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Religious cults in Liguria in Northern Italy created by religious images from the Medieval and early modern period that create a powerful spiritual sense of neighborhood due to common visual reference is discussed. In these cults the neighborhood identity is an ongoing and fluctuating process, cultivated deliberately by the local people to serve different groups in various ways.

The Making of Assisi: The Pope, the Franciscans and the Painting of the Basilica Donal Cooper and Janet Robson Yale University Press, 45 £ ISBN 9780300195712 Religious Poverty, Visual Riches: [...]

Medieval society, according to a well-known description current at the time, was divided between those who prayed, those who fought, and those who worked.(1) While modern scholarship would add nuance [...]

Guilds and fraternal groups of both men and women played important social and economic roles in medieval England. Their feasts encouraged legitimate relations between people who might otherwise not interact, to the advantage of those both high and low in social standing. They could employ many cooks and suppliers for days or weeks. The interplay of formal and egalitarian at such feasts both reinforced the social order, and legitimized the roles and positions of individual members.

Kathleen Kamerick. Popular Piety and Art in the Later Middle Ages: Image Worship and Idolatry in England 1350-1500. (The New Middle Ages.) New York: Palgrave. 2002. Pp. xi, 292. $65.00. [...]

By PETER SPUFFORD (London: Thames and Hudson, 2002; pp. 432. 24.95 £). PETER Spufford is well known to medievalists as the author of an excellent book on Money and its [...]

English historiography has been far less marked by the impact of Norbert Elias's The Civilizing Process (first published in 1939) than has the German, the French and the Italian. Even [...]

Towns in Decline, AD 100-1600, ed. T. R. Slater (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000; pp. 325. 49.95 £). The fall of cities is one of the great historical themes, from Babylon and [...]

Medieval British Towns, by Heather Swanson (London: Macmillan, 1999; pp. 161. Pb. 13.99 £). The fall of cities is one of the great historical themes, from Babylon and Troy to [...]

Historical Perspectives on Memory, ed. Anne Ollila (Helsinki: SHS, 1999; pp. 222. N.p.). Perhaps it is too early to say that reports of the death of history have been exaggerated. [...]

While the dominant quality of Peter Godman's book is its density of cultural texture, Christine Raffini, in Marsilio Ficino, Pietro Bembo, Baldassare Castiglione. Philosophical, Aesthetic, and Political Approaches in Renaissance [...]

The vitality and the perceived relevance of classical learning in the context of late fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century Florence is vividly conveyed by Peter Godman in From Poliziano to Machiavelli. [...]

A question for our times: Is it possible that a major civic university could be extinguished, vanishing so completely that subsequent generations would deny that it had ever existed? Yes, [...]

Dante and the City, by Catherine Keen (Stroud: Tempus, 2003; pp. 288. Pb. 19.99 £). During his long years of political exile, Dante repeatedly recalled, in his letters and in [...]

by Ira Rosario (Woodbridge: Boydell P., 2000; pp. xvii + 155. 45 £). The Emperor Charles IV was one of the most remarkable of all medieval rulers; we also happen [...]

City and Spectacle in Medieval Europe, ed. Barbara A. Hanawalt and Kathryn L. Reyerson (Minneapolis/London: U. of Minnesota P., 1994; pp. xx + 331. Pb. $19.95) presents a mixed bag [...]

The history of childhood remains largely unwritten; and what has been published has not always advanced understanding. The strange notions, endorsed by certain scholars, that the very conception of childhood [...]

On the edge of several worlds, at the limes of Western Christendom, poised improbably between a barren mountain and the sea, stood the mediaeval city of Ragusa. In the outsider's [...]