The subject of this book (its title translates as ‘The cursing church: ritual and ceremonial forms of excommunication in the Middle Ages’) concerns the medieval ceremonies devised to turn the act of excomunication into an increasingly public event. Excommunication (or anathema) was at its most basic a curse leading to social exclusion. In ecclesiastical terms it meant a person's exclusion from the community of Christians, deprived of all forms of pastoral care and destined ultimately to eternal death, that is deprived of the means to ensure salvation after death. The Carolingian Church developed a liturgy surrounding this act to underline the seriousness of the punishment for major crimes. Part i of this book is an introduction (pp. 1–53); it sets the scene, arguing convincingly that a study of the ceremony of excommunication can teach us a great deal about the practicalities of being banned from the Church. Inevitably, a history of ritual and ceremony belongs to the realm of anthropological historiography, hence social theories of anthropology are presented as an explanatory framework. Part ii of the book (pp. 54–300) sketches the early history of the ecclesiastical concept of excommunication with the oldest forms of ritual dating from Reims in 900. After a discussion of the forms of, and variations in, the ceremony it gives an overview of the liturgical writings on the subject by Regino of Prüm (906–10), the Romano-Germanicum pontifical (950– c. 963), Burchard of Worms (1008–12), Ivo of Chartres (1091–6) and Gratian (c. 1140). In the late thirteenth century it was the lawyer-liturgist William Durand, bishop of Mende (1285–96) who composed what became the standard pontifical with an extensive and standardised version of the excommunication ceremony. He included a section on absolution. Although right from the early use of banning there had always been an escape clause for reconciliation, Durand is the most important medieval scholar to explain the legal steps that needed to be taken for this to be put into effect. The canonical and liturgical sources contain detailed descriptions of the ceremonies staged by priests to perform excommunication by speech and gestures, for example twelve priests trample on as many burning candles on the ground in a ritual symbolising the damnatio of twelve excommunicants. Most of the early cases of excommunication took place on Sundays, or feastdays, after mass in a church. The context was usually a conflict between ecclesiastical institutions (bishops, church or monastery) and a wealthy secular layman. Excommunication was the only tool at the Church's disposal to inflict its own (spiritual) punishment on lay culprits if secular rulers refused to intervene or in the eyes of the Church failed to exercise justice. It was a matter of religious exclusion versus the use of arms. Jaser has compiled facinating surveys of body parts being cursed in the excommunication formula, for example table 20 (p. 195) lists the parts of the body singled out most for cursing in the ceremonies: head, eyes, mouth, neck, belly and feet top the list, followed by ears, hands and legs. Interestingly, cursing of genitals features only twice. The third part of the book (pp. 301–73) discusses the possible end of ‘the cursing Church’, which Jaser identifies as the late medieval evolution of the excommunication ritual between canonical innovation and narrative compensation. This section deals with the increasing sophistication of thinking about excommunication in different settings, varying from a temporal liminal concept (a specific church or local area), to more abstract liminalities, such as spiritual excommunication (the devil takes a person away and ruins his chances of a good death), social excommunication (exclusion from other Christians) and posthumous excommunication (exclusion from resurrection). In other words, legal and religious thought concerning the community of Christians developed increasingly real and metaphorical spaces from which the excommunicant could be excluded. The fourth part of the book (pp. 374–524) concentrates on the papal use of excommunication formulae in the later Middle Ages up to the early sixteenth century. From the thirteenth century onwards the papacy began to use extensive rituals for the issuing of general excommunications on Maundy Thursday. The first such statement Bulla de coena Domini dates from the time of Pope Gregory ix in 1229 reissued with extensive rewritings in 1303 (Boniface viii), 1341 (Benedict xii), 1363 and 1368 (Urban v) and finally 1521 (Leo x). This section also contains late medieval images of the architectural spaces from which popes proclaimed these bulls. Pope Boniface viii's loggia at the Lateran palace can be seen in a painting attributed to Giotto, on a (copy of) a Lateran fresco and on Maarten van Heemskerck's drawing (Figures 3–5 at pp. 405, 408, 420); this loggia was the direct inspiration for the late sixteenth-century one built in the Vatican palace. Jaser's conclusion is set out in the fifth and final part (pp. 525–34), where he argues that the earliest local excomunication rituals from the Franco-German and Anglo-Irish areas of northern Europe found their way into major canon law collections that eventually became applicable to all Christians across Europe. The variety of liturgical rituals of cursing one person (or a small group of persons) as part of local disputes developed gradually into one generally acknowledged ceremony of excommunication employed by popes over large sections of Christendom, most obviously those who left the Church during the Reformation. This is a very important book that I hope will be translated into other modern languages, especially English, in order to reach the wide audience that it fully deserves.