The author begins where many doctoral students begin their dissertations: with a lament about the deplorable state of the relevant historiography and passionate claims about the intellectual significance of their subject. To be fair, Barry Craig claims no originality for Bishop Medley – and though a philosopher himself, Craig admits that Medley was no philosopher. But he is keen to show the significance of Medley to those who might not appreciate the complexities that unfolded when he landed in the Canadian province of New Brunswick in 1845. Medley immigrated to a region over half the size of England yet populated by only 200,000 souls, the majority of them French and Roman Catholic. He arrived as a forty-one-year-old father of five, but as a widow – he remarried only when his children were grown. He arrived as the son of a wealthy evangelical family, and graduate of an evangelical college (Wadham, Oxford), but as one fully transformed by his long intellectual friendships with notable Tractarians, most notably Pusey. And above all he arrived as the first bishop of Fredericton with an enormous mandate, yet managed to write good pieces of synthetic theology for his clergy, design churches for his diocese and compose music for his cathedral. Perhaps Medley's greatest episcopal legacy was his character (much noted in local eulogies by all church parties in the fall of 1892). He managed, with patience and in spite of Low Church hostilities, to instil into an evangelical diocese ecclesial principles gleaned from both the old, but lively, High Church tradition and the more pugnacious catholic revival within the Anglican world of the day. And he did it without inspiring the bitter polemics that erupted in the mother country and the battles that led too often in England to liturgical rulings by the state judiciary. Medley's greatest political legacy, related to this, was his untiring work in aid of a self-governing Anglican diocese, freed of both the dubious advantages and striking disadvantages of an ‘established’ Church. To this end he promoted regular diocesan synods, which he persuaded every one of his parishes to join before his death – and the full inclusion of laity in the decision-making of synodical bodies, though liturgy and theology were of course meant to be safely out of the reach of such bodies. Canadian scholars may wish that the author had related Medley's life and mind more closely to simultaneous developments in other Canadian dioceses. British and American readers will appreciate his attention to the dynamics of the ‘transatlantic triangle’. Most readers will be at least tempted to admire Medley, a ‘missionary bishop’ who practised what he preached: ‘English statesmen seem to have thought of a bishop only as an officer of state, a useful potentate to be respected’, he said in his 1868 charge, ‘not a primitive bishop, mixing with the people of his charge, assisted and supported by his flock’ (p. 147). He was decidedly the latter.