Building on her earlier work on family, women, marriage, and testaments, Martha Howell now offers a more encompassing view on the late Middle Ages. She does so by showing how sociocultural rules and practices of townspeople in late medieval Europe were altered by, and interacted with, the process of commercialization. Indeed, commercialization is one of the main features of this period, although the pace and nature of the process showed big variations. Other studies have shown that although Flanders was highly urbanized and had thriving commodity markets, it was not in the vanguard of capitalism, especially because land and labor markets remained fairly small and restricted, with small-scale, independent producers playing a prominent role in society and politics. Towns in Holland and other coastal regions in the north of the Low Countries, on the other hand, experienced a fundamental transition and sharp social polarization, sustained by dynamic factor markets. And other areas of Western Europe, including parts of Denmark and Germany but also central Italy, saw commercialization paired to growing coercion, in the latter case especially exercised by the urban elites over the countryside.

The big asset of this book is that it offers a systematic overview, and one of the best available, of how commercialization interacted with society and culture. The author distances herself from teleological reasoning and resists the temptation to judge the arrangements of this period as an immature version of those which would develop in the modern period. Rather, she shows how nonmarket forms of exchange, including gifts, tribute, and inheritance, remained vital in shaping social relations, and how they were reframed in the process of commercialization, most notably by seeking ways of making money and movables fulfill the role of securing links and hierarchies, instead of immobile land. This is shown for the changes in customary law, and most notably the weakening distinction between movable and immovable property, and how this affected inheritance and marriage (Chapters 1–2). The author also analyses the changes in the practice of gift-giving, as gifts became increasingly quantified, priced, and registered, but kept their function of creating bonds of honor (Chapter 3). Next, she discusses the new ideas about dress and ways to control dress by way of sumptuary laws, developed to reframe the link between appearance and identity, and the emergence of a commercial ideology, which stressed the need to increase market transparency and to make the markets serve the common good. In these ways, late medieval people dealt (rather successfully, she suggests) with the threats that commerce posed to social order, morality, and personal identity. The period thus generated a new economic culture, which was fully rational in the context of the period, she argues, and in its turn enabled commercialization to further proceed.

The book is based on Howell's profound knowledge of her subject, and this knowledge is rooted in fine empirical research—in particular on the southern Low Countries. She links detailed findings and scattered data to the bigger issues, and lends them a deeper meaning, in one of the first systematic studies in the field. Moreover, the book is pleasant to read, and many of the sections are full of insights, rich, and well-written.

Still, the book suffers from an imbalance. Since the author is most familiar with the southern Low Countries, and particularly Ghent and Douai, many parts of the book focus on this area. On the one hand, this is logical since it allows the author to use her profound knowledge of the area to elaborate her ideas, but nowhere it is explained how this area compares to others. Her claim that these developments are representative of happenings elsewhere in Europe (p. 4) seems unfounded. The process of commercialization showed wide variations in chronology, nature, and effects within Europe—and even within the Low Countries, and it is unclear whether Douai or Flanders are representative of any of these variations. Examples from all areas are jumbled together, with no reference to their different trajectories. The author adds to the problem by shifting her focus halfway the book from the southern Low Countries to Europe as a whole, without underpinning how this change in geographical scope affects the results.

This problem is partly connected to the vagueness surrounding the terms used in the book. No clear definition of the crucial term “capitalism” is offered; the capitalist market economy is explained as “the modern economic system” (pp. 8 and 299). Other aspects of capitalism are mentioned, and many studies are listed (pp. 8–13), but they are not clearly elaborated for use as an analytical tool. Further, the pace and strength of commercialization—and its geographical variations—are not really discussed. There is a fine but short discussion of land sales and markets (pp. 34–42), but a systematic view on the organization of commodity and factor markets, the importance and thickness of these markets or processes of accumulation, is missing. It is equally difficult to identify the subjects of the study. They are “the people who lived from commerce,” but some are merchants and others are craftsmen. And often it is not clear whether they are big entrepreneurs or small-scale craftsmen or retailers, whether or not they were organized in powerful guilds, what position in society and economy they really held, and how they related to other social groups, including wage laborers or the nobility. Hardly any attention is paid to conflicts of interests between the actors. All these issues are not self-evident, even more so because—again—late medieval Europe shows sharp geographical differences in these respects.

The richness of the book and the valuable thoughts it offers make it a necessary read for anyone interested in these topics, but this lack of clarity about the concepts used and the representativeness of its cases make the value of its findings somewhat difficult to assess. Howell's findings are probably characteristic of a highly commercialized society dominated by small-scale, independent producers, but it would be useful to know how this compares to less commercialized societies or to highly commercialized societies undergoing a more profound transition. This would open up the opportunity for a comparative analysis and enhance our understanding of the causes behind the processes observed.