This book about the medieval bishops of Badajoz begins by reminding us of how the medieval Spanish Church was subjected to monarchs who, posing as defenders of the faith, felt free to use and abuse the Church's men and means to their own ends, often, it must be said, with the complicity of prelates and pontiffs – a fair warning at the start of a book that describes over three and a half centuries of such conduct. Kurtz also explains why he begins in 1255. Early modern church historians had posited an unbroken chain of bishops from the Apostle James to Bishop Pedro in 1255, when the Badajoz see was in fact established ex novo in the recently conquered Muslim town. Kurtz simply dismisses the fabrications of that school, which survived until the Francoist period, and places himself in a critical current which, he believes, sprang in the 1980s from the work of Nieto Soria, Sanz Sancho and Arranz Guzmán. While recognising their merits, it must be said that the decisive turn in the ecclesiastical historiography of medieval Spain was in fact the work of Peter Linehan, whose Spanish Church and the papacy (Cambridge 1971) changed the paradigm and exerted a powerful influence on the aforementioned authors, whose PhD theses were completed more than a decade later. That aside, Kurtz places his own work in that current to great effect as he advances through complex historical periods, always ready to tilt at the old windmills, agitated by currents of hot air and erected on the long trail leading from 1255 to 1485. He emphasises the predominance of curial prelates who rarely, if ever, set foot in Badajoz, whether in the king's or the pope's service; also, if they were moved to other dioceses, he follows them there, making sense of their whole careers. Earlier fabrications are convincingly dismantled: four bishops previously placed between 1281 and 1299 are neatly folded into a single don Gil. Taking a different tack, he wonders whether well-established figures are one or more persons. Take the case of Alonso Fernández de Vargas, an Augustinian monk who taught at Paris in 1344–5, at Montpellier in the late 1340s, wrote commentaries on Peter Lombard's Sentences and on Aristotle's De anima, and was successively bishop of Badajoz in 1353, of Osma in 1354 and archbishop of Seville in 1361, where he died in 1366. But at the time of his tenure of Badajoz and Osma he was also military deputy to cardinal Gil de Albornoz during his daring campaign to reconquer the papal states. After looking at that record and pointing to some factual discrepancies, Kurtz wonders whether we are dealing with one, two or even three persons. In this, as in numerous places of this challenging work, the author admits temporary defeat, leaving the question open and suggesting that uncertainty is often the price of objectivity. The book deserves a second edition.