A hallmark of the best recent work on medieval English vernacular theology has been increased attention to the chronological, sociological, codicological and theological contexts in which vernacular religious texts were produced and through which they were transmitted. This has been reinforced by the larger set of exegetical tools made available by the capacious cultural discipline of the History of the Book. Sweepingly generalised overviews of medieval English vernacular theology are no longer tenable: scholarly energy is now going instead into micro-histories of important texts and manuscripts. In particular, many studies are now demonstrating a deeper understanding of the stable catechetical underpinnings of the wide spectrum of devotional writing throughout the period after Lateran IV, while simultaneously stressing the need to attend carefully, almost on a decade-by-decade basis, to the shifts in the production, transmission and reception of vernacular books of religion. The essays in this volume display precisely this sort of attentiveness, and have been well marshalled by Nicole Rice, whose own scholarship on these materials, here and elsewhere, has been exemplary in attending to a spectrum of textual reception that incorporated both the English clergy and theologically informed and spiritually motivated gentry and mercantile readers. Her excellent introduction poses the core question for the following essays to address: ‘How did Middle English religious texts answer changing cultural and pastoral needs and respond to the ever shifting requirement of orthodoxy?’ (p. 2). This book displays a welcome recognition of the peculiar mixture of lability and pragmatism that characterises even texts avowedly working within the footprint of doctrinal orthodoxy. As Rice comments, these essays particularly focus on the ways in which older religious materials were repurposed and repackaged in the fifteenth century. This allows the contributors to avoid the overly-schematic doctrinal typologies that can easily beckon unwary scholars into fusillades of heteropraxic name-calling. Anne Hudson's famous ‘grey area’ between Lollardy and explicit orthodoxy has effectively now been expanded to cover the entire field of English vernacular theology after 1370, and the field is much the better for that fluidity and flexibility, which the contributors to the book exploit and relish. Part i (‘Continental Religious Women in English Practice’) allows Jennifer Brown, Michael Sargent and Martha Driver to explore the reception and transmission of new vectors of religious thought in aspects of the works of Catherine of Siena, Marguerite Porete and Birgitta of Sweden, respectively. Part ii (‘Manuscript Compilation and the Adaptation of Religious Practice’) and Part iii (‘Negotiating Orthodoxy’) bring closer analyses of individual texts and manuscripts. Mary Edsall argues that vernacular ad hoc manuals for lay use can be seen to mirror earlier Latin collections used in monastic novitiates, while Stephen Kelly and Ryan Perry return once more to ms Laud Misc. 23 for a further demonstration of that book's promiscuous habitation of the grey area. Moira Fitzgibbons offers a close analysis of Dives and Pauper's use of the material from the earlier Pore Caitif. Rounding off the volume, Margaret Connolly explores the reading tastes and habits of the Roberts family of Willesden who annotated the medieval religious books that they had acquired across and through the religious upheavals of the sixteenth century. The book gains from its tight focus and the disciplined remit provided by its editor's introduction, and the essays all make useful contributions to the ongoing exploration of what English spirituality ‘after Arundel’ was actually like.