This is a valuable collection which, aimed at an undergraduate audience as a primary source reader, serves its purpose very well. Maryanne Kowaleski has gathered together over 150 separate sources in order to present a comprehensive view of approaches to the medieval town, and with some passing reference to earlier periods. Dividing her collection into 13 main sections, she begins, in her first section, with a pre- and early medieval glance at some early sources relevant to the study of towns. These include descriptions of everyday life in Roman towns and the development of early medieval towns as separate centres of power and resistance. Thereafter, in the remaining sections, Kowaleski turns her attention to a thematic compilation. There is often some chronological development within and, to a degree, between sections but the main thrust, and suitably so, is upon themes and their potential interpretation. Thus, in separate sections Kowaleski presents a series of sources which, in their turn, consider, inter alia, communes and external relations, conflict, the economy of towns, jurisdiction and finance, the family and the role of women in towns, the cultural, social and religious context and the environment of town life. An important theme for Kowaleski, as she explains in her introduction to the collection, is the capacity of the documentation to reveal the discrete qualities of urban living in comparison with a rural experience in the period. This may not necessarily come across to modern general readers at all points unless they are also familiar with contemporary rural sources, and what may strike them more is the intrusion of the rural into the urban context, especially the prevalence of livestock wandering in an urban environment which some of the sources gathered here describe. We might also note, of course, that there was enormous variety in what might count as an urban experience just as the distinction between town and village, certainly in terms of scale, tends to blur at the lower end of the spectrum. For the greater part, though, Kowaleski draws on what is evidently urban, especially from the records of the greater provincial towns and the major European cities.

The majority of the selections are based upon documentary evidence, though this is not confined to narrative accounts, but Kowaleski takes pains to extend the range of her material and includes some representations of dress, archaeological finds, house plans, etc., offering the student other potential routes into an understanding of the medieval town. The selections are approached sensitively and the categories are treated quite liberally so that, for instance, discussion of urban tensions includes not only accounts of riot and significant unrest but also, inter alia, accounts of runaway slaves, labour relations and distinctions in wealth. Inevitably the categories and organization by chapter generate a degree of thematic overlap: a document selected for a discussion of the urban economy might as easily sit under the heading of the regulation of the medieval town or the environment of town life, say, but this is not a problem, simply a reflection on the variety of interpretation capable of being directed at this material. A reasonably full index also helps here in allowing navigation around themes additional to those employed as chapter headings.

Within the documents there is a range of information which includes odd, sometimes uncomfortable, and often unexpected insights, as in the anxious observations of a late fourteenth-century Genoese functionary in attempting, whilst carrying out his principal activities, to secure a young Romanian slave girl for Francesco Datini, the stipulation of fines in Copenhagen guild for those who could not hold their ale or of the life and death of the 120-year-old Bonaccorso di Pietro. Others are redolent with the sounds of life, and not only town life, as in the account by Fitzstephen of ice-skating in late twelfth-century London, or the early fourteenth-century revels in the High Street following a wake at Oxford which resulted in another death. Alongside such random snippets the broader themes of medieval urban history are certainly brought out in this collection and there is much here to which those using the primer as a teaching resource can point as useful example. In her selection of already-published sources, that is where she is relying on previous translated editions of a source and not her own translation or a translation which she has commissioned (of both of which there are a good number), Kowaleski does not always use the most recent edition or translation. While this is not a significant problem in terms of the aims of the present publication, it does allow some eccentricities and rather dated interpretations to intrude. Thus, for instance, the report of risings at Bristol in 1316, taken from the Vita Edwardi Secundi of which there are two more recent editions, relies on a nineteenth-century source-book which, presumably itself employing the earlier Rolls Series edition of Stubbs, identifies this as the work of the ‘monk of Malmesbury’ and employs some fairly antiquated terminology (Aymer de Valence appears as Adolmar, etc.).

The volume includes, as already noted, a short introduction which, in its style and approach, emphasizes again the intention to provide a primer for students, directing a putative readership to the key interpretative issues associated with the sources gathered here. A chronological table and a list of sources are also included, as are a series of research questions which, following each source, are intended to encourage further reflection on the material to hand.