Over the last few decades, historians have become increasingly interested in guilds that were not involved in the organization of labour, such as chambers of rhetoric, religious confraternities or archery and shooting guilds. Laura Crombie has contributed to this line of enquiry by investigating the formation and the activities of the archery and crossbow guilds of the county of Flanders. The focus of her monograph is on the roles these guilds played within the urban communities of which they were part, and on the use of these guilds as tools to represent urban civic values. To do so, she relies on a wide range of sources, such as financial accounts, charters, chronicles, guild books and lists of guild membership. As the author indicates, the high degree of urbanization and the splendid preservation of the archival material makes Flanders a useful case-study to analyse the archery and shooting guilds as well as their role in urban society. Thanks to a concise yet complete introduction (pp. 6–15), this book is also accessible to readers who are not familiar with the history of the Low Countries.

The monograph is divided into six chapters. The opening chapter discusses the origins of the archery and shooting guilds as well as their role in civic defence and peacekeeping. Although myths about the foundation of such guilds usually situate their origins in a distant past, these guilds apparently emerged in the second and third decades of the fourteenth century. Their main duty was to ensure urban security, but they also were called upon to serve the count of Flanders, the overlord of the towns. The second chapter addresses the organization, structure and membership arrangements of the guilds. General trends are sketched for the entire county, but the bulk of the analysis is a prosopography of the members of the archery and crossbow guilds of Bruges, which reveals that ‘guild brothers represented a cross-section of civic society’ (p. 72), including noblemen, poorters (i.e. citizens of a town), urban politicians, members of the financial elite and so forth. The third chapter discusses the social and devotional activities of the archery and shooting guilds. Activities like the yearly papegay-shoot – a competition with the effigy of a bird as its target – and the common meals strengthened bonds between the various members of a guild. Following up on this line of enquiry, Crombie has paid close attention to moments of disunity within and between the guilds as well as to the strategies, developed by the guilds, to cope with these frictions. The shooting guilds also were devotional communities in which the sense of togetherness was strengthened through masses, funerals for deceased members and investment in chapels that in most cases were dedicated to the guilds’ patron saints.

The fourth chapter puts the guilds in their wider context. As Crombie correctly points out, the archery and shooting guilds enjoyed the support of various social groups and political actors. For various reasons, urban governments, the nobility and the Flemish counts – which often had conflicting interests – all eagerly provided support to these guilds. Using the spectacular shooting competitions in the fifth chapter, Crombie probes the guilds’ ideals of peace and civic honour and how those ideals were performed vis-à-vis interested parties. This chapter proceeds from an original methodology, namely an analysis of the language used in the letters of invitation to these competitions but also of the entrance ceremonies of the guilds before the start of a shooting competition. During such ceremonies, notions about civic honour and urban identity could be articulated and expressed towards various audiences. The sixth chapter is also original in that Crombie has used the guilds to reconstruct the development of urban networks within and beyond the County of Flanders. The shooting competitions, she concludes, were means for ‘enhancing the Common Good and unity of Flanders’ (p. 220).

Contrary to earlier research, this work privileges a relational perspective: the archery and shooting guilds were embedded in urban society, and their role in urban network formation is emphasized. Also, these guilds serve as a lens through which the often strained relations between urban and princely authorities were recalibrated. This relational perspective is without any doubt the main asset of this study, and in this respect, it is somewhat odd that the author has not situated her research in a broader historiographical framework, leaving the reader with the question how this study intervenes exactly in current debates on the social and cultural history of late medieval Europe. This remark does not, however, call into question the scholarly relevance of Laura Crombie's book. This is a well-written, original and thought-provoking work, in which broader trends are combined with well-chosen case-studies, and it deserves the attention of historians with an interest in cultural and social history.