Conrad ii has usually been seen as the most secular-minded of the German rulers of his time, and a bluff, brutal politician, who enforced his will with a ruthless disregard for others, a view that is ultimately derived from the nineteenth-century biography by Harry Bresslau, completed in 1886. Herwig Wolfram gives us a more nuanced picture, that emphasises both the conventional religiosity of his subject and his political acumen and flexibility, especially in the settlement of disputes. Although Conrad had, he argues, a high conception of the imperial office, largely Carolingian in derivation, he was essentially a pragmatist, and it was this, rather than any lack of overt religiosity, that contrasted him with his more doctrinaire predecessor Henry ii and his own son and successor Henry iii. Certainly, as patron of his family monastery at Limburg, of the hitherto second-rank bishopric of Speyer, and of the monastic reformer Poppo of Stavelot, he was by no means indifferent to the Church, and he was more even-handed in his treatment than Henry ii, who tended to indulge his favourites. He did indeed appoint a number of his own and his wife's relatives to bishoprics, but then so too did the Ottonians, and the later Salians might well have done the same had there been more male members of the family surviving. One of these relatives, Bardo of Mainz, was indeed a monk of noted piety, although his tenure of that see was hardly a great success. For ecclesiastical historians, the most useful part of this book will surely be the detailed see-by-see discussion of the bishops and bishoprics, and also of the principal monasteries, of Germany (chapters xvi–xix) during the reign, which gives us a realistic appraisal of the realities of the so-called pre-Gregorian ‘imperial Church system’.