These essays examine various aspects of the negotiation of power in late medieval and early modern urban communities with a view to understanding the formation of identities. They are all carefully crafted empirical case-studies showing considerable skill in unlocking often intractable and partial sources. There are occasional forays into theory, as most helpfully in Mark Merry's essay which touches on the relationship between individual and community, but in general there is little attempt to explain what ‘negotiating the political’ might mean, or what its relationship to issues of identity actually is. To the extent that politics is about relationships of power involving human actors, all politics is negotiated, and one begins to wonder what the force of the term is. The volume would have benefited from a firmer conceptual grasp and by engagement by all the authors with the concept of power. As Caroline Barron notes in her afterword, it is the diversity of urban experience that most clearly emerges; we might have got a little further in identifying the variables had the authors been held to a tighter brief.

But that is not to detract from the fact that the essays are individually extremely useful and often insightful. They are grouped around essays which explore the articulation of relationships within the town and those that look at relations between towns and the state. Mark Merry shows how an individual (the mercer John Smith) could have a decisive impact on the formation of urban identity through charitable benefactions channelled through a particular gild: the management of the gifted resources and the commemoration of the donor as an exemplary citizen focused the energies and imaginations of the leading citizens of Bury St Edmunds. Karsten Igel and Sheila Sweetinburgh both use studies of civic ritual and its contestation to illuminate aspects of urban identity in late medieval Osnabruck and sixteenth-century Sandwich respectively. Igel's particularly impressive essay shows how the reorientation of public space signalled shifts in power relations, both between the elite and the citizens, and between citizens and cathedral. Sweetinburgh looks at other aspects of lay–clerical tensions, showing how disputes over the place of the local clergy in a procession precipitated changes in the local clergy which assisted the reformation process, though the precise mechanisms and motives of change remain elusive. Paula Simpson adds to the tally of politically contentious early modern sermons in her richly textured account of the 1593 attack by Anthony Kingsmill on the personnel of the Canterbury ecclesiastical courts, worthy he said of the flaying meted out by Cambyses to the unjust judge. She exonerates the judges, but there was something decidedly whiffy about the Canterbury courts, and the essay might have benefited from a little wider contextualization in the broader controversies over the ecclesiastical courts. Claire Bartram and Mary Dixon remind us of the social depth of political engagement in their discussion of John Tooke's dialogues on the Dover harbour project, the largest civil engineering project of Elizabethan England. Tooke offers a specifically ‘Dovorian’ perspective, but also shows the highly charged nature of the local arguments about the technical aspects of the challenge. The text, incidentally, is crying out for comparison with Reginald Scott's account of the same project (included in Holinshed and noted here incidentally), which shows the local expertise of the Romney marshmen clashing with the London ‘experts’.

In the second section there are essays on relations between the prince and the town using the case-studies of Bristol, the towns of Holland and of Prague: given the commonality of theme, it would have been particularly helpful if comparisons had been encouraged in this section. Peter Fleming charts the relationship between Bristol and the crown in the political conflicts of the age; in each of the key moments there appear to have been a small number of committed partisans with the majority acknowledging the realities of power, but a key factor seems to have been the role of the surrounding magnates: even towns as large as Bristol had to acknowledge the webs of local seigniorial power in which they were bound. Serge ter Braake focuses on brokerage relationships between the towns of Holland and the princely administration: towns maintained close relationships with key individuals at the centre in order to mitigate the force of princely pressure and to promote their own agendas. One is reminded forcefully of the power of interpersonal relationships and face-to-face contact in making government work. Christian-Frederik Felskau's essay on Prague makes few concessions to the uninitiated, but is a rewarding exploration of the conflicted relationship between the four constituent towns of Prague, the crown, and the local nobility in a confessionally divided environment. It falls to Caroline Barron to pull the threads together in her elegant afterword which does succeed in drawing out a few of the variables that had eluded the individual contributors. In short, a worthwhile collection, but one where the whole is perhaps less than the sum of the parts.