This is an interesting collection of ten contributions divided into three sections. Part i is concerned with ‘Monastic identities: bridging secular and clerical identities’. Andrew Romig (ch. ii) explores Odo of Cluny's Life of Gerald of Aurillac the founder of the monastery of Cluny, Scott Wells (ch. iii) provides an important contribution to monasticism in the reign of the Holy Roman Emperor Henry ii (d. 1024) whose outrageous demands of monastic income caused deep political problems, and K. A. Smith discusses the value of spiritual fighting in crusading. Part ii on ‘Priestly masculinity: reconciling celibacy and sexuality’ contains three pieces. A. Perron (ch. v), studies Saxo Grammaticus' model of masculinity. Jennifer Thibodeaux (ch. vi), the editor of the volume, gives a nuanced and compelling account of the Norman thirteenth-century evidence for what she calls extended adolescent behaviour by priests (ie single men unable to rein in their sexual appetites). Janelle Werner (ch. vii) explores clerical sexuality and behaviour in late medieval Hereford. Part iii is on ‘Clerical masculinity: contested identities’. It includes a piece by Andrew Holt (ch. viii), who reviews Bernard of Clairvaux's counselling on knightly values of abstinence and chastity amongst his monks. Andrew G. Miller (ch. ix), adopts the strategy of ‘spatial’ research methodology by looking at deer parks of laity and episcopate with special reference to the parks at Bury St Edmunds, the diocese of Exeter's deer park in Cornwall and that of the bishop of Lincoln. Finally, Tanya Stabler Miller (ch. x), in an excellent essay, explores the pastoral care provided by clergy in Paris to beguines and other religious women within the context of the contemporary discourse between mendicant orders' perceived responsibility for the urban laity and the Church. The collection opens with Derek Neal's wide ranging historiographical essay (ch. i) on masculinity as an analytical tool used for other chronological periods and the potential methodological pitfalls for the medieval period. The collection as a whole is instructive in that for the medieval period it highlights the idealistic, and in the end often impossible, demands made by the Roman Catholic Church for clergy to restrain their human sexual urges (by forbidding them to marry and have children) in the expectation that the care that they provided might persuade the laity to improve their Christian behaviour.