There is a two-fold intention to this ambitious if flawed monograph. Firstly, and to some extent successfully, the author seeks to revise the standard account of the clerical mitre’s evolution, first established by Joseph Braun in 1907. Secondly, she seeks a clearer terminology, to distinguish the rounded caps worn by clerics before c. 1050 from what she here defines as the ‘true’ mitre, first recorded as a specifically episcopal adornment in the 1040s, originally worn with protruding ‘lobes’ over each ear. By the twelfth century, these lobes had been reshaped into distinctive peaks or ‘horns’, extending wide of the head, at first oriented side to side, in due course pressed closer together and reoriented from front to back, so that by 1200 or so we observe the already standard pyramidical format of the ‘peaked mitre’ slanting inwards to single points front and back. Various decorative bands and pendants were themselves now standardised to include two ‘lappets’, for the most part hanging from the centre-back of a band of tablet-weave encircling the wearer’s head. Through a series of truly splendid diagrams Spies reveals that the tailoring of the ‘lobed’ mitre was distinct from that of the later ‘peaked’ variety (either ‘horned’ side to side, or as later reorientated front to back). Her data-set of 534 images from before about 1200, offered as an eighty-page appendix, allows her to illustrate her arguments with almost 300 photographs or line drawings (albeit themselves frequently repeated), massively extending engagement with the surviving visual evidence. She also seeks to grapple with the literary sources, concluding that the mitre’s introduction was indeed, and as has long been supposed, a consequence of the mid eleventh-century papal ‘reform’ movement, intended to set the clergy apart from, and in this instance both figuratively and physically ‘higher’ than their lay contemporaries. Her search for origins (ch. v) includes rather more speculative suggestions both that the ‘true’ mitre may have been first added to the repertoire of papal symbols by the Emperor Henry iii, in the 1040s, keen to boost the standing of the papal office, and that the more or less simultaneous evolution of the chess pieces – the ‘rokh’ or ‘chariot’ into a twin peaked ‘castle’, and the ‘alfil’ or ‘elephant’ (thanks to its two protuberant tusks) into the more familiar ‘bishop’ – may have inspired the particular designs deemed appropriate for the clerical mitre, in both its ‘lobed’ and later ‘horned’ (in Spies’s terminology ‘peaked’) varieties. For suggestions such as these, and not least for the wealth of her illustrations, Spies can claim to have made a significant contribution to understanding. So much for the praise. But now, I fear, we come to the censure. Let us start with bald fact. The author clearly struggles in her reading of any texts not in English. Thus there are frequent misunderstandings of Latin terminology, illustrated all too obviously at p. 159 by the references to Migne’s ‘Patrimonia Latina’. Source after source is referenced from old or outdated editions, with barely a mention of CCCM, OMT or other standard modern equivalents. Nor, beyond her opening rejection of Braun’s typology, is there any attempt to engage with the (essentially German-language) literature on the papal regalia. Thus Klewitz and Eichmann on the papal tiara, like Gussone on papal coronation, are entirely (and alarmingly) absent from the author’s bibliography. Their absence in turn points to a wider problem of organisation. Rather than begin with the mitre as a distinctively papal symbol, from the 1040s papally licensed for use by other authorities (episcopal, abbatial or lay), Spies fails to grasp an essential point: that in her search for images she should have paid far closer attention to papal self-representation and the specific ways in which, from the same basic starting point in the mid eleventh century, the papal tiara came to be deliberately distinguished from what was henceforth a widely disseminated and hence ‘devalued’ symbol of clerical power. For a clear and plausible exposition of these realities we can turn to Walter Ullmann’s Growth of papal government (1955, rev. 1962, again uncited by Spies). Here we read that the dissemination and hence downgrading of the mitre, identified with the ‘frygium’ of the Donation of Constantine and the ‘camelauca’ of the Liber pontificalis, led directly to the additional banding of the papal crown or ‘regnum’, itself from the 1040s set apart, in due course as a new three-tiered tiara, perhaps (Ullmann suggests) first employed by archdeacon Hildebrand in crowning Pope Nicholas ii at the Lateran synod of 1059. What process of evolution other than this can be signified by the fresco of Constantine and Sylvester, in the church of the Santi Quattro Coronati (cited but not illustrated by Spies at p. 74), where the emperor is displayed ritually investing the previously mitred pope with (unbanded) tiara, umbrella and white horse as symbols of the newly established papal guardianship of the Roman patrimony? Henceforth, the artist implies, the pope will wear his new tiara rather than his ‘peaked’ white mitre, itself with lappets that are surely mere vestiges of the pendant and bejewelled ear-pieces of the Roman and later Byzantine imperial crown. In all of this, and incidentally confirming Braun’s insistence that the mitre itself possessed symbolic significance long before the 1040s, where would Spies locate Isidore of Seville’s definition of the ‘mitra’ (Etymologies xix.xxxi.4) as a feminine equivalent to the masculine ‘Phrygian cap’ (‘pilleum Phrygium’)? ‘Nowhere’, seems to be the answer, since Isidore is entirely absent from Spies’s discussion. So too is any deeper engagement with the Latin texts, where the author depends instead on second or third-hand English translations, in many cases of references harvested from Maureen Miller’s (ever reliable) Clothing the clergy. In the process, much of significance goes unnoticed, not least the resonances of the Latin word ‘titulus’ (Spies p. 56), surely best approached in association with the ‘titulus’ or ‘INRI’ inscription placed over the head of the crucified Christ, itself one of the greater Christological relics claimed in turn for Jerusalem, Constantinople and Louis ix’s Sainte-Chapelle. Two further points of censure, before we return to a dose of praise. The appendix of 534 images is a remarkable resource. Yet why are these images not sequentially numbered or cross-referenced to the figures elsewhere in the book? Moreover, what is offered here is essentially the result of a random internet trawl, for the most part in search of illuminated manuscripts, with an all too obvious bias towards those collections or source-types that, to date, have been most effectively uploaded online. As Spies herself admits, 70 per cent of these images are presented in three-quarters profile, in each case making the architecture or alignment of the mitre difficult to establish, whilst an even more overwhelming majority derive from essentially ‘fictitious’ representations in painting, drawing or sculpture, with hardly a single episcopal or abbatial tomb effigy. Only twenty-four images are taken from seals: eight of them English, thirteen German, one papal, and only two French (neither of these French examples earlier than 1170). This itself is doubly regrettable, given that tombs and particularly, for this period, episcopal (and abbatial) seals supply the closest we are likely to come to clerical self-representation, and this in images drawn ‘head on’, permitting the orientation and decoration of mitres to be clearly shown. A brief rummage through the listings to Douët d’Arcq’s catalogue of the seals in the French Archives nationales (1863–8) reveals no less than eighteen archiepiscopal and seventy-three French episcopal seals earlier than 1200, all of them available as ‘moulages’ in the AN ‘D’ series, many now uploaded to the IHRT’s indispensable SIGILLA website: <https://sigilla.irht.cnrs.fr/app.php/>, itself with over 7,000 hits for the search term ‘évêque’. And this before ever we get to the regional catalogues, by Demay for Normandy, Eygun for Poitou, Coulon for Burgundy and so forth. A glance at Martin Brett’s splendid Facsimiles volume in the English Episcopal Acta series reveals an equivalent number of missed opportunities on this side of the Channel: before 1200, the seals of at least fourteen archbishops of Canterbury or York, and of sixty-eight English bishops, albeit now in need of a rather more detailed taxonomy than has been afforded them in the individual volumes of EEA. Why did none of the professional experts thanked in Spies’s acknowledgements see fit to draw such material to her attention? Without it, we are left to wander, monoglot and too often chaotic, far from the most direct path to enlightenment. At the same time, there is an enthusiasm, a resource and an intelligence here that deserve acknowledgement. On the facts of tailoring and terminology, and for the sheer abundance of her images, Spies cannot in future be ignored. All told therefore: ‘Caveat lector’ yet, at the same time a (however highly qualified) ‘Gut gemacht!’