This book began life as a collection of papers delivered in March 2003 to the annual meeting of the Renaissance Society of America in Toronto. It comprises fifteen chapters, covering fraternity historiography, art and architecture, poor relief, drama and a number of other political and social roles of fraternities. These are pursued for the best part in local or regional case studies, from the thirteenth to the eighteenth century, mainly based in Italy (seven chapters), South America (two), the Low Countries (two), France (one) and Ireland (one).

Perhaps the most notable chapters are Colm Lennon's comparison of the forms of lay religious association in Irish Gaelic, and older English, communities during the Reformation, Dylan Reid's study of a Rouen gild in war-torn sixteenth-century France acting as a vehicle for re-establishing social peace, and Susan Verdi Webster's study of the friendly rivalry of gilds as seen through their patronage of architecture in colonial America. These three pieces stand out as being particularly elegant and incisive contributions to this volume, and to fraternity studies more generally.

Two chapters, by Dylan Reid and a concluding study by Nicholas Terpstra, explore Robert Puttnam's idea of social capital as a means of understanding what gilds helped to foster within their communities. The idea of social capital, as Reid points out, is a similar concept to John Bossy's ‘social miracle’, and is helpful when exploring what fraternities brought to communities. It also allows fraternity historians to tap into a contemporary school of thought with potentially useful insights.

One of the drawbacks of this book is that the better chapters, unfortunately, expose some of the weaker contributions: for example, Webster's well-written essay on gilds in colonial America has the unfortunate side effect of exposing the lack of structure of the other study of gilds in America by Emma Sordo. A more rigorous editorial judgement might have excluded some studies which may well have made good conference papers, but perhaps should have warranted further research before publication. Christopher Black's main contribution is a case in point here – an interesting study that lacks a conclusion because the source material apparently dries up; the essay is therefore left hanging in the air and one is left wondering whether it should have been included at all.

What else is notable about this volume? One significant issue is the uneven coverage of European fraternities: there are no studies of Scandinavian, central and eastern European, British or Iberian fraternities. This may be, as the editors suggest, a reflection of the stronger tradition of English-language work on Italy, and possibly also the ebbs and flows of research elsewhere, but the exploration of broader themes is not helped when the coverage is so skewed.

This limited coverage does cause problems in the discussions of religion. When religion is analysed, it is often in terms of clerical and lay rivalry. Although this will doubtless always remain a relevant theme for fraternity studies, it ought to be possible to weave in the apparent absence of this rivalry from the English evidence. Unfortunately, the English gilds are rarely discussed, and when they are, by Terpstra, the prevalence of the argument about rivalry leads him to some very odd conclusions.

Both this reviewer and Virginia (not, pace Terpstra, Victoria) Bainbridge have discussed the role of the fraternities in lay piety more generally. My own work came to two conclusions: the first was that there was a lot more to lay piety than the religious routines offered by the gilds in England, so it cannot be taken as shorthand for the totality of the religious life of the laity more generally. The second point was that, since clergy were often members of gilds in large numbers, ‘gild’ piety was not the same as ‘lay’ piety since it reflected the pious practices of the clergy too. Quite how Terpstra turns these arguments into one about social control is completely beyond the understanding of this reviewer, and shows just how far he is immersed in a mindset that is almost completely irrelevant for the English evidence.

So where does this study leave us? Broadly speaking, there are three main themes that fraternity studies, including this volume, gravitate towards: the first is the gild as an example of the concept of fraternity. Terpstra's study, following Bossy and Le Bras, does this. The second is the fraternity as a particular form, or series of forms, of organisation – Lennon's chapter deals with some of the issues around this; but it also includes how parishioners organised themselves, and understanding what we can learn from the forms and structures they used. A third theme is around fraternities as windows on other matters – religion, politics, attitudes to society, neighbourliness and so on. By far the bulk of this collection of essays falls into this category.

What would certainly be useful, then, is a collection that looked at these three themes equally; and that looked at spatial and temporal variations within each one in a more comprehensive manner. As fraternity studies move forward, it is perhaps time that historians took up the challenge that this presents.