Clear and vivid in its exposition, Louisa Burnham's survey is most unusual amongst former PhD theses in its willingness to engage with its readers, to draw modern parallels and even, at one crucial point, to cross over into fictional ‘reconstruction’ of past events. The ground covered, at least in the first half of this book, is essentially that already surveyed by David Burr and others in their histories of the ‘spiritual’ Franciscans. After the death of Peter Olivi in 1298, various of his admirers, members of the Franciscan third order, attempted to champion Olivi's teachings on poverty and on the coming apocalypse. Their conspicuous austerity was condemned by Pope John xxii, leading to persecution from 1317 onwards, as part of the pope's wider assault upon the Franciscan ‘spirituals’. Burnham's most interesting contribution to this familiar story is to consider the beguins, alias fraticelli, alias bizzochi, not, as has become customary, as one aspect of the story of the suppression of heresy in southern France but as a cult of martyrdom in its own right, with its own grisly collection of relics of the burned beguins (utterly at odds with the Cathar rejection of corporeal remains), and even its own martyrology. In the second half of her survey, Burnham breaks further new ground, with a detailed examination of the beguin fugitives in Montpellier, a city here shown to be far from the bastion of orthodoxy that previous historians have described. Support for the ‘heretics’ emerged not only from the rural aristocracy but from Montpellier's own urban and educated elite. Perhaps to pay off the inquisition, money was raised by semi-covert means, here revealed for the first time from the rich notarial registers of Montpellier, with Burnham in effect outdoing the detective work of the fourteenth-century inquisitors in her pursuit of suspicious financial transactions. Throughout, although Burnham pays lip service to the post-modernists and even rehearses John Arnold's categories of ‘heteroglossy’ and ‘the colonization of the subaltern voice’, she is too good a scholar to allow such mutterings to interrupt the story that she and her medieval evidences have to tell. A few minor errors apart (Celestine v for Clement v at p. 8, for example, and an annoying confusion between livres and pounds sterling at p. 125), Burnham's thesis raises only two significant points of criticism, both of them applicable more to the genre in which she writes than to her writing in particular. Firstly, and despite her use of the notarial evidences, Burnham shares the reluctance of most modern historians to engage with the evidences of royal and secular jurisdictions in southern France, which is here presented, as has become customary, as a theatre of heresy and inquisition, the pope's playground, in which orthodoxy did battle with heterodoxy, shorn of much of the subtle interplay between royal and papal, civic and aristocratic jurisdictions that in reality characterised the region. Secondly, readers may be tempted to question why, yet again, an American scholar has been attracted to the study of religious persecution and in particular to the persecution of southern (French) dissent. One day, Burnham herself, perhaps, will do full justice both to the confederation of competing jurisdictions in southern France and to the modern imperatives that lure so many into this particular scholarly plantation. In the meantime, she has written an excellent book which will be widely admired and just as widely cited.