This volume arises from a 2004 Edinburgh conference to honour Gary Dickson on his retirement. It includes a bibliography of his publications and an introduction by André Vauchez which distinguishes between church history and the history of religious experience, including religious enthusiasm inspiring crusades, flagellants, charismatic preaching, prophets, mystics and cults of saints; and charts Gary Dickson's contribution to the academic recognition of this topic. The book contains nine papers, divided into sections: ‘Making saints’; ‘Locating sanctity’; ‘Seeing sanctity’; and ‘Society and the sacred’. Each section is preceded by a substantial synopsis and each paper followed by a lengthy bibliography. It is a pity that the plates are hidden away at the end of the book and confusingly numbered in relation to each chapter, not in sequence throughout the book – the reader will hence find, for example, four plates labelled fig. 5 – and there is no list of figures to help in this respect. The period covered ranges from Anglo-Saxon (Alaric Hall on the construction of St Guthlac) to late medieval, and the geographical coverage is wide too. It would have been helpful if the titles had reflected this more. One article on civic religion in Bruges (Andrew Brown) and two concerning Scotland (Helen Brown on St Triduana of Restalrig and Richard Fawcett on architecture) are located by their titles, but otherwise one would not know from the book's contents list that articles on the influence of Dominican women (Maiju Lehmijoki-Gardner), flagellant processions (Mitchell B. Merback) and the measure of the Virgin's foot (Michael Bury) largely focus upon Italy. The editor's own contribution on visual expression of the ineffable in late medieval art stands out, not least for its illustrations, which include a disturbing three-headed deity and images of the Devil and the AntiChrist with monstrous heads replacing genitalia. The subject matter of the papers moves from inside the church and convent (Felice Lifshitz on litany; Fawcett; Lehmijoki-Gardner) to the streets (A. Brown; Merback) and the approaches are cross-disciplinary, including gender, painting, sculpture, poetry, saints' Lives, place names and civic records. This somewhat diverse collection is nevertheless ingeniously linked by the common theme of religious experience in the Middle Ages.