The eight papers collected in this volume, written by an international group of scholars, make a valuable contribution to our understanding of medieval baptismal fonts and their visual programmes, changing liturgical uses and architectural settings, and their patronage and audiences. Interdisciplinary in scope, the essays consider fonts from across the entire width and length of Europe – from Iberia to Scandinavia, from the British Isles to the Italian Peninsula – through the shifting lenses of hagiography, prosopography, folkloric literature, homiletics, civic history and liturgics. The volume opens with a paper by Nirit Ben-Aryeh Debby, which surveys some of the most significant font projects of medieval and Quattrocento Tuscany, while also providing a useful introduction to the topics of fonts and baptism in general. A series of individual font ensembles is discussed in the following four papers. Annabelle Martin casts new light on the portal of St John Baptist on the west front of Sens Cathedral and its complex spatial and semantic relationship with the baptismal topography of the cathedral and some of its predecessor buildings. In a subsequent article Harriet M. Sonne de Torrens challenges the conventional dating of the font of St Isidore of Seville in Léon – hitherto believed to have been made in c. 1000–50 and to represent the oldest extant Christological font of the Latin West – in light of new archaeological, iconographical and epigraphic findings, arguing instead for a later twelfth-century origin. Amy R. Bloch then redirects our attention to Tuscany and to the Baptistery of San Giovanni in Florence in particular, meticulously tracing its changing artistic, liturgical and experiential environments of baptism over a period of roughly three centuries, from the seasonal mass immersions of the Romanesque period to the daily aspersions conducted there in the century and a half after the Black Death. Madeleine Gray's paper is the only contribution to focus completely on a later medieval work, the font of All Saints in Gresford, Wales. She unpacks its programme of images, at first sight puzzling, in the context of local politics, patronage and patterns of devotion. The three remaining papers present more thematic vistas on the topic of this volume. Silvia Schlegel, focusing on material from the German-speaking lands, convincingly argues for a connection between the artistic and iconographical elaboration of a given font and the institutional rank of the building for which it was intended; she thus distinguishes between what she calls the ‘festive or ceremonial fonts’ of the cathedrals, collegiate churches and monastic churches, which were mainly reserved for elaborate Easter celebrations, and the more humble ‘everyday fonts’ found in parish churches and used for the regular baptism of infants. Equally outstanding is Frances Altvater's intervention, which explores the rite of baptism in relation to concepts of divine and celestial time, as embodied by such pagan-inspired images as the zodiac signs, the labours of the months, or the appearance of the sun and the moon, all of which are occasionally encountered on Romanesque fonts. The pre-Christian past is likewise invoked in the last contribution to this collection, Jenni Kuuliala's largely text-based investigation into the nexus between baptism, the concept of limbus puerorum, and the recurrent belief in the hauntings of malevolent spirits and the ghosts of dead, unbaptised children. The editors of this volume are to be congratulated on bringing together such a rich and rewarding body of scholarship, which will no doubt henceforward constitute an important point of reference for all students with a serious interest in medieval baptismal culture.