This book examines the way in which monastic writers of the eleventh and twelfth centuries drew on and intensified the distinctive military imagery and terminology which had developed since patristic times to describe their vocation. It argues that this portrayal of monks as the spiritual militia dei intensified in this period and suggests that this drew inspiration and example from the rise of meritorious war, especially the development of the crusade and the monastic warrior of the Temple and the Hospital. This extended to special praise for sacred warriors and even imitation of their lives and a degree of approval for their fighting life-style. The author particularly highlights Loricati saints who used the hauberk of knights as a form of self-flagellation. In this way monastic and ‘chivalric’ culture were not separate entities, but overlapping spheres which influenced one another through a common language. This provides a reinforcement of M. Bull's idea that monasteries and monks may have provided a decisive influence upon decisions to take the cross at the time of the First Crusade (Knightly piety and the lay response to the First Crusade, Oxford 1993). The book sheds valuable light on our understanding both of monks and of lay attitudes towards them, but some of the author's ideas need careful handling. Was there truly an ‘explosion of martial rhetoric in monastic texts composed after c. 1000’ (p. 198) or simply an explosion in the number of such texts forming part of the general expansion of European cultural activity after the millennium? Moreover, the acceptance of the knightly vocation, so evident in this material, and so vividly and copiously illustrated here with such scholarly care, can be looked at in a different way. My own study of saints’ Lives written before the year 1000 had a very different focus from the present work, but seemed to emphasise the phenomenon of ‘conversion’ from the secular to the monastic life. In such stories as those of St Bavo of Ghent (†655) and St Guibert of Gembloux (†966) there was no tendency to despise the prior life of these converts, any more than in the later cases which Smith examines (J. France, ‘Holy war and holy men: Erdmann and the lives of the saints’, in M. Bull and others [eds], The experience of crusading, I:Western approaches, Cambridge 2003, 204). But the very idea of conversion emphasises the superiority of the regular life and it can be seen as a reaction to the very ambiguity of the knightly militia and the Military Orders with their pretensions to be sacred vocations paralleling and perhaps equalling the special vocation of the regulars. It is a pity that there are no illustrations in this otherwise well-produced book, with its fine bibliography and excellent index. It is a substantial contribution to our understanding of medieval monasticism and its relations with the world beyond the cloister.