Examining in what ways and how far medieval churches were treated as items of property, Susan Wood surveys Western Europe from the late Roman Empire to the post-Gregorian Church, taking an approach that is as much social and religious as legal and administrative. Here, then, sustained across nearly a thousand pages, seen through the bifocal lenses of a richly paradoxical theme, is a comprehensive vision of the earlier medieval world, in which every piece of evidence touched on is handled with respect, every person with sympathy, and the interrelationships between ideas and practices analysed with rare finesse. This book is not Mansfield Park or Barchester Towers: it is a historian's Middlemarch.