This is in many respects an admirable study of the bishops and community of the church of Worcester, their archive, their lands and their spiritual and political priorities in the ninth, tenth and eleventh centuries. It is based on Worcester's three eleventh-century cartularies, of which the pre-Conquest ones – the so-called Liber Wigorniensis and the seriously incomplete Nero-Middleton cartulary – are the earliest surviving English examples, with the third, Hemming's cartulary, having been produced not long afterwards, chiefly so as to defend the monks' landed estate under Norman rule. Francesca Tinti uses her intimate knowledge of these already much studied sources to present a very careful and thorough analysis of the mechanics of their composition which produces many new and valuable insights and also important corroborations of some existing ones (in particular those of Patrick Wormald and Julia Barrow). These include a discussion of the composition of the cathedral community in the initial monastic reform period, which stresses that among those attesting charters as clerks were many monks on the higher clerical grades, thus undermining any judgement based on witness lists alone of the speed and thoroughness of Worcester's reform under Oswald. She also amplifies our knowledge of the community's increasing size, complexity and independence through the eleventh century and Wulfstan ii's seminal role in achieving this while prior; and she highlights their reinforcement, manipulation and sometimes plain invention of institutional memories of the past through record-keeping, especially of land-holding, in order to serve their spiritual as well as their economic and political agenda – hence ‘sustaining belief’. This is all most welcome. By contrast, Francesca Tinti is firmly dismissive of the ‘minster hypothesis’ (which argues that the geography of England's late medieval parochial system evolved out of a pattern of minsters of early Anglo-Saxon date and their pastoral territories), as she also is of efforts to use the unparalleled Worcester sources for testing and refining it. Regrettably, she offers few clues about her reasons for doing so, and seems unwilling to articulate an alternative model beyond stressing the importance of tenth- and eleventh-century manorial control for the establishment of a network of local churches. She also gives the appearance of thinking that there were few minsters in the diocese in her period apart from the ones which came into the bishops' hands. This exemplifies a significant weakness – mainly confined to Chapter v – in what is by and large a very productive and impressive study. It is one thing to act on the belief that it is best for historians to avoid discussing aspects of the past for which they have no substantial direct evidence, but it is quite another to appear not to be allowing for the possibility that what is absent from the sources, or approachable only by circumstantial arguments, had an actual but unrecorded existence. This is a magisterial study which has a great deal to tell us about the church of Worcester in the period concerned; but it should not be thought that there is little to be learned about the early medieval ecclesiastical history of the diocese of Worcester which is not alluded to in these three cartularies.