Facsimiles of English Episcopal Acta, 1085–1305, by Martin Brett, with Philippa Hoskin and David Smith

The English Episcopal Acta project aims to publish the texts of all surviving charters issued by English bishops from the Conquest until the commencement of the bishops’ registers for the relevant diocese. The first volume, for Lincoln between 1067 and 1185, edited by David Smith, was issued in 1980. The project is now well advanced: the latest volumes at the time of writing, covering Norwich between 1266 and 1289, edited by Christopher Harper-Bill, are the fortieth and forty-first in the series. Between them the three co-editors of Facsimiles of English Episcopal Acta have edited or co-edited more than a dozen volumes of acta, and two have served as general editor of the series: David Smith, from the project’s inception in 1973 until 2005, and Philippa Hoskin, the current general editor, from 2003. The new volume, the first in a supplementary series, sets out to illustrate the most characteristic features of episcopal acta by reproducing some 190 original charters over 100 plates. The decision to print at full size has necessitated a very large book, with pages measuring approximately 30cm × 43cm. Even so, some 5 per cent of the approximately 2,000 surviving originals had to be excluded on grounds of size alone—most notably ‘the single sheet copy of the canons of the Council of London of 1075, subscribed by all the bishops of England’, which measures 30cm × 50cm. The size of the book has brought with it certain difficulties. The text block used on most pages is substantially narrower than the page width, with a very wide outer margin, which has resulted in some unevenness in the opening pages. This is particularly noticeable on the half-title and dedication pages, which are offset awkwardly and jar with the title page where the text is set centrally on the page.

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