Editors of collaborative volumes can be scarred for life. I have often wondered whether the end products are really worth the effort involved in buttering up contributors, finding replacements for those who suddenly decide to withdraw and driving forward those who are dilatory. The aim is to produce a work of reference that introduces the reader to a comprehensive modern understanding of a subject in a given period, but the result is often rather dull, if workmanlike, and the delays before submission can mean that some chapters are out of date even before they are published. I suspect that the only reason that these series continue to be commissioned is that publishers have found them to be highly profitable. At any rate, I approached the task of reviewing this volume with foreboding. I am delighted to report that this is a rare example of a collaborative history that is lively and interesting.

The series editors made the sensible decision to confine it to the Latin Church. This gave it a unity that would have been hard to achieve if the eastern Churches had also been included. The volume editors decided to break the subjects up into quite narrow topics, so that, for example, monasticism and the religious orders are covered in at least six chapters and learning in at least another six. It also means that topics such as music can have more in-depth treatment than is usual in collections of this sort. The thirty-one chapters have been grouped into seven broad categories: ‘Institutions and change, 1100–1200’, ‘Forging a Christian world, 1200–1300’, ‘The erection of boundaries’, ‘Shapes of a Christian world’, ‘Christian life in movement’, ‘The challenges to Christian society’ and ‘Reform and renewal’. Some of these titles are rather artificial and others sound more than they mean, but underlying them is a fresh way of looking at the medieval Church. Most important of all, the contributors seem to have been given the freedom to write what they wanted, without worrying too much about covering everything.

This will never be a reference book in the way of so many of the Cambridge Histories. The chapters are so short that a few of the contributions cannot avoid being rather shallow. The editors could have been a little tougher with some of the authors. For example, there is in ‘Christendom and Islam’ a section on crusading which compares poorly with the chapter dedicated to the subject later in the volume and should have been pruned, if not cut, since it implicitly contradicts the more knowledgeable treatment elsewhere. On the other hand, the contributors have on the whole risen to the challenge. They are a nice mix of the experienced and the young. Writing essays of this sort has encouraged them to challenge modern preconceptions. There is a defence of celibacy. The prevailing views on the status of women and of heretics are questioned. There is an understanding that parish Christianity and the religion of the learned should not be too strictly distinguished from each other but were part of a single spectrum of belief, although I would have liked to have read rather more on the grass roots and slightly less on the intellectuals. And the editors and the contributors have managed to convey the excitement that must affect anyone of imagination who considers the medieval Church, with its excesses, of course, but also its intense vitality.

I do not think that this volume will ever satisfy those who want a comprehensive guide to the Church in the period, but I think it is something that is much more valuable. I would be tempted to insist that all undergraduates who opt to study the medieval Latin Church should be given this to read at the start of the course. It is bound to interest, even inspire, them. The only pity is that it is so expensive.