This volume contains twelve articles (six in English and six in French), based on papers presented at the sixteenth symposium of the International Medieval Sermon Studies Society (St-Maurice, Switzerland, 18–22 July 2008), along with a pithy but instructive introduction by the editor. One article, on preaching and crusade propaganda, was previously published in Medieval Sermon Studies liii [2009], 11–32), but is republished here because of its relevance to the volume. The collected contents explore a wide range of preaching traditions, from different locales and in different languages, from the sixth through fifteenth centuries, though the coverage skews in favour of preaching in the medieval Latin West. Ten articles focus on various aspects of preaching in different European locations during the ‘high’ and late Middle Ages; one entry examines the preaching of the anti-Chalcedonian patriarch Severus of Antioch; another addresses twelfth-century Islamic preaching in Almoravid Ceuta. The very concept of preaching as related to ‘political society’ is, as the editor wisely notes, quite broad, and at first glance the articles contained within the volume seem to struggle to find a clear, unifying theme. Paradoxically, this may also be one of the volume's greatest strength. The breadth and ambiguity inherent in the organising principle of the collection allows for a considerable range of topical coverage. The articles in this collection reveal the great variety of circumstances under which preachers pressed sermons into the service of objectives well beyond what conventional thinking might regard as the ‘normal’ purview of preaching. Constituted as they were on the primacy of a common faith, late antique and medieval societies made no allowance for the modern, secular distinction between ‘Church and State’. The spiritual and the temporal impinged on one another constantly; they justified and reinforced one another. How could one even attempt to separate the one from the other in phenomena like the crusades, the sectarian controversies of Byzantine late antiquity, or the civil and social concerns of the Lollards in late medieval England (to choose just three of the topics addressed in the collection)? Preaching and political society challenges a modern-inflected understanding of what preaching was and reminds us that, in pre-modern worlds in which the ‘religious’ and the ‘political’ were inextricably linked, there were few subjects indeed that would not have been fair game for preachers. Uneven quality is one of the risks of any collection of revised conference proceedings; happily, the quality of the entries in this volume is uniformly high (though some inevitably explore their subject matter in greater depth than do others). Each article includes a useful bibliography. This book is a welcome contribution to the literature on late antique and medieval preaching; it is to be hoped that it inspires continuing scholarship along the lines that it has laid out.