More than a social history of Renaissance Florence, this is an innovative and riveting examination of how space defined and regulated life in early modern Florence. As such, it goes a long way in helping us to reassess urban life in an early modern city. As the editors rightly point out, space in Renaissance Florence was ‘not rigidly bounded’ but constituted, instead, ‘an urban theater where human activity was as much a definer of space as was architecture’ (p. 1). For the various contributors, space is not a void to be filled, walls and buildings are not enclosures meant to hold something, piazzas and streets are not passages to another destination, but they are all dynamic elements in a social ritual that expressed profound meaning and gave sense to human action. For the post-modern reader moving blindly through the maze of a contemporary city this ‘history’ of Florentine society and the space within which it operated opens new ways of seeing early modern Florence. It will seem to be something very much distinct and strangely alien to our own contemporary world, but at the same time (if we look around us a little more carefully) chillingly familiar. For students of ecclesiastical history the collection offers a variety of insights into how early modern religion and spirituality were experienced and lived in a very immediate, physical manner as part of the urban structure that included home, work, play and devotion. As the permeable boundaries of urban life spilled over into each other they formed an organic but mottled whole that was both familiar and novel, a stage set where the quotidian could suddenly make way for the miraculous or the incredible, the horrifying or the scandalising, the spectacular or the amazing, and then fall back into step with the ordinary as if nothing had happened – though something clearly had and the world did change. In early modern Florence walls and stones spoke constantly to the people, and so did piazzas, porticoes and streets, for they were all part of a historical record that conversed with its people and conditioned their lives. The nineteen articles in this collection cover the private and public realms, the spiritual and the secular spheres, the ‘male’ and the ‘female’ spaces of this early modern city. They also represent some of the absolute best of Anglo-American and Australian historical and art-historical scholarship being done today, with the likes of John Najemy, Sharon Strocchia, Sarah Blake McHam, Philip Gavitt, Guido Ruggiero, Robert Gaston, Peter Howard (to mention just some of the contributors) writing on the relationship of space and population from their own perspectives and with the advantage of their many years of research. Although directed primarily at social and art historians, this collection is also of great interest for historians of religion and society for what it says, for example, about Florentine society at the time of St Antoninus, or Savonarola, or during the early years of the Catholic Reformation.