This weighty work containing contributions from more than four dozen scholars of that and other Portuguese institutions, provides a compendium of information regarding the see of Lisbon and potted biographies of its prelates from Potamius in the fourth century to Archbishop João de Sousa, whose death in 1710 was closely followed by the creation of the patriarchate of Lisbon and in 1755 by the earthquake which destroyed its cathedral and with it so much of the evidence upon which any documentary undertaking such as this must depend. With the first part of its biographical section covering the history of the see from the arrival of Bishop Gilbert of Hastings, its earliest post-reconquest prelate, in 1147, sandwiched between overviews of the see during the Visigothic period and the centuries of Islamic occupation (‘o estado de incerteza’) to its promotion to archbishopric at the time of the Western Church's Great Schism and Portugal's change of dynasty, and the second part, down to the eighteenth century, followed by essays on heraldry, sigillography, iconography and its prelates’ ‘cultura escrita’ and taste in tombs, this is an achievement of interest for more than just its ecclesiastical content. Enhanced throughout by an abundance of revealing illustrations – although as to documentary items the size of reproductions regrettably requires preternatural eyesight – the episcopal biographies, provided by some of the ablest amongst the younger generation of Portuguese medievalists in particular, represent, despite all the consequences of the earthquake, a singular achievement. Since not uncommonly Lisbon's medieval bishops proceeded to the primatial see of Braga their biographers here sometimes choose to follow them, not always wholly relevantly. Thus in the fourteenth century Gonçalo Pereira's four years at Lisbon merit three pages here, followed by three times as many on his later career, and these are to be welcomed. But by 1635 when Rodrigo da Cunha, the historian of both these churches as well as of the see of Porto, moved in the opposite direction Lisbon was the senior, and when on account of his assistance in the elimination of Habsburg rule there five years later he would be dubbed by some ‘Pai da Pátria’, by others a wolf in sheep's clothing and a second Don Oppas, stirring memories of that bishop of Toledo who was remembered for betraying the peninsula to the invader in 711 and thereby taking the reader back to near the beginning of the story. There is much to be grateful for in this well-informed volume.