Late medieval Bruges was the commercial capital of northern Europe, a bustling entrepôt of international trade. In the fifteenth century it also became a jewel of the Burgundian court, a favourite city, a centre of patronage and a site for great ceremonial events. Andrew Brown's book on ritual and civic religion in late medieval Bruges is a bracingly smart excavation of Bruges's ceremonial pulse, a study grounded in extensive, patient work in ecclesiastical and civic sources. Brown's study is impressive for its empiricism – the archival research in difficult sources is exacting and deep – and for its theoretical familiarity with ritual as a scholarly field. The author wisely eschews a single model of interpretation, opting instead to allow the sources to guide his reconstruction of Bruges's densely layered ceremonial landscape. What emerges is a portrait of a city whose ceremonial calendar was both crowded and diverse, a mirror, Brown argues, of Bruges's hybrid, commercial makeup, and of its many and competing corporate groups, from gilds to religious brotherhoods. One of the book's most fundamental contributions is to complicate and nuance the city-state model of statecraft that has framed much of the scholarship on urban life in the Low Countries. In the first instance, Brown pays abiding attention to the clerical role in urban ritual, from the elite canons of St Donatian to the lesser clergy who managed obit masses at the city's many altars and chapels. More generally, he explores how religious practice and expression ordered civic life. This may be obvious, but religion has been woefully understudied by historians more interested in politics and warfare. Brown also refuses to interpret the growing power and presence of the Burgundian court in the fifteenth century as a top-down directive to control Bruges's public life. True, the number of general processions in honour of Burgundian events, both political and familial, grew, and so did their ceremonial presence in Bruges's calendar of feast days and festive activities, from urban jousts to the famed Holy Blood procession. But there was as much civic investment in such directives as there were state mandates, and their complex dance of interactions is better seen as a series of artful and mutually reinforcing negotiations. In Brown's comprehensive treatment, Bruges's public world is one crowded with competing claims for public legitimacy among a field of players, from aldermen to clergy, from gildsmen to merchants. They endowed masses, ordered processions, negotiated among themselves and with the dukes of Burgundy, all in the name of legitimacy, salvation and the public good. Brown's study is one of the finest considerations of medieval Bruges and it will be considered the standard work for decades to come.