In 1383 the parish priest of Wilsnack in Brandenburg, John Cabuez, found three bleeding hosts in the ruins of his parish church, burned down by plundering soldiers. Soon these relics attracted pilgrims from all over Europe: when Margery Kempe accompanied her widowed daughter-in-law back to Danzig, this experienced pilgrim took the opportunity to visit the by then famous pilgrimage site. The pilgrimage came to an abrupt end in 1552 when the Protestant minister of Wilsnack, in an attempt to defy superstition, burned the holy relics. This collection of essays presents the papers of a conference (held in Bad Wilsnack in 2005) on the history of this pilgrimage site which has been – as the editors suggest in the introduction – partially neglected by scholars up to now. The essays cover a wide range of topics: the history of Wilsnack as seen in early modern historiography (H.-D. Heimann); the appeal of the pilgrimage to the faithful in northern Germany, around the Baltic Sea, in Poland and Bohemia (J. Hrdina, Ewa Wółkiewicz, M. Starnawska, M. Gąssowka, D. Kurze, E. Bünz); contemporary doubts about the authenticity of the Wilsnack Holy Blood relics (J. Hrdina introduces Jan Hus; K. Bracha retraces discussions among ecclesiastical authorities and theologians about their value); the building history of the impressive pilgrimage church (A. Krauss); votive offerings, especially the so-called Pilgerschuh, ‘pilgrim's shoe’ (P. Hlaváček and H. Kühne); visual documents of the contemporary cult of hosts and eucharistic worship, including anti-Jewish propaganda (M. Kapustka); and comparable pilgrimage sites (D. Hoffmann-Axthelm, W. A. Eckhardt). The conference organisers' approach was interdisciplinary and international, and this is mirrored in the essays: art historians, theologians, historians and ethnologists from the Czech Republic, Germany and Poland present different views on this once prominent pilgrimage location. However, attention is directed firmly to the east and north. The wider context of the worship of the Holy Blood is only mentioned in passing; Margery Kempe and visitors from the west are not included. Important subjects like the theological and practical implications of ‘blood piety’ are not sufficiently explored – but that might not have been the focus of the conference as a whole The merit of the collected papers is that they make their readers aware of a place which may have been a bit ‘out of fashion’, at least partly because of its geo-political location. However, this has changed: Wilsnack, the cult of the Holy Blood and Holy Blood worship in general have recently found broader interest among scholars (for example B. Bild, Medieval blood, Oxford 2005, and C. Walker Bynum, Wonderful blood: theology and practice in late medieval northern Germany and beyond, Philadelphia 2006). In this respect, the papers of the 2005 conference are witnesses to a turning of the tide.