University historians, by and large, understand themselves as specialists within periods, and periods of not more than 200 years at a stretch. Accordingly, a history of a diocese across 900 years now calls upon many hands. What goes for the production might well also go for the reception: the fate of such an enterprise is likely to show a good deal of ransacking and plundering of constituent parts. While all of this goes on cheerfully in responsible quarters a more persevering audience may be found in the generously interested private reader, often fortified with a local loyalty, on whose gentle shoulders so much of the argument and hope of civilization usually comes to rest in the end.

Peter Meadows, Keeper of the Ely Diocesan Records and Under-Librarian of the Cambridge University Library, not only inspires the whole project and elicits the contributions but also writes two of the chapters himself (on the fifteenth century and on the period 1748–1864). In so doing he breaks just a few conventional academic rules and carries off the crime admirably. This book is principally his achievement and, clearly, Ely is fortunate to have him. His cast of authors, meanwhile, is nothing if not sterling: all the names enjoy eminence in their respective patches and they serve the cause with aplomb (and usually with about twenty-five pages a throw).

Ely itself is not always flattered. Nicholas Vincent observes the diocese in the thirteenth century as ‘one of the smallest and richest, certainly the flattest and wettest, and quite possibly the coldest in medieval England’. Even the monks who went there were warned to wear their hoods all the time in case they froze. By 1956 Archbishop Fisher would write of Ely uncharitably, as a place comprising ‘fen villages, lonely, isolated, dour and rather depressing’. By then there was not much talk of riches to compensate. This impression lingers damply over the passing ages, even if the titanic splendour of the cathedral – presented boldly by the dust-jacket of the book – does at least something to lift the eyes and the heart.

As a diocese, Ely became distinctive for myriad reasons, not least because of the mysterious advent of the University of Cambridge, which gave the Church a point of growing intellectual dignity to which it might cling through various patterns of clerical association. Each chapter here fashions an individual course – as is entirely necessary, for each has a different set of elements with which to conjure. In the medieval parts, the picture is of bishops, monks, kings and papal legates, with a good measure of indistinct piety hovering over the lot. By the sixteenth century, it is a matter of disciplining heretics, choosing sides (for good or ill) and printing texts. By the far end, it is a realm littered with church membership campaigns, parish reorganizations and shortfalls in budgets. All but one of the chapters offers a succession of sections on distinct themes and this proves helpful (the exception is the vigorous Vincent, who gobbles up the whole thirteenth century in one go).

Above all, it is the bishops who dominate proceedings. But what sort of figures do they cut? Their formal portraits, whether in effigy, engravings or oils, present them as a sombre lot: the medieval tombs are elegant but remote, the eighteenth-century paintings all robes and imperiousness, the twentieth-century images all purposeful amiability. Lancelot Andrewes, sketched by his secretary at lunch, looks profoundly unenthusiastic. All of their virtues or sins were characteristic ones in their particular days and nothing should surprise us here. Moreover, they leave later historians with predictable opportunities or difficulties: some are vivid, some obscure; some are opaque, some virtually non-existent. Ely, like every other diocese, had its fair share of great souls, rogues, time-servers and reformers. There is some zeal, some assertion, some kindness and some asperity, a good deal of ambition and calculation (usually frustrated), some verse, some art collecting and at least one case of recorder-playing. Some show virtually no interest in the adventure of scholarship, Cambridge or no Cambridge, while at least one is accused of securing books by ‘underhand means’. The bishops get into trouble; the bishops get out of trouble. Two find a far more glorious vindication in prison than they ever would have done out of it. Most behave well and some behave badly – though none quite as badly as Thomas Harrington, the church warden of sixteenth-century Dullingham. Indeed, in the case of a handful their behaviour mattered not at all, at least to Ely, because they were seldom there. The general impression is that, whatever its comforts, Ely was not often a step to something higher.

But the realm which the bishops oversaw remains a rich one and it is well served by each author in turn. The monks come and remain for ages, but when they go away it is for good. The diocese, too, is suspended for a while. In short, Ely was prone to many of the new movements, and not a few of the fads and fascination that were imported there from other places. Accordingly we glimpse the Ely versions of Arminianism, Laudianism, Latitudinarianism and Tractarianism. Some innovations turn out to be ones characteristic of that wider picture: a stately theological college in the later nineteenth century; a revived suffragan bishopric (of Huntingdon) in the later twentieth century. There is a good deal of administration, but not enough to demoralize.

Altogether, this is a fine contribution and it is likely to prove an enduring one. Perhaps, too, it might encourage what is now something of a movement to write long, collective histories within diocesan boundaries. If that is so, there will be few finer examples of the breed than this.