In this excellent study on the transformation of the Irish Church through the eleventh and twelfth centuries, Marie-Therese Flanagan sets out to explain the changes in Irish terms. By this I mean that she strives to set to one side the retrospective preconceptions that have read the ecclesiastical history of the island through the prism of the Anglo-Norman invasion and settlement post 1167, and the consequent attempt, articulated by King Henry ii and by Gerald of Wales, to justify that action in terms of Irish backwardness. The result is a refreshing and comprehensive examination of the indigenous movements which sought to bring Irish Christianity into line with continental practice. Fully acknowledging the problematic nature of surviving records – their paucity, their narrow regional concentration – she exploits those which do survive to good effect. Three crucial arguments are advanced. The first draws on manuscript evidence to indicate a higher level of Latin learning than usually attributed to clergy from the island. The second shows that Irish churchmen were not out of touch with their continental colleagues in the century before 1167. Here she reassess the foundation of Irish Benedictine monasteries (Schottenklöster) in south Germany and Rome through the tenth and eleventh centuries, which point to the existence of two-way channels of communication between Ireland and continental centres independently of Canterbury. Irish pilgrimage to Rome, which entailed the maintenance of hospices for the reception of Irish and other pilgrims at Vercelli, Piacenza and Rome itself, points in the same direction. Even for the cathedral church of Holy Trinity, Dublin, she suggests possible links with the cathedral of Cologne before the middle of the eleventh century, significantly preceding those later established with Canterbury. The third strand of her argument is that the actual restructuring of the Irish Church into provinces and dioceses and the introduction of the new orders of Cistercians and Canons Regular had all occurred before 1167. There had been a resident Irish papal legate (Gillebertus of Limerick) from the early twelfth century; the constitutional organisation had been confirmed by a legatus a latere (John Paparo) at the Council of Kells in 1152 in response to requests from the Irish Church; and that ‘programmatic restructuring … inaugurated with the synod of Cashel in 1101’ had been prepared by ‘local initiatives, generally with the support of lay rulers … from the mid eleventh century onwards’ (p. 244). In thus demonstrating Ireland's participation in reform movements in the Latin Church from the 1050s, Flanagan has advanced our understanding that such movements were more localised than the traditional emphasis on ‘papal monarchy’ recognises. ‘A comparable pattern of localized initiatives can be discerned in Ireland, where individual episcopal endeavour preceded papal direction and oversight … Papal supervision, however, appears to have emanated less from active papal initiative than from the wish of the Irish clergy to secure it’ (p. 246).