In Blessing the world, Derek Rivard surveys the blessings found in medieval sacramentaries and pontificals from the tenth to the thirteenth centuries, supplemented with later material from the great two-volume work on blessings published by the German scholar Adolph Franz in the early twentieth century. He focuses on places, events and objects that received clerical blessing but functioned outside the daily liturgy of Christian worship – on fields, ships, wells and the fire employed in ordeals, for example, not on the candles, wax and bells used in the mass or the office – although it is often harder than he admits to separate liturgical objects and spaces from extra-liturgical. Despite lengthy summaries of some anthropological theory and of some recent, mostly Anglophone scholarship on medieval piety, his treatment is in fact a description, not an analysis, of types of blessing, with little sense of the complexities of devotion. Rivard maintains throughout that blessings reflect lay needs and desires, not simply clerical efforts at control; in this he is certainly correct, and the point is well worth making. He never demonstrates it, however, partly because he seems not to know much about lay religion beyond a few generalisations derived from secondary treatments. He characterises as ‘lay’ changes in Christocentric or Marian piety that may be monastic or mendicant; he fails to explore the well-known quantitative emphasis found in late medieval lay religion; and he is content merely to mention contradictions in religious assumptions that should be the starting point for probing analysis (for example, competing ideas about how far the efficacy of blessings lies in a power imparted to the object to act per se and how far it depends on the prayer or the inner spiritual response of the faithful). The heart of Rivard's work is three substantive chapters devoted, respectively, to sacred places, sacred persons and sacred things (vessels, objects, events). In each, he chooses several examples to examine at greater length, finding such predictable themes as a sense of the engagement of sacred and natural or a contract between human and divine. For students who have not encountered this sort of material before, these descriptions will be useful, as will Rivard's rather laboured summaries of recent scholarship. Moreover, both author and publisher are to be congratulated on a handsome book, well designed and well proof-read. But this study will not replace Franz's work of 1906 either in coverage or in analysis.