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These are, however, small criticisms and the fact that such questions arise indicates the value of the book, as it leads us forward to examine new areas. As work on the thirteenthcentury episcopate and episcopal administration continues, and as more volumes of English Episcopal Acta covering this period are published, debates about the professionalization and administrative organization of households continue, and debate about the connections between bishops and their perhaps increasingly separate writing offices also continues. Burger's work also points the way forward to other research concerning episcopal households. He himself suggests that it would be worthwhile to undertake a comparative study of episcopal and secular networks of friendship and affinity. It would also be valuable to look at the diplomatic of episcopal acta that made grants to or addressed household members in light of other work on the literary and administrative language of friendship in this period. Additionally, if bishops were driven increasingly to find new forms of patronage or to try to increase their stock of traditional patrons, so also were members of episcopal households encouraged to cultivate diverse patrons and to be aware of the drawbacks as well as the value of traditional grants-perhaps by seeking to become part of a wider network of competent administrators rather than tying themselves solely to the bishop's service. The household was the sphere of operations for those men who wished to rise to the height of bishop, for other men whose ambitions may have been focused on cathedral prebends, and, no doubt, also for men for whom receipt of a position in the household itself was the height of their ambition. Burger deliberately looks at bishops and their households from a top-down position-although he does also sometimes note the feelings and interests of the clerks. This is the right starting place in this field of research, but now that we have this volume a closer study of individual household members, their ambitions, and their claims upon both episcopal and other patronage (particularly other ecclesiastical patronage) would also be valuable.Overall this book is a work of fine scholarship and an important addition to the study of thirteenth-century episcopal administration.