The image of the medieval city of Prague has in recent years become familiar to unprecedented numbers of visitors. That image has been reconstructed a number of times, as emerges from several studies in this rich collection. The potential value of a culturally vibrant medieval past, on which the city has capitalised lately, was important in the nineteenth century to Bohemian nationalists, whose restoration programmes did much to determine the material image of Czech history. The historicisation of national culture runs as a leitmotiv through these fifteen essays, a number of which are revealing also of how artistic patronage was already being used in the medieval centuries to shape perceptions of the Bohemian past. Several contributors focus on Prague's cathedral of St Vitus, whose brilliant master mason of the mid-fourteenth century, Peter Parler, is famously represented in a carved portrait in the triforium gallery of the choir which he designed. Reviewing the series of portraits in this group, together with their inscriptions, Milena Bartlová convincingly suggests that this body, comprising cathedral canons, various members of the royal family, and the two chief masons, had seen themselves, most being present at the foundation of the new choir in 1344, as the collective founders of the building. Yet within a few years the decision of the Emperor Charles iv to have himself buried before the high altar contributed to a change: St Vitus' cathedral was thenceforward to be presented as the expression of the personal piety and majesty of Charles alone. The force of that piety emerges with greater clarity from Milada Studničková's illuminating interpretation of theological themes informing the iconography of the emperor's castle of Karlstein. If the question of patronage calls for such careful interpretation, that of style requires no less nuanced an attention to historical realities. Paul Crossley, in a superb review of the stylistic affinities of Parler's work in the cathedral choir, shows how, by the fourteenth century, architects were no longer, as in the first generations of the Gothic, modelling their designs directly upon specific – French – prototypes, but were relatively free to ring their own changes on a widening repertory of ideas. Although Crossley does not make the point explicitly, the interpretation that he advocates overcomes the barriers to understanding which were erected in the earlier historiography of Central European Gothic architecture by French, German and – not least – Czech nationalism. Further notable essays in the collection include Evelin Wetter's sensitive study of liturgical vestments, focused on orphreys bearing images of the crucifed Christ, which, as she persuasively suggests, were animated with heightened presence in the context of the ritual of the mass. Equally relevant to a wider sphere than the Bohemian lands is Achim Timmerman's essay on medieval public monuments. His starting-point is the mid-fifteenth century Zderad column in Brno, one of many crosses erected at sites of public execution for the edification or consolation of the condemned. This is part of a larger study of such crosses, together with lanterns of the dead and monuments to historical events, which shows how such markers, no less than an outstanding structure such as the cathedral of St Vitus, contributed to the construction of a medieval sacred landscape.