This translation into English of Jacques Le Goff's final book, A la Recherche de temps sacré: Jacques de Voragine et la ‘Légend dorée’ (2011), is an accessible introduction to the Golden legend, an encyclopedic thirteenth-century compendium of stories about the life of Christ and the saints. Composed by the Dominican Jacobus de Voragine (c. 1228–98), the Golden legend became the most widely read text of the later Middle Ages and second only to the Bible in terms of the sheer number of surviving manuscripts (over one thousand copies), vernacular translations and early printed editions. Jacobus organised his work according to the liturgical calendar, beginning with Advent to emphasise the centrality of Christ's incarnation in salvation history. After a brief introduction to the life of Jacobus and his patristic and medieval influences, Le Goff takes the reader on a discursive tour of the Golden legend that reads like the learned gloss of an old master, filled with explanatory digressions drawn from the author's deep well of knowledge about medieval Christianity. The book is selective in its coverage and often personal in its reflections. On several occasions Le Goff refers to Jacobus as ‘our Dominican’ and makes at least two analogies to modern French literature (the book's title is clearly an homage to Proust, but unfortunately this is not discussed in the text; and on p. 46 he compares the social machinations of the spurned fiancé of St Lucy to a character in a Balzac novel). The thirteenth century was the age of the summa – comprehensive summations of theological and philosophical information used as tools for teaching and instruments of reference – and one of Le Goff's most compelling insights is to read the Golden legend as a summa on the meaning of Christian time. Unlike his glass-jawed masterpiece La Naissance du purgatoire (1981; trans. as The birth of purgatory [1986]), this book does not forward a thesis that will incite a generation of lively scholarly debate. In search of sacred time is none the less important on its own terms, not only as the last work by the most renowned French medievalist of the late twentieth century, but also as a sensitive rumination on the way in which medieval people organised and understood the passage of time, ‘one of the great gifts of the Creator to humanity’ (p. 91).