This volume presents fifty-two papers delivered at a three-day symposium of German, Czech and Eastern European scholars held in the Bohemian city of Příbram during May 2004. The choice of location for this meeting was pointed. An ancient centre of silver and iron ore mining, Příbram had come by the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to produce almost all the silver mined in the Habsburg empire, before its veins became exhausted in the early twentieth century. During its long period of industrial and economic development, Příbram's famous pilgrimage chapel, the fourteenth-century Svatá Hora, also underwent a dramatic expansion, particularly after the Jesuits took control of the site in 1647, eventually transforming it into a vast, fortress-style complex of Marian devotion on a hilltop just outside the city. Thus the 2004 meetings in this once flourishing centre of industry and devotion were intended to call attention to pilgrimage as part of the long, cultural and religious heritage of Bohemia as well as to commemorate the religious freedom that has come to the state since the Velvet Revolution.

Yet fifty-two papers, even in a volume of more than 700 pages, presents a buffet of incredible variety, and may leave readers with a case of intellectual indigestion. Just like many a smorgasbord, the contributions presented here are of widely divergent quality. A review can therefore only indicate the range of subject matter in the book's twelve subsections. For example, the collection begins with two overviews of pilgrimage as a historical and geographical phenomenon. The first of these, by the eminent folklorist Wolfgang Brückner, suggests that pilgrimage is a problem in the ‘history of mentalities’, but a problem that is best treated as rooted in the analysis of discourses. His subsequent remarks trace the historiography of pilgrimage, with its roots in nineteenth-century German scholarship concerned with the genesis of ‘mass movements’. Here, Brückner points to Wilsnack and other mostly holy blood pilgrimages as the inspiration for much of the first generations of scholarship that treated the practice, as figures like Ernst Breest and Peter Browe became interested in such devotions and what they revealed about heterodoxy as well as the character of the Church and of late medieval lay piety. Brückner then proceeds to show how subsequent attention to pilgrimage has broadened to include a range of issues, not only in the history of religion and piety, but in the history of art, folklore and material culture. While one might wish for a longer and fuller treatment of all the various foci and scholarship that Brückner identifies in his historiography, his paper nevertheless presents a good overview of the subject's intellectual trajectories.

Less satisfying is Antoni Jackowski's examination of ‘The geography of pilgrimage’ that follows. Jackowski divides the pilgrimages of the modern world into eleven ‘macro-regions’ before turning to examine, in only the most cursory fashion, some of the distinctiveness of the divisions within his typology. His contribution lacks footnotes, and might have benefitted from a closer attention to some of the overarching theories about the relationship between pilgrimage, space and geography, including those presented in the works of scholars like Victor Turner and Mary and Sydney Nolan. Jackowski's English text, moreover, is poorly translated, and what is presented seems to obscure much of his meaning, often to the point of unintelligibility. The problem of poor translation diminishes the effectiveness of other English-language papers in the volume.

The range in quality displayed in these first two pieces is symptomatic of problems throughout the volume: one finds many contributions that appear to be of only antiquarian interest side by side with those that speak to issues of broader importance, issues that is, that are currently being discussed by historians of late medieval, early modern and modern religion and culture. Among the contributions with a narrow focus are Petr Hlavàček's paper on pilgrims' footwear (pp. 139–43), Roman Zaoral's study of several Bohemian coins found in the archaeological trove at Caesarea (pp. 73–9) and Thomas T. Müller's examination of the relationship between German pilgrimages and the history of brewing (pp. 317–31). It is not that such papers might not be useful to some scholars at some given time or place, but scattered within such a disparate body of work they tend to obscure the impact of those contributions that are more broadly addressed. Many of the more expansive articles treat the relationship between the religious orders and pilgrimage; the ideal of pilgrimage as reflected in late medieval devotional literature and sermons; and the differences between long-distance pilgrimages and those to local shrines. But overall the inclusiveness of this collection – with its multiplicity of foci in the history of art, social history, folklore, ecclesiastical considerations and theological issues – tends to obscure, rather than illuminate, the relationships the editors identify as existing between ‘pilgrimage’ and ‘European culture’, even though the range of subjects they have presented points to the vibrancy of pilgrimage as a religious practice across many centuries.

The publisher, Peter Lang, advertises this as the first volume in a projected series of studies on European pilgrimage. Certainly, this book, which has a largely Czech and Bohemian focus, testifies to the large numbers of scholars now working on pilgrimage in Central and Eastern Europe. It also reveals what must have been a fruitful three days spent discussing and listening in Bohemia in 2004. Yet books are different from conferences, a fact that seems to be being quickly forgotten in these days of obligatory conference proceedings. For a book to have much impact other than as a mere artefact of a few days spent in scholarly bonhomie, it must be more than just a collection of work loosely based around an overarching theme. In its future endeavours it is to be hoped that Lang will encourage editors to exercise more restraint and require them to tailor their volumes so that they are ultimately more than a record of oral performances. Instead its volumes could make a contribution to how the practice of pilgrimage, an admittedly rising area of scholarly interest for some time now, should be discussed, examined and assessed by scholars of religion. And finally, if this series continues to present work that has been translated from other languages, or that is published by scholars whose first language is not English or German, Lang should introduce adequate safeguards to ensure the integrity of the translations.