorded a central role in its history. As one of the most famous preachers of the age who served the Church as dean, bishop and archbishop from 1576 until 1628 this is a surprising omission. Such marginalisation may reflect the fact that Matthew served much of his ministry away from the centre of power in the dioceses of Durham and York, though his role as bishop of Durham made him a crucial figure in border politics, especially during the negotiations over the accession of James vi & i to the English crown. He has now been the subject of a major study placing him at the centre of the English Reformation as it unfolded in the first century after the break with Rome. His place there is grounded on two central planks of that Reformation: the importance attached to preaching as a means of furthering reform of both individual and society, and a vigorous anti-Catholicism which was a mainstay against idolatry and an essential element is defeating those who wished to destabilise the young Church. A well-respected academic, it was his anti-Catholicism which thrust him into national affairs following his sermon at Oxford attacking Edmund Campion and led to his promotion in 1582 to the deanery of Durham, a diocese where Catholics were numerous and which shared a troublesome borderland with Scotland. For more than twenty years, as dean until 1594 and thereafter as bishop and chief magistrate of the Palatinate, Matthew devoted himself to the furtherance of reform, the containment of popery and the security of the regime in the region. These were complementary priorities, as reflected in a note he made to himself in 1597 when border negotiations were frustrated by rivalries at court and lawlessness among the people of the ‘disputed lands’; he wrote perhaps resignedly, ‘a man may bear office in a Christian society, and yet be a preacher of the word’. Matthew was recognised for his services to the state by the new king and chosen to preach the sermon at the opening of parliament in 1604. His career as an office-holder is set out clearly in the text but it is his work as a ‘preacher of the word’ which was Matthew's and is Oates's principal concern, and where the originality of the book lies. Matthew was indefatigable in his preaching, as his diary of his years in Durham and York testify. Despite his official responsibilities he preached weekly throughout both dioceses, in both poorly endowed livings where preaching was not regular and in parishes located in noted recusant areas, as well as at more formal events such as visitations, the assizes and at court and parliament in London. In addition, Matthew encouraged preaching exercises in his dioceses, appointing godly graduates to cathedral posts and important livings. Matthew's diaries have been known for a long time and the entries in them tell of his activity in preaching, but little of its substance. Like many of his contemporaries, Matthew did not publish his sermons. For his generation, as Arnold Hunt has shown and Oates develops, the sermon was a sensory, even theatrical, event, the meaning of which was relayed through sound and sight, and it was disseminated the same way from notes taken by those present and shared later with others in smaller religious gatherings, be they household or workplace. Behind this approach lay the idea of ‘edification’, building the Christian commonwealth through the shared experience of attending sermons, a task which fell to both pastor and magistrate. Oates sets out Matthew's initiatives to achieve this clearly, but still its content remains elusive. In getting at this Oates adopts two approaches. Matthew acquired an extensive library of over 3,000 volumes, which he used himself in preparing his sermons, and which he made available to those godly ministers he supported and to those engaged in the printed campaign against popery. Matthew annotated his books and so we gain an insight into his working methods and his preaching priorities. Oates shows in a fine chapter how Matthew used and returned to these texts as ecclesiastical priorities changed; for example, his earlier engagement with John Ponet's defence of clerical marriage focused on that issue, but by the 1600s, when he revisited the book, it was Ponet's argument that Protestantism was a return to primitive Christianity which caught his attention. This immersion in Matthew's annotations eventually led Oates to identify a volume of Matthew's sermon notes, wrongly catalogued by century, in the Bodleian Library, Oxford (ms Add. 89A). Through this notebook and his library annotations we can at last glimpse Matthew's own comments on his preaching activity and its substance; thus in an ordination sermon he preached he put a marginal comment from Augustine's City of God: ‘episcopacy is the title of work, not an honour’, placing him firmly in the pastoral as opposed to the judicial understanding of that office. This no doubt reflected his Puritan, or godly, understanding of the Church and may explain why, despite his active service to the crown as prince-bishop, he was kept at arm's length dealing with papists in the North and was not preferred either to Durham at first time of seeking it, or to Canterbury on the death of Whitgift. Ros Oates has, however, moved Matthew out of the margins of the English Reformation, revealing how his career exhibited the crucial role that a godly, reforming bishop played in the edification, or building, of the post-Reformation Church. For that we are greatly in her debt, and it is a shame that the volume has not been better proof-read, and that the map of the archdeaconries of York claims to be of the ‘archdioceses’. But these are small blemishes on an important book which greatly enhances our understanding of the pastoral and theological priorities of a key figure in the Elizabethan and Jacobean Church.