This afternoon I took part in the enthronement of the Rt Revd Joanne Grenfell as the 12th Bishop of St Edmundsbury and Ipswich at St Edmundsbury Cathedral, where I am one of the canons. One of the canons’ tasks (as I wrote about here) is to formally elect the bishop; that took place on 24 July last year. Today’s service of enthronement marked the end of the process by which Joanne Grenfell becomes the bishop, although legally speaking she has been the Bishop of St Edmundsbury and Ipswich since 5 September, when she took the requisite oaths at St Mary-le-Bow in London. To some extent, therefore, today’s service was a mixture of liturgical drama and otiose oaths and affirmations that are of no legal force since they have already been taken. The only substantive part of the service, and its core purpose, is for the bishop to take possession of her cathedra: the literal throne that gives the church its name. In order to do so she has to swear to uphold the statutes of the Cathedral Church of St James and St Edmund (in much the same way as canons do when they are installed). The rest is symbolic theatre. But the reason the enthronement matters is that it establishes a relationship between the Bishop on the one hand and the Dean, Chapter and College of Canons of the cathedral church (which, paradoxically, is independent of the bishop’s jurisdiction) on the other.