Henrik Dey's book on a group of important late antique cities sees greater cachet in the idea of the city and monumental spaces for the rulers and the high élites of the late antique period than has necessarily been argued for in the past. It is not a book about late antique urbanism per se. The focus is firmly on the main thoroughfares and buildings of power, with D. arguing that the post-classical city's shape was ‘largely a product of ceremony’ (17) with the need for ceremonial and processional space being particularly expressed through the maintenance and development of the ‘armature’ (in the sense coined by MacDonald). In doing so, D. is explicitly building on the work of Sabine MacCormack, Michael McCormick and others on the centrality of victory ceremonial in art and ritual for rulers and their courts in the late antique period (16–17), but he also suggests that the preservation and creation of these spaces was reproduced beyond a narrow set of cities, with both post-Roman capitals and major provincial cities being influenced by these articulations of power and space into the seventh century and beyond. The examination of sites around the Mediterranean basin (although rarely sites on the southern coast) and the occasional foray north to Merovingian capitals, allows D. to examine the armatures as a continuing way of articulating space across the former Roman Empire rather than producing a narrow regional analysis.

The book is organized chronologically with an introduction which deals with key arguments: the problems of Romanization, a consideration of Horden and Purcell's critique of the privileging of the city as an object of study, and an examination of the continuity versus catastrophe debate. Ch. 2 examines the late Roman city and particularly how cities tied to the imperial court were changed to meet the court's needs. It argues that the colonnaded street came to the fore in the period as an important means of organizing space and movement with the adventus ritual being crucial to the evolution of these spaces.

Developments in the fifth and sixth centuries are examined in ch. 3. D. emphasizes the trend to connect important churches to armatures or to place important relics into churches in the armature. The focus on the armature went beyond imperial cities to new foundations such as Justiniana Prima and larger provincial cities such as Ephesus where pre-existing colonnaded streets became ever more important.

In ch. 4, D. argues that major centres were still organized around the principal of a central processional route-way, into which the palace, cathedral/mosque and key extra-urban sites were connected, into the seventh and eighth centuries. This was true for major cities in the western successor states, for Byzantine provincial cities and key Umayyad sites. New cities in the Umayyad East, and western sites such as Recopolis, were also utilizing processional spaces. D. argues that it was only when groups who were unused to classical urbanism took over in Asia Minor, Britain and the Balkans that settlements stopped being urban (15, 129–30, 209).

D. expresses the hope (249) that he has moved away from the catastrophe versus continuity debate towards a more nuanced approach where examination of armatures of power suggests continuity whilst a focus on other areas of the city suggests contraction; together they produce a more realistic picture of late antique urban history. The book eschews an easy escape into continuity/decline, but the focus on one element of a small proportion of late antique cities leads to a very positive picture of urban survival. D. makes the point that the conclusions are applicable to only a small percentage of cities that existed in the fourth century, those that rulers wanted to exist ‘as crucial tokens of power and prestige’ (15), but the focus on the armatures of those cities does give a sense of more than just an ‘ember’ (20) of the ancient city continuing into the early Middle Ages. In addition, the people who use the spaces, rather than those whose ideals were codified in the construction and preservation of the structures, are sometimes missing. More analysis of how these armatures might have worked for populations that lived in cities that had changed in other respects would have perhaps allowed an even more nuanced picture.

D. necessarily tackles important methodological issues that bedevil the study of the late antique city: how do we assess the archaeology of abandonment? D. is clearly correct to point to the problems of understanding continuity in spaces that were regularly maintained but his optimistic interpretation of both dark earth and the absence of intervening debris layers between Roman structures and new buildings in the medieval period as showing evidence of urban survival might not be universally accepted (especially 135–6, 172–3, 247).

D.'s assessment of processional space is a well-argued assessment of the centrality of a particular urban form in late antique and early medieval cities and for their rulers and élites. Its focus is clearly on a small group of cities, but its achievement is in demonstrating that urban ritual built around royal and élite power, and later the Church, remained a concrete organizing principal at more cities and for longer than has often been thought.