For Émile Amann and Auguste Dumas in L’Église au pouvoir des laïques, the volume that they contributed to Fliche and Martin's Histoire de l’Église series, the tenth century was a grim period of lay oppression and violence on the eve of the glorious Gregorian dawn of reform. Long-outdated though this viewpoint is, it has not completely disappeared from textbooks and it provides John Howe with the starting point for his book, which aims to show that the tenth-century Church (here called ‘the millennial church’) began the process of reform by defeating the violent forces of Vikings, Hungarians and Mediterranean Arabs (the last-mentioned here routinely referred to simply as Muslims) and rebuilding hundreds of burned and ruined monasteries. Alas, here too the reader is simply being given another outdated paradigm. The paradigms are worth exploring much further for their own sakes, as it happens: the historiographical divide between those who view new ecclesiastical growth (and even reform) out of Viking ruins in the tenth century and those who place it in the eleventh has been with us at least since the early nineteenth century, and has not been properly explored. The former viewpoint, which stresses the monastic rather than the papal role in reform, can be traced at least as far as the Council of Trosly in 909 and then forwards through Mabillon (who linked Trosly with the foundation of Cluny), and, in the mid-twentieth century, Christopher Dawson, who presented a blood-and-thunder view of the Vikings before chirpily remarking that Trosly showed that the situation was not ‘desperate’. Howe, although curiously ignoring Trosly (and Dawson), provides an approach very like the latter's, though far more richly footnoted. After setting out his aims in the introduction he launches into two narrative chapters, the first arguing that invaders did indeed cause widespread damage to churches, the second giving a quick whistle-stop tour of defences and nation-building in tenth-century Europe, winding up with an account of monastic reconstruction. There follow chapters on the rebuilding of churches, the creation of sacred artefacts such as reliquaries and statues, the development of the liturgy, on spirituality, particularly in this period focusing on the eucharist and the office, and on the development of education. Howe next adopts Wulfstan the Homilist's division of Christian society (with minor changes) to survey the roles of different groups within the Church, before looking at the relationship between the Eastern and Western Churches and the influence of the former on the latter and then winding up with a conclusion using Leo ix’s final months as a means of tying together the threads and staking a claim for the fundamental contribution of the millennial Church to the work of the Gregorian Reform. There is much of use here: the stress on the physical, acoustic and aesthetic aspects of developments in the tenth and early eleventh centuries is welcome, and these sections bring together a wide range of recent literature. Mediterranean areas, especially Italy, receive due attention (though some of Howe's conviction that the late ninth and early tenth centuries were a general disaster zone across Europe may be too strongly influenced by his detailed knowledge of events in southern Italy); the emphasis on Byzantine ideas is refreshing. However, the presentation of material is largely descriptive rather than analytical; the author's recognition that the term ‘reform’ needs unpicking does not lead to a full enough exploration of the conceptual and historiographical problems that it poses; and, worse, the fully-populated footnotes often disguise a real reluctance to address the points made by historians whose take on Viking invaders, monastic evolution and urban growth differs from the author's. The presentation of Scandinavians here is entirely negative, and extensive research on co-existence, settlement and the employment of Vikings as mercenaries by Carolingian rulers is underplayed or else treated as a sign of failure on the part of the latter (for example, p. 48). Moreover, Howe takes all accounts of monastic destruction at face value (sometimes finding fault with scholars who try a more nuanced approach) and does not pause to reflect on what the communities had actually been like in the ninth century: in fact, many had never been more than small family outfits, and in Anglo-Saxon England charter evidence tends to suggest that large numbers of them had been taken over by bishops to swell episcopal estates in the late eighth and early ninth centuries. They almost certainly did not cease to exist as churches, though they lost their monastic focus: none the less, putting blame for monastic decline squarely on Viking shoulders is at the very least open to question. The overall picture was more complex. Quite a few points of detail need correction: referring to Lotharingia as Lorraine throughout is not helpful to the reader; Sutton Hoo was not a cenotaph; the Vikings could be keenly aware of the resale value of books, as the Stockholm Codex Aureus testifies; canons of German cathedrals in the tenth century entered as boys and then took their places, as boy-canons, in the choir, rather than entering as choirboys and then being recruited as canons; the Dream of the Rood poem probably existed by the early eighth century. Overall, while recent scholarship has emphasised the enduring legacy of Carolingian ecclesiastical structures and learning into the tenth century and beyond, this book denies readers a full chance to appreciate this and tries to edge them back to the vantage point of medievalists in the 1950s.