The subtitle gives a better idea of the contents of this book than the title: the subject is not really the beauty of the holy city. It is, however, an interesting collection of studies on a theme which has recently been much discussed in books by Christine Gomez-Géraud, Norman Housley and others: the cultural impact of the symbolism of the holy city upon ritual and devotion in the west. The extent and variety of the contributions necessarily makes for a scatter-gun approach, but their quality is high. Reudenbach's discussion of the Sancta Sanctorum reliquary at Rome is brief, but is one of the best that I have seen, and Toussaint is excellent on the impact of reliquaries of the cross in the twelfth century. The stress in the earlier articles is that what mattered at first was the presence in the west of actual devotional fragments: it was stones and oil from the holy places that established the reality of Jerusalem in liturgy and worship. The later articles, which are primarily studies of Lutheran thought, inevitably focus more on the symbolism of Jerusalem, and not on the transfer of relics. The Lutherans themselves, though, considered that the spiritual presence of Jerusalem was also important in Fathers such as Jerome and Gregory of Nyssa, and one or two papers on late medieval developments would have provided bridges between them (or perhaps, alas, would have shown the difficulty in finding such bridges). Taken as a whole, this is an admirable collection of studies. One would have welcomed an index. The illustrations are not very clear, but are well selected: as in any well-designed collection of relics, the pictures and the words cohere and give force to the contents.