At first glance, Middle Byzantine prelates look unpromising subjects for a rounded historical study. The lists of episcopal sees, editions of seals and fairly full records of synodal proceedings may suffice for investigating the Church as an institution and its interrelationship with the imperial ‘Establishment’. But these materials are weighted towards the Constantinopolitan patriarchate. The writings of learned high-fliers like the metropolitans John Mauropous of Euchaita and Eustathios of Thessalonica and of Archbishop Theophylact of Ohrid do not really offset this bias. Indeed, the letters of Theophylact voicing disgust about his rustic and ‘barbarous’ flock and pining for the civilised life of the capital tend to reinforce the bias. Small wonder, then, that hardly any scholars have set about investigating prelates as a social grouping or attempted general treatment of the suffragans, who tend to be marginal figures in the Lives of holy men and seldom inspired hagiographies of their own. Jack Roskilly has undertaken this investigation for the eleventh and twelfth centuries, avowedly following on from Benjamin Moulet’s study of the earlier Middle Byzantine episcopate. Trawling through all available evidence has yielded a prosopographical register some fifty pages long, its entries often containing more information than one might have expected. Roskilly highlights the main pathways towards episcopal office. Foremost are those of bishops belonging to Constantinopolitan elite families de second rang, often having relatives in the civil administration. In the same premier league of importance and quantity are bishops hailing from well-to-do provincial families – rich enough to send their sons off for a sound education in the capital, but not occupying the topmost tier of a region's families. In terms of numbers, there are fewer prelates belonging to families capable of dominating a local see. The same goes for those prelates with a rural background, coming from families describable as ‘coq du village’ (p. 35 n. 50). What emerges most strongly is that the Church continued to function as an institution, for all the upheavals and displacements Byzantium underwent in the later eleventh century. A bishop could not directly nominate his successor, while appointments to metropolitanates were overseen by the authorities in the capital. The one sine qua non for an aspiring clergyman was a period of education in Constantinople, preferably – at least in the twelfth century – under St Sophia's auspices. Roskilly shows that the profusion of literary works in atticising Greek says something about the competitive nature of church appointments. He also shows how and why eloquence – ‘rhetoric’ – became the distinguishing mark of intellectual authority and could bring sociopolitical influence. Unappealing as they appear to the modern reader, the copious orations, verses and flowery letters of bishops (and would-be bishops) offer windows into the political culture of late eleventh- and twelfth-century Byzantium. While perhaps revealing its intellectual constraints, they also betoken elite networks spanning the length and breadth of the empire. The protestations of ‘friendship’ (philia) in their letters were not wholly empty, or self-serving tropes: they stood as reminders of all their writers, hearers and readers had in common, that higher learning to which a Constantinopolitan education held the key; religious correctness and apostolic zeal for preaching were part of the package, too. Roskelly emphasises the role of Alexios i Komnenos in bringing about this cultural turn. This book has much else to say about the balance struck between empire-wide political stability, standards of scholarship and pastoral concerns in twelfth-century Byzantium. It should also be instructive to the non-specialist, offering means of contrasting Byzantine prelates with their counterparts’ role in maintaining the socio-political fabric in the West.