This edition of the ‘city book’ (‘Stadtbuch’) of Kolberg, now Kołobrzeg in Poland, makes available a remarkable resource for the study of a fascinating late medieval city with a diverse history and landscape. Kolberg can trace its roots to the early medieval period, but the settlement expanded with an influx of German-speaking settlers in the thirteenth century and by 1400 it was an important city in the duchy of Pomerania, chartered under Lübeck Law and both a member of the Hanse and the seat of the imperial prince-bishop of Kammin. This second city book of Kolberg, published for the first time, contains almost 6,000 individual entries dated between 1373 and 1436, dwarfing the first ‘city book’ of Kolberg – published in 1940 – that contained a mere 67 entries compiled between 1277 and 1373. The thousands of entries are as diverse as they are fascinating, shedding light on various aspects of urban life and history, including administration and landholding, crime and punishment, charity and almsgiving and memory and civic administration.

The varied entries in the ‘city book’ are difficult to summarize, but include wills and dowry agreements, property and land sales and donations to local ecclesiastical institutions, as well as legal agreements regarding issues ranging from the care of orphans to the penitential acts prescribed for criminals. What the entries have in common is that they were brought before the city council for entering into the city book, preserving the agreement or transaction for posterity and for future reference in case of litigation. The city councillors appeared eager to ensure the consent of all parties involved in any agreements entered in the record: one entry notes that a councillor visited a local religious house to visit an unnamed nun, to ensure that she consented to her father giving 25 marks to another individual, before entering the agreement into the ‘city book’ (no. 2296). The majority of entries are in Latin, although a significant minority contain Low German technical and legal terms or, often in the case of wills and dowry agreements, are drafted in Low German entirely. Glosses in Low German to clarify the sometimes vague or unclear Latin also recur. An agreement between two citizens regarding access from their properties to the nearby ‘aqueduct and guttering’ (aqueductum et stillicidium), for example, was glossed as aghetucht unde drupval, shedding light both on the infrastructure to which citizens had access and the vernacular terms used to describe them (no. 3626).

The range of topics illuminated in the ‘city book’ makes it difficult to imagine a scholar interested in medieval urban history whom this volume would not interest. The codex highlights the varied forms of tenure and land use in both Kolberg's urban landscape and its rural hinterland, with the ‘city book’ recording the renting or mortgaging of houses, market stalls, taverns, bakeries, stables and cellars, as well as farmland, forests, meadows, hop gardens and pasture. Kolberg was surrounded by salt pans and these lucrative sites appear frequently. Rents were often paid in salt too, such as the three tuns of salt Johannes Wasmüt owed yearly to the Cistercians at Oliwa along the coast near Gdańsk (no. 5506). Provisions for civic charity appear, including the city council's yearly gift of beer to one almshouse from 1375 onwards (no. 209).

Numerous wills offer insights into the material culture of the wealthier sort in a port town, including jewellery and the occasional ‘ship chest’ adapted for naval travel (e.g. nos. 1477 and 5182). Personal stories and tribulations emerge even from the often laconic and formulaic entries, including a man who had lost the documents proving his right to extract a rent (no. 2048). One Gertude Lyndebusch was given permission to sell her home in 1421/22 after being abandoned by her husband (no. 4400), while the array of penitential acts that the city council prescribed in 1376 for a murderer included donating silk cloth and candles for display in local churches and town gatehouses, embarking on a pilgrimage to Rome, and processing through the city twice for forgiveness – first with 100 men and women and then again with 200 (no. 236). These penances were decided by the ‘friend’ of the murdered individual, shedding light on some of the decision-making that lay behind the city council's rulings and the use of urban space and landmarks to administer justice in late medieval Kolberg. Such a diverse array of contents illuminates almost every aspect of late medieval urban history.

While the introduction is helpful, it is only 13 pages in length, and it could have been expanded to offer more guidance to the reader approaching Kolberg and its hinterland for the first time. The bibliography runs to only seven items and could similarly have been expanded to gather together some of the publications, especially those by Marian Rebkowski, that have appeared in recent decades and that have shed new light on the history and archaeology of Kolberg in the late medieval period. The inclusion of a city map and its surrounding region to make sense of the panoply of places named within the volume would have been helpful too. These criticisms aside, an invaluable index running to some 80 pages makes the large tome and its many thousands of entries more convenient to navigate. In short, this volume represents a significant resource for historians interested in urban government and society in the Middle Ages and will prove a welcome addition to university and research libraries.