Given its long and rich history as well as its significance as a centre for religious faith and practice, the city of Rome has exercised an incomparable fascination on students of the medieval west. The current volume, which consists of academic papers from the Medieval Conference at Kalamazoo, Michigan (2003), the International Medieval Congress at Leeds (2003) and the Medieval Academy of America (2005) is a fine example of this fascination. The book is divided into two parts. The first is comprised of essays that ‘read’ the liturgical (especially processional) and artistic ‘text’ of the city. The general essays in this section – by Alan Thacker on the Rome of the martyrs, Caroline Goodson on the architecture for the veneration of the martyrs, and Joseph Dyer on the Great Litany procession – are particularly valuable and represent excellent examples of the state of research. Other essays in this section, like Carol Neuman de Vegvar's piece on men and women in the basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore articulated by the relation between mosaic imagery and liturgical disposition, are fine models of intricate historical analysis. Essays in the second part of the book focus mainly on the appreciation of medieval Rome from afar – especially from Ireland and England. For some reason, with the exception of the editors, the institutions of the individual authors are not identified. The volume does, however, contain a fine index. In general this collection of essays represents a fine combination of art and architectural history, social history and the history of Christian worship – a necessary combination of skills and methods to appreciate the rich history of medieval Christian Rome.