Book excerpt: The question of personality is a problematic one, beset by complications of cultural distance, the layers of the past, and the limitations of the source material. Recognising these difficulties, this volume draws together character sketches based upon historical narratives and a range of sources, including architecture, liturgical manuscripts, chronicles, and hagiographical material, to show a multifaceted range of means by which historians can construct, reconstruct, and deconstruct episcopal power through the person of the bishop. Building on a previous volume of essays, Episcopal Power and Local Society in Medieval Europe, 900-1400, which examined the construction, augmentation, and expression of episcopal power in local society, this second volume seeks to uncover the impact of the personalities behind that power. Through essays dealing with the construction of cultural and political personalities, the shadows they cast, and the contexts that forged them, this volume brings to life the careers of bishops across medieval Europe from c. 900 to c. 1480. This geographical range and broad time span throws up the similarity in applications and benefits of interdisciplinarity which can be applied to ecclesiastical history, and presents a fascinating range of case studies for consideration.