Most of the items in this collection are derived from papers originally delivered at a conference, which was held at Robinson College, Cambridge, in 2002, on the theme of monastic culture in medieval England. To these have been added two later contributions by David Bell and Joan Greatrex. Their range is wide in terms of both chronology and treatment, and a firmer editorial hand, not to say a more satisfactory index, might have added to the coherence of the volume. Contributions by Gillian Evans and Julian Haseldine focus on Anselm and the twelfth century. By contrast, Roger Bowers's splendidly researched study of the evolution of choral polyphony, and the patronage of musicians, in a monastic environment is essentially anchored in the years after 1480. Some consider monastic culture in its broadest sense; others concentrate on much more specific topics: for instance an individual monk of Canterbury, or monastic concepts of time evolving into a consideration of clock-making. Yet two broadly inter-related themes can be discerned beneath this diversity. The first is concerned with the way in which monastic culture nourished itself, whether by music, by its visual experience, by study or by reading. The second arises from the first. How self-sustaining, how independent, was this culture? And to what extent was it stimulated from outside the cloister? One approach to the former issue lies in a study of monastic mural paintings. In this connection Miriam Gill examines the fragmentary survivals, particularly the Apocalypse paintings at Westminster and Coventry, well demonstrating their comparatively erudite and arcane nature. They represented a learned iconography requiring exegesis, ‘public books for the monastic community’ and hence closely allied to the various themes of monastic reading which occupy many of the succeeding chapters. A. J. Piper and R. M. Thomson investigate aspects of monastic study in the cathedral priories of Durham and Worcester; and three contributions – fashionably and in fact somewhat misleadingly herded together – are concerned with reading within nunneries. Barry Collett examines Bishop Fox of Winchester's writings for the nuns of his diocese, stressing in particular the – rather commonplace and homely – additions which he made to his English translation of the Benedictine rule for nuns in an attempt to make it more palatable to his potential readers. This episcopal condescension is contrasted, to its advantage, with the ‘semi-Pelagian pattern of cloistered strenuous effort’ which, scarcely surprisingly, characterises the almost contemporary advice to a very different body of nuns, the Carthusians, given by John Alcock, bishop of Ely. David Bell's contribution ‘What nuns read: the state of the question’ is largely bibliographical in content and oddly self-regarding in tone, amounting at times to an extended review of his own earlier book on the topic. More important, his main concern is in reality with what books the nuns owned rather than with the much more awkward problem of what books they read. Given many of their methods of acquiring books, these are two very different things. Much more fertile in this connection is Mary Erler's insightful combination of Paul Saenger's work on the growth of private, interiorised, silent reading during the period with an analysis of a number of devotional texts specifically written for nuns. This goes to the heart of the matter and her resultant picture of reading leading in turn to memorisation, contemplation and finally prayer is revealingly persuasive. To what extent was this monastic culture self-sustaining? The editor's view is sometimes triumphalist in its revisionism. He speaks of the ‘cultural vitality’ of monastic life in the period, and of the way in which it manifested a ‘process of cultural renewal and reinvention’. Yet many of the contributions to the volume are more ambiguous in tone. In his revealingly detailed account of the adoption of choral polyphony in many of the greater monastic churches, and even in those of such small and remote houses as Tywardreath, Bowers summarises this process as one of rejuvenation and invigoration. Yet the essential stimulus came from outside the cloister, in the first instance from the secular church, and it was based on the employment under contract of professional musicians. What is more, these musicians seem often to have been young men who went on to better things elsewhere. Musical performance within the monasteries may well have been transformed, but the process was essentially parasitic. Even more to the point, standards of music are not to be too readily identified with standards of devotion. Similarly, although Piper traces a very long tradition of scriptural study amongst the monks of Durham, it is noticeable how this tradition was transformed by the physical introduction of university texts via Durham College and by the adoption of academic habits of study in the form of tabulae and indices. The impetus for change was again external. Even more is this the case with Thomson's account of the education of the monks of Worcester. With regard to the period around 1300 he concludes that ‘the community was clearly intellectually alive’ but that much of the life blood came from the University of Oxford, whether from the studies of the monks who were sent there or from the books that they brought back with them. By contrast, the finest study in the book, although one of the shortest, focuses in microcosm on a single monk who appears to have been true to his inheritance. The fortunate survival of his commonplace book enables Joan Greatrex to anatomise the mentality of William Glastynbury, a monk of Canterbury during the first half of the fifteenth century, ‘an ordinary if not a typical monk of his time, intelligent without being scholarly, and both conscientious and diligent’. William was no gyrovagus. He seems not to have gone to university but to have put into practice his order's traditional precept of stability, and remained intensely loyal to his community in both practical and emotional terms. He fulfilled a range of monastic offices, carefully recorded in his book the growth of his church's endowments since the time of St Augustine and equally carefully listed the deaths of his fellows within the community. The spiritual life permeated his thinking, set him puzzling over predestination and grace, prompted him to contemplate the spiritual message conveyed by the ‘theological windows’ in his cathedral church, and made him concerned as to whether monastic silence might at times seem to condone error. Far from being a model of ‘renewal and reinvention’ or of ‘critical engagement’ with the external world, he appears more as an exemplar of the eternal verities transmitted to him over centuries by the rule.