In the fifteen years since the publication of Simon Schama's Landscape and memory historians have rightly taken a far greater interest in the symbiosis between human societies and the physical environments that they have inhabited. This volume is the product of a seminar on the contribution of monasteries to the German landscape that arose from a conference in Clarholz in 2007. Though the foreword opens optimistically with a proverb about the special relationships between the different orders of medieval monasticism and particular environments, the focus is primarily a narrow one, on Cistercian and Praemonstratensian houses. The first chapter, by Haik Thomas Porada, is little more than an introduction but is the only one of the five to accept the foreword's aspiration towards comparison. It identifies seventy monastic houses in eastern Germany and makes some general remarks about the differences between the landscapes in which they were constructed interspersed with somewhat gratuitous references to the author's personal history. The following three chapters, by Dagmar Söder, Johannes Meier and Hans-Werner Holz, offer detailed case studies of particular monastic foundations, two of which (Eberbach and Clarholz) were dissolved in 1803 while the third (Loccum) has struggled on to the twenty-first century with a mere handful of monks. The continuing contribution of these monasteries to the surrounding landscapes is assessed in terms of their influence on the management of land and watercourses, roads and local networks of trade, and in each study has potential as a resource for local historians or scholars interested in acquiring information about the particular case. The reasons for the selection of these three studies are far from obvious and it seems unlikely that any of the contributors have thought at length about any of the bigger questions that might have emerged from this work, not least the extent to which the continued dominance of monastic houses over the countryside in both Catholic and Lutheran parts of Germany delayed the agricultural revolution and agrarian reform. The conclusion by Winfried Schenk makes an impassioned exhortation on the importance for society of maintaining landscapes as repositories of history and cultural identity. Unfortunately, the limited ambition of the preceding contributions probably ensures that the audience that this plea reaches will not be a wide one.