This admirable collection of essays approaches monastic culture in a remarkably comprehensive fashion. The essays cover a long temporal sweep spanning the period from the Norman Conquest to the Dissolution of the Monasteries, and they address a range of monastic orders both male and female, quite rightly highlighting the wide varieties of cultures that characterize English monasticism. The contributors also approach culture in diverse and informative ways, considering such topics as music, architecture, and art alongside education, texts, and liturgy. The essays are grouped into four sections: “Observant Culture,” “Learned Culture,” “The Culture of Women,” and “The Culture of the Community.” The overall thrust of the collection is to present a contrasting view to the still-all-too-prevalent one (in spite of much excellent recent scholarship) of English monasticism as an institution in decline in the post–Anglo-Saxon era. The essays demonstrate English monasticism's “cultural vitality,” attending to “old themes renewed—such as scriptural exegesis, meditative and even mystical literature” as well as to “new trends” in philosophy, theology, music, and art (15).

The first section, “Observant Culture,” begins with Roger Bowers's fascinating and well-documented analysis of the performance of polyphonic music in Tudor monastic communities. In his discussion of the roles of cantors and lay singers, he introduces a little-studied dimension of a theme that recurs in several essays in the collection: the state and nature of relations between those inside and those outside the cloister. Miriam Gill's essay, “Monastic Murals and Lectio in the Later Middle Ages,” also calls attention to material that has generally received comparatively little attention by scholars of monasticism. She considers the Apocalypse cycles at Westminster and Coventry in relation to the monastic practice of lectio divina, making an important contribution to work on the interaction of texts and images in the monastic milieu.

In introducing the section titled “Learned Culture,” G. R. Evans's essay provides a brief meditation on the meaning of the term “culture” itself in a monastic context, looking specifically at the cases of Anselm and his contemporaries. A. J. Piper then presents an account of the impressive level of scriptural study among the Durham Benedictines from the eleventh through the fifteenth centuries. Of particular interest is his discussion of the monks’ enthusiastic involvement in the market for printed books in the second half of the fifteenth century. The section concludes with R. M. Thomson's essay, “Worcester Monks and Education, c. 1300,” which explores the monks’ studies at Oxford motivated by “a growing awareness” among the Benedictines of the need “to participate in the intellectual life of the universities in the same way as the Friars” (104).

To open the section titled “The Culture of Women,” David Bell revisits the topic he addressed in his groundbreaking book What Nuns Read (Kalamazoo, MI, 1995). He argues that the conclusions at which he arrived in that book need some amendment in light of more recent work. Significantly, he observes that his cautious assertion of the need for “a modicum of honest reassessment” about “the scholarly attainments of women religious” was likely too cautious (127). He also indicates that he believes more attention should now be paid to the physical forms of books and the ways in which nuns experienced them. Mary Erler's essay, “Private Reading in the Fifteenth- and Sixteenth-Century English Nunnery,” provides a nice companion piece to Bell’s. She addresses questions of when, where, and how private reading may have taken place in nunneries as well as considers what texts the nuns read. Barry Collett's essay on Bishop Richard Fox and the nuns of Winchester diocese closes the section. Collett lays out a clear and well-documented account of the expectations of the bishop and the nuns concerning their monastic vocations. He examines Fox's translation of the Benedictine Rule made for the nuns in 1517 and his version of the Benedictine form of profession along with evidence for the nuns’ own views of their monastic vocation, including their annotations of Fox's translation of the Benedictine Rule.

Joan Greatrex's essay, “Culture at Canterbury in the Fifteenth Century: Some Indications of the Cultural Environment of a Monk of Christ Church,” begins the final section, “The Culture of the Community.” She considers the notebook left by William Glastynbury (MS Corpus Christi College, Oxford 256), discerning clues to “William's cultural framework” (171) in the extracts from scripture, letters, historical notes, and other writings contained in the manuscript. Julian Haseldine's contribution, “The Monastic Culture of Friendship,” examines recent scholarly takes on St. Anselm and Aelred of Rievaulx to survey current approaches to monastic friendship. J. D. North's piece, “Monastic Time,” closes the section and the collection. North informatively discusses monastic approaches to time on the macro- and microlevels; the section concerning the introduction of the mechanical clock into the monastic sphere is particularly interesting.

Overall, the essays in the collection are well written and copiously documented; the footnotes of several essays are a veritable treasure trove. The collection's organization is logical, though organization provides the ground for my one significant objection to the volume. Though the essays in the section “The Culture of Women” are excellent, and though I understand the rationale for combining them in a single section, I would have preferred not to see female monasticism segregated in this way. To do so is rather too reminiscent of the scholarly tradition of relegating female monasticism to an appendix or treating it as a less important version of monasticism implicitly defined as generically male. Why, for instance, could not Bell's and Erler's essays on nuns’ reading have been included in the section “Learned Culture”? To do so would in fact have reinforced points made by both authors about the learning of later medieval nuns. This objection aside, the collection is a strong one, and one that should interest not only scholars of medieval English monasticism specifically but also those of later medieval culture more generally.