The volume under review is a set of papers first given at a conference in 2016. As the programmatic title Jenseits des Königshofs (‘Beyond the royal court’) suggests, the aim was to re-examine episcopal authority and identity in the long tenth century outside the traditional paradigms of king and court. In two introductory chapters, the editors note that the eclipse of older models of an ‘imperial church system’ (‘Reichskirchensystem’), according to which bishops were employed as ersatz-royal officers, offers exciting new opportunities to reconceptualise bishops and bishoprics on more local terms. Yet rather like Milton's Satan, the court's magnetic pull has proven too much for many of the contributors. The essays by Wassenhoven and Althoff – on bishops and royal succession and bishops and political decision making – while excellent on their own terms, focus almost entirely on relations with the king. And even the more local studies of memorial texts (Lieven), forest rights (Flachenecker) and courtly culture (Zotz) regularly invoke king and court. More successful in this respect are the studies by Geis on simony and Kruppa on parish churches. The highlights of the volume, however, are the contributions by Riches on episcopal assembly practices, Bölling on liturgy at Bremen, and Minden and Krüger on episcopal seals. Here we do indeed start to see ways of understanding bishops on their own terms. Similarly stimulating were the comparative perspectives offered from northern France (Winandy) and England (Bruhn), though why these two comparanda have been singled out in a book about Germany is unclear. Indeed, since the Ottonian and Salian rulers were also lords of the Church in the cisalpine regnum Italiae, it would have been nice to see how material from this region fits within (or challenges) the paradigms set out elsewhere. Still, these are minor quibbles about a stimulating set of essays. We may not have entirely escaped the spectre of the ‘imperial church’ (Reichskirche); but thanks to Bihrer and Bruhn, we are much closer to doing so.