On the surface this book is limited to an obscure medieval Cistercian monastery in the duchy of Silesia, now in south-western Poland, but Piotr Górecki makes use of the records of this monastery, compiled into the Henryków book, to provide reflections about the meaning of the concept of a medieval frontier, the idea of medieval Europe and the ‘small world’ of a medieval locality. In this manner his introduction to his translation of the Henryków book does the same for the monastery that Robert Brentano did for a little-known Italian town in his last book, A new world in a small place (1994). By looking at one geographical location in terms of how its inhabitants expressed themselves and in considering the way in which they furnished their lives, Górecki, as Brentano before him, has made obscure but pregnant worlds come alive. The Henryków book, composed in two stages in about 1268 and around 1310, reveals much about the monastery, its origins and development, as in a section on ‘The reason for the name Henryków’ or ‘About the place where the cloister is’. Here the compilator admits that there once lived peasants ‘in the place where the cloister now stands’ (p. 102). The medieval Cistercians usually tried to tell the world that their monasteries were founded in places of desolation, but here the truth emerges. The explanation is given, however, that the peasants quarrelled and killed each other, while the others departed, and so the monks could make their entrance. Górecki makes impressive use of his source in terms of what it reveals not only about agrarian history but also about monastic mentalities. The monks' description of their world can be a point of departure for understanding how eastern and western Europe belonged together in the Middle Ages. The Cistercians, usually seen primarily in their western European success, also cultivated the religious and agrarian soil of eastern Europe. My one small criticism of this book is based on its surprising silence about studies made in the last quarter century of Cistercians in Scandinavian countries which would have provided good comparisons with the Silesian material. Górecki's commendable familiarity with key medieval studies from the last decades leaves out perhaps more provincial and less theoretical Cistercian research. Otherwise, however, this book is a welcome introduction to a Europe that more than ever after the end of Communism needs to be looked upon and studied as a cultural and economic whole.