When I began the study of mediaeval canon law in the 1970s, I was told, or perhaps warned, that the main focus of scholarship in this area was shifting from the identification of manuscripts, authors and sources (dismissed by Walter Ullmann as simply troves reviewed by ‘text men’) over to the analysis of legal systems, courts, jurisprudence and procedure. To look at the bibliography in this volume, that prophecy would appear to be borne out by the mass of publications in this area that have appeared over the last 40 years. While work on the sources and their identification has certainly not lapsed (witness Anders Winroth's work on the composition of Gratian's Decretum in the last few decades), scholars in canon law have clearly begun to build on this foundation.

In 1999, the Catholic University of America Press announced an ambitious programme to produce ‘The history of medieval canon law’ in eleven volumes. The series was to bring together ‘a group of distinguished scholars to present a unified history of medieval canon law from the earliest time to 1500’. The volumes in this series offer studies organised either by period or by subject; while all of the volumes have been assigned authors and are now in process, the titles have been painfully slow to appear.

This volume, on the history of courts and procedure, is the fifth in the series thus far. It is a stellar collection of essays on judicial procedure, jurisprudence and courts in the Middle Ages (roughly from 1000 to 1500), followed by specific considerations of the ecclesiastical courts in different parts of Europe during that period. This is one of the first volumes in this series to be organised principally by subject matter rather than chronologically; given the previous appearance of other volumes including descriptions of individual sources and authors arranged by date, it was a prudent editorial choice to concentrate on the wider subject matter in order to avoid duplication or repetition in listing the sources.

The authors of the main essays are internationally recognised scholars, and many have relied upon and synthesised their own writings and research in their presentations in this volume. This is particularly true with authors such as Professor Richard Helmholz, who in writing about the ecclesiastical courts of England is covering ground that he has notably ploughed for years. That does not in any way devalue these contributions, which are not only magisterial introductions to the topics but also skilled reviews of the vast, and expanding, scholarly literature. Several writers have taken the opportunity to settle some academic scores, which is unfortunate in a book such as this, not only because their opponents cannot respond but because both sides of the controversies are not adequately presented.

The fact that several of the contributors died before this volume appeared (specifically Charles Duggan, who died in April 1999, and Antonio Garcia y Garcia, who died in July 2013 after a decade of debilitating illness), points to what may be the book's most regrettable flaw. The volumes in this series have been rather slow to appear, although the same cannot be said for further contributions in the field. Harvard's Charles Donahue has done a good job in pointing out areas in which scholarship has advanced since the essays were originally written, but looking at the footnotes in individual essays it is usually possible to see when that essay was written, and where or how scholarship has progressed since then is difficult to determine. In Garcia y Garcia's essay on ‘Ecclesiastical procedure in medieval Spain’, as Donahue points out, there is little attention paid to the reports of the Working Group on Church Court Records, which were only beginning in the 1980s and 1990s and have continued significantly and substantially since the original essay was written more than 15 years ago.

It is worth mentioning as well that the fact that most of these essays were originally written in English points to a welcome increase in English-speaking scholarship in these areas. That has not always been the case, as a review of the citations in Brigide Schwarz's article on ‘The Roman Curia (until about 1300)’ shows. Almost the only English citation, on page after page, is I S Robinson's The Papacy, 1073–1198: continuity and innovation, a valuable and standard college textbook since its publication in 1990, but one wonders whether there really has been little else in English since then. Schwarz's article also does not really describe the papal judiciary of the period; this is partly because of the self-imposed limit of the year 1300 (although the span of the book is supposed to reach to 1500). Unfortunately, the various arms of the papal judiciary in the Middle Ages (dismissed by Schwarz as ‘bureaucracy’ in favour of a more sociological consideration of court life) are nowhere else described – or even listed – in this volume, which is a regrettable lack. Cardinal Erdö’s ‘Ecclesiastical procedure in eastern central Europe’ is also valuable here, because almost none of this scholarship is available in English, and Czech and Hungarian are not currently the major languages of scholarship. The translators of the essays should also be given full credit for a very fine job.

All of this should highlight the caution with which this volume should be used. It is unusually expansive and draws together from different disciplines much that has previously been hidden in scholarly journals. It is a necessary and vital addition to the series, a truly significant review of scholarship and, as with the other volumes, serves as a springboard to further research.