Jerusalem exercised a powerful hold over the imaginations of Europeans throughout the Middle Ages, both as a physical destination for pilgrims and as a symbolic presence in exegetical, liturgical and devotional literature. Built memorials and reminders of Jerusalem in the West have recently received considerable attention, but the main theme of Imagining Jerusalem in the medieval West is the presence of Jerusalem and the Holy Land in a variety of western textual sources between the seventh and fifteenth century. Eight of the nine essays in the collection were originally delivered as papers at a conference of the same title as the volume in Oxford in 2009. Four of the essays – Thomas O'Loughlin's on the plans in Adomnán's De locis sanctis, Catherine Delano-Smith's on plans accompanying commentaries on Ezekiel, Lesley Smith's on plans in Nicholas of Lyra's Postilla litteralis and Mary Carruthers's on a manuscript of the Postilla without a text – deal with plans of single structures in Jerusalem. The three that follow are on maps of Jersualem: Andrea Worm's essay on a plan of the city in Peter of Poitiers's Compendium historiae in genealogia Christi, Hanna Vorholt's study of the plans of Jerusalem in two thirteenth-century manuscripts, and Evelyn Edson's on Marino Sanudo's plan of Jerusalem in the Liber secretorum fidelium crucis. The final two essays, by way of counterpoint, turn their attention to monumental copies of Jerusalem's buildings – in Kathryn Rudy's essay on a fifteenth-century English pilgrimage guide – and, in Bianca Kühnel's contribution, to re-creations of Jerusalem in landscapes and views. Some striking themes emerge from these closely argued pieces of text-based research: not least the way in which the production of artefacts representing Jerusalem reflects developing European aesthetics and intellectual trends. This is a thought-provoking and original collection.

Denys Pringle's volume of new translations of pilgrimage accounts to the Holy Land from the thirteenth century brings together in English a few well-known sources, such as the accounts by Wilbrand of Oldenburg (1211–12), Thietmar (1217–18) and Burchard of Mount Sion (1274–85), together with a larger number of lesser-known accounts, such as Geoffrey of Beaulieu's account of Louis ix's pilgrimage in 1251, and some of the anonymous old French pilgrimage guides originally edited by Tobler and Molinier. Pringle's careful scholarship is evident in his excellent introduction to the texts as well as in the very full footnotes. This is a welcome and valuable addition to Ashgate's Crusade Texts series.