This book traces the sensory impressions available to people in the Middle Ages and how people interpreted them. In the first chapter Woolgar explores medieval scientific ideas about the senses, but for most of the book he explores what he calls the ‘practical’ sensory impressions and responses to them (p. 3). He explores these practicalities best through the everyday records of religious and secular households. Woolgar's earlier research makes him one of the best cultivators of these records, and much in the final three chapters in particular is freshly picked from manuscript sources. It can be difficult to bring such brief, dry records to life, but Woolgar interprets them vividly, often by comparing ideas from literary and devotional works, especially hagiography and religious drama. He writes in a brisk style and provides, courtesy of the ever-generous Yale University Press, many pretty and always helpful illustrations, especially in the discussion of colour. Overall, the book is diverting and full of interesting information. In the first few chapters, alongside the individual senses, there is much information about the things sensed, such as hand gestures in the chapter on touch. The relevance of this information is not always clarified: apparently medieval thought distinguished the senses and things sensed less rigidly – so touch could be understood as both an active and a passive sense (p. 29) and speech was ‘enumerated as a sense’ (p. 104); but these ideas could be further explained. The practicalities are more lucidly illustrated. There are good introductions to the efficacy of prayers and curses (pp. 86–8) and to the acoustic world of the liturgy, both important topics (pp. 69–73, 81–3). Chapters vi and vii offer wonderfully recherché accounts of medieval food and hygiene, on which Woolgar, as in his previous book on The great household, is excellent. One might look for more discussion of the eucharist in the chapters on taste, otherwise mentioned only briefly in this regard (p. 23), but the discussion of the ‘odour of sanctity’ and the ‘stink of sin’ (pp. 118–26, 129–32) is full and fascinating. At the end come chapters on three ‘sensory environments’: the households of bishops, of queens and of the nobility. These three chapters are all based on a few case studies, and so of necessity a little narrower than the surveys which precede them, but the variation of focus is refreshing and allows more archival research. The account of the mortification of the senses of Thomas Cantilupe, bishop of Hereford (1275–82), is especially thorough. And particularly striking is the contrast between Cantilupe's private asceticism and his outward maintenance of a typically luxurious episcopal household (pp. 193–205). As Woolgar remarks in conclusion, we cannot generalise lazily about medieval attitudes to the senses (p. 266): concurrent were stern religious ideas about starving the senses but also, in the worldly sources which Woolgar uses so well, rich indulgences of the senses, here richly described.