The eight essays in this collection build on the seminal work of one of the co-editors, the late and much-lamented Professor Alfred Haverkamp. They differ considerably in length. The article by co-editor Christoph Cluse is 100 pages and that by co-editor Jörg Müller comes to 120 pages. Each author could repurpose his article, with a little revision, as a monograph. The other contributions, though often very short, are intelligent interventions on the subject of the relations of Jews to the bishops in whose dioceses or under whose temporal jurisdiction they lived.

In 16 crisp pages, Lukas Clemens addresses the barriers to the bishops’ exercise of power in Southern Italy. The main obstacle was the limited resources in the relatively tiny dioceses in which they had episcopal authority. They transcended the limitations by cultivating papal support in tandem with canny alliances with the secular rulers, especially the Norman and Hohenstaufen dynasts, at least until the latter came into persistent conflict with the popes.

Lucy Pick, in the same number of pages and with equal insight, discusses the bishops of the Iberian Peninsula. She does so by offering a case study of the activities of prelates in the archdiocese of Toledo. To the extent they could, the prelates, especially the early 13^th-century archbishop Rodrigo Jiménez de Rada, tried to cultivate good economic relations (a controversial policy) with the local Jewish communities. They did this even as they reaffirmed the social and political subordination of the Jews.

The rich documentary archives of England come under the scrutiny of Gert Mentgen in a wide-ranging essay showing how aggressively the English crown, particularly under King Henry III (1216–1272), championed the persecuting ideologies of a number of leading churchmen. While Mentgen is careful to acknowledge that certain bishops were more restrained than others, most still manifested enormous hostility toward Jews.

Whereas church and crown worked hand in glove in England, the situation, as Juliette Sibon demonstrates, was quite different in Angevin Provence. The bishops of Marseille, the focus of her study, vied for influence with the counts, with municipal authorities in the city, and with their own cathedral chapter. The jockeying for power provided a small opening for the sustaining or even improvement of Jewish life. Promising the Jews something (say a confirmation of old liberties) projected a kind of authority to the other claimants to political power. Of course, this approach could only go so far. It could ameliorate Jewish oppression, but a backlash was always possible.

Something like this helps explain the erratic and often tragic character of Jewish life in and around Salzburg and Breslau, the focus of studies by Birgit Wiedl and Ewa Wółkiewicz respectively. Sometimes relations between the bishops and local Jews seem surprisingly positive, and yet these brief moments of relative bliss alternated with potentially disabling taxation, murders, massacres and expulsions. These two articles are especially important because they deal with cases not ordinarily addressed in the wider scholarship.

It comes as no surprise, given Alfred Haverkamp’s work, that the two long articles by Cluse and Müller deal with Trier, Cologne and later medieval Germany more generally. They are too lengthy to summarize here. Suffice it to say that they are not only magisterial synthetic treatments of episcopal-Jewish relations but also bibliographical gold mines. If he were alive, Haverkamp would be very pleased with these contributions as he would be with the volume as a whole, which is a worthy tribute to his memory.