Lawrence Besserman's Sacred and secular includes five literary and five historical essays, all more or less centred on the titular theme. These are prefaced and ably introduced by the editor, who stresses the fluid boundaries between the sacred and the secular. Then Cyril Aslanov shows how the vidas (lives) of troubadours were influenced by the Legenda aurea. Thomas Duncan explores the interplay between sacred and secular in Old and Middle English literatures. More obscurely, Alan J. Fletcher relates the book's theme to metonymy in the English poem Pearl. In a substantial, theologically informed essay on the Canterbury pilgrimage, Alastair Minnis deals with two economies, material and spiritual, in regard to indulgences and their sale. Murray Roston's thesis, clever if not wholly convincing, discovers scriptural echoes in the Merchant of Venice's clash between the profit economy and Christian values. Lior Barshack's ‘anthropological reading’ of the Gregorian Reform unhelpfully superimposes theory upon poor Gerhart Ladner. Esther Cohen, on the other hand, impressively demonstrates how the dialectics of pain passed from the acta martyrum to later medieval legal texts. Rita Copeland's discourse on rhetoric is also dialectical, here between the sermo humilis and the sophists. Historiographically, Robert M. Stein focuses on the eleventh-century Deeds of the bishops of Cambrai as a means of revealing the rise of a societas christiana. This is a solid, well-crafted, workmanlike historical essay. For Miri Rubin, the eucharist was the defining badge of medieval Christian identities, and the moment of the elevation became the performative climax of the mass, all of which Luther denounced. Sacramental as well as communitarian implications are touched upon in Rubin's complex argument.

Heffernan and Burman's Scripture and pluralism, again a collection with an intriguing theme, struggles to contain a rich and diverse selection of essays. This time it is the contrasting medieval scriptural exegetical traditions in Judaism, Islam and Christianity. In his introduction Burman highlights inter-communal aspects of medieval approaches to the biblical text. Heffernan discusses the use of the sacred name of Christ by early Christian martyrs, following and extending the Maccabean use of Adonai. The subject of Sidney H. Griffith's lucid, masterly conspectus is the scriptural as well as rational arguments which (up to the twelfth century) Christians and Moslems employed to justify their respective beliefs. Frans van Liere, following nobly in the path blazed by Beryl Smalley, probes Andrew of St Victor and his discriminating indebtedness to St Jerome and Jewish exegesis. Michael A. Signer continues this Victorine link with the twelfth-century Paris rabbis. The canons of St Victor appreciated the rabbinic literal sense of the Hebrew Bible, while rejecting any Jewish claims that impacted upon Christian interpretations. The Victorines again figure in Constant J. Mews's beautifully clear exposition of difficult material, the relationship between the book of nature (or the mundus sensilis) and the Bible. The world, too, could be read like a book. In a perceptive study, Lesley Smith considers the thirteenth-century bishop of Paris, William of Auvergne, and his attitude towards law and faith reflected in the holy books of Jews and Muslims; for the former, reverence mingles with rejection; for the latter, the verdict is insanity. Anne Marie Wolf does a good job in presenting the views of the fifteenth-century Castilian theologian Juan de Segovia on Pope Eugenius iv (Lucifer) and, more interestingly, converting, instead of crusading against, the Ottomans. It would take time. After all, Jesus preached for three years, but it took three centuries for his law to hold sway in the world. Andrew Gow challenges the ‘Whig history’ of the Reformation in a panoramic, historiograpically rich trawl through later medieval religion. E. Ann Matter competently examines the sixteenth-century court prophetess, Lucia da Narni, a follower of Savonarola, and her sometimes idiosyncratic use of the Bible. Bernard McGinn, characteristically in full control of his material, offers us an illuminating survey of western apocalypticism and its various relationships to violence from the Jewish apocalyptical writings of the Second Temple to the seventeenth century, along with apt musings, sotto voce, about the present. One niggle. The collection is mistitled. There was no religious ‘pluralism’ in the Middle Ages, as that word is commonly understood today, only multiple religious worlds that oftentimes collided.