Cranz was a scholar of the Renaissance and Reformation, but his name is familiar to Augustine scholars and students of medieval political theory for two essays that were included by Robert Markus in a volume on Augustine's philosophical ideas published in 1972. These two essays are included here. However, this volume in the Variorum Collected Studies Series is unusual in that more than half of the contents has never been published before (or only circulated in samizdat form on some American campuses). The collection has been put together by Nancy Struever, who has contributed an introduction on Cranz's scholarship. Cranz was interested in the history of ideas, but in his pursuit of this combined the rigour of a historian with the understanding of a philosopher (one of the footnotes – item IV, ‘Augustine and Anselm’, n. 80 – indicates the omission of a long discussion of Frege on signification). He was influenced to some extent by R. G. Collingwood, and was particularly interested in the notion of ‘absolute presuppositions’ and how these presuppositions change in the course of history, a change he called ‘reorientation’. All the essays published here for the first time are concerned with this notion of ‘reorientation’ and especially with the reorientation that took place around ad 1100 and separated medieval (and modern) man from classical (and late antique) man. The longest of these essays explores the relationship between Augustine and the ‘Augustinian’ Anselm. For Cranz, Augustine, in common with ‘classical man’, thought that when we know, we become that which we know (‘we are each of us the intelligible world’, as Plotinus put it); Anselm, although he imagined he was Augustinian, thought very differently and saw the realm of the intelligible as a human construct gesturing towards a reality with was outside the mind, even when known. Another essay discusses Petrarch, even more convinced than Anselm that he was Augustinian, but again belonging to another world. Put as bluntly as I have put it, the distinction looks crude, but Cranz's thought, as he develops it, is far from crude, and is based on very careful readings of texts, translated with an awkward literality. Another essay applies his sense of this reorientation to the Apostle Paul, in whom he discovers something else, neither classical nor (still less) modern, in his understanding of the human perception of God, a perception mediated through hearing rather than sight. These are profound and disturbing essays, shedding enormous light on one of the deeper elements of the ‘twelfth-century renaissance’. They deserve to be widely read.