Keith Lilley's excellent new book takes as its theme the idea of the city as it was played out, performed and remediated in medieval culture. Lilley opens with classical ideas of the city as both macrocosm and microcosm of human society, at once an ideal cosmic and social polity of good order and a metaphor for the well-run human body. This parallel, perhaps paradoxical, conceptualization of the ideal city – massive and miniature, corporate and personal, ideal and actual – animates Lilley's wide-ranging discussions of how that most translatable of cities, Jerusalem, was replayed in medieval Christian architecture, town planning, illustration, literature, drama and liturgical processions. Lilley's admirably interdisciplinary book shows how ‘the city’ – and by extension what we might call ‘urban history’ – has much to contribute to debates in many disciplines, including literature, theology, philosophy, geometry and, in particular, aesthetics.

It is hard to summarize the wide base of evidence Lilley brings into focus, but his book does have an extremely coherent argument and narrative. Broadly, Lilley's book moves from early, theoretical ideals of the heavenly city (‘The city-cosmos ideal’ and ‘Urban mappings’) through imitation of this city (‘Urban forms’, ‘Founding a city, founding a world’) to performed, material actualizations of this city (‘Moral topographies’, ‘Performing bodies’). Thus the book moves from the ‘heavenly’ form of Jerusalem as depicted on ‘T and O’ maps, which imagined a ‘symmetry between the shape of Jerusalem and the shape of the world’ (p. 16), to the grid and circular geometries of bastides and other medieval new towns which, Lilley argues, adopted ‘cosmological symbolism . . . coupled with the image of the heavenly Jerusalem’ (p. 46). Lilley then moves on to exploring the urban ideologies implicit and (less frequently) explicit in the work of medieval town planners and the mensuratores (literally, measurers) who imposed geometrical categories on to medieval urban space; such activities of urban foundation, he suggests, ‘were microcosms of cosmogony, imitating the work of God and re-enacting the formation of the cosmos’ (p. 94). Lilley then explores ideas of ‘urban embodiment’ (p. 131) and later medieval civic ceremonies which drew on stylized ideas of urbanism, ‘apparently in imitation of the holy city’ (p. 133). These include Robert Ricart of Bristol's fifteenth-century ‘Kalendar’, which both functioned politically and had ‘symbolic resonances with Eucharistic processions’ (p. 134); the London Liber custumarum and Brunetto Latini's Livre dou tresor, which connect ‘the role of the world and the rule of the city’ (p. 136); and the extension of Norman Breteuil law from Hereford into Wales, in which urban boundaries functioned spatially, morally and legally. The final section of Lilley's book explores urban processions, and is especially illuminating on the Bruges procession of the Holy Blood and York's Corpus Christi procession.

Lilley's book does not take an overarching theoretical framework to his sources; rather, he lets his fascinating materials speak for themselves. The book's assumptions are, in general, cultural materialist, historicist and thoroughly interdisciplinary. Lilley's concluding statement, that ‘Christianity is fundamentally an urban religion’ (p. 186), will no doubt raise eyebrows; one might think of such rural, indeed isolated, versions of Jerusalem as the polygonal, Temple-imitation churches at Garway (Herefordshire) and the Round Church near the Earl's Bu (Orkney): the city of the mind, the Jerusalem of the heart, was truly translatable out of its urban setting. Naturally, a book which takes as its theme a set of ideas as pervasive and broad as ‘the city’ will not be exhaustive in its coverage. There are points, however, when one wishes for a little more completeness in coverage: for instance, Lilley's excellent analysis of the sacramental and symbolic functions of the procession at Bruges might usefully have been supplemented by a consideration of that city's extravagant imaginative homage to Calvary, the late fifteenth-century Jeruzalemkerk. The book's guiding principle though is to offer fascinating and germane examples which other scholars will be able to learn from and apply to other sources. The book, like the urban forms it describes, is impressively far-reaching, beautifully designed and richly illustrated.