Kirsi Salonen and Sari Katajala-Peltomaa's edited volume, Church Belief in the Middle Ages: Popes, Saints, and Crusaders, is a valuable collection of essays written in tribute to pioneering Finnish academic Christian Krötzl. The essays in this volume are as varied as the interests of Krötzl, spanning from criminal trials to hagiographies to holy wars, and are written by leading scholars of medieval thought, many of whom have connections to the Baltic region.

The volume is organized into three sections. In “Papal Administration,” authors delve into the logistics of papal bureaucracy during the late Middle Ages, both with regard to analyzing larger histories of interconnected networks that formed across borders and to charting the individual careers of papal administrators. The next section, “Saints and Miracles,” considers how different groups of people interpreted sainthood. Through the careful synthesis of medical texts, saints' lives, and papal decrees, these articles trace how individuals from popes to peasants crafted images of sainthood that resonated with their own lived experiences. The volume's final section, “Crusades and Conversion,” considers the landscape of crusade and holy war in the Baltic region and Finland, regions which have received considerably less attention from scholars than the Levantine Crusades. Despite the different focuses of these essays, they are all bound by their analysis of the effects of papal power across medieval Europe, one that manifests in ways as varied as maintaining bureaucratic institutions, conferring sainthood, and declaring holy war.