The purpose of this brief but perceptive monograph, first presented as a lecture series, is to demonstrate that the schools of Paris functioned not only as a seat of learning but as a clerical community much of whose time was devoted either to the commemoration of the dead or to the liturgy, especially to the cult of the Virgin Mary. The modesty of the author's intentions is matched to considerable originality and clarity in his performance. We are thus introduced to the chief characteristics of the Paris schools, in which individuals identified themselves by association firstly with ‘nation’, and thereafter by faculty or college, the ‘university’ itself remaining too amorphous a body to command anything but the vaguest of loyalty. Within the nations and colleges, and here assuming that their surviving statutes were in practice implemented, religious devotions would have occupied between 20 and 50 per cent of any individual's time. Despite disagreement over the efficacy of pro anima masses, not least over whether they would benefit all the faithful or merely their specified dedicatees, nations and colleges encouraged elaborate funeral rites and regular commemoration of their dead. In the case of the nations, there was particular focus on the Friday vigil and Saturday Mass of the Virgin celebrated in the nations’ favoured parish churches on the Left Bank, rather than (as has previously been supposed) in the cathedral church of Notre-Dame. The effect here was to consolidate communities that were in part prayer circle, part drinking club. As the newly founded colleges came to replace or supplement the nations as a focus of identity, so they too assumed a role as mausoleum and chantry, with college chapels and dining halls now central to communal life. Turning now to gender, where previous writers on the schools have limited their consideration of women either to servants or to whores, Courtenay broadens our horizons, identifying women as grammar or even as higher university teachers, as college founders or benefactors, as the local employers and patrons of magistri, and in one case (Margaret of Sens, of the rue Saint-Jacques) even as the proprietor of the bookshop to which Aquinas sent his works for copying. Finally, Courtenay extends his earlier and innovative discussion of the seals of the Paris masters (‘Magisterial authority, philosophical identity, and the growth of Marian devotion: the seals of Parisian masters, 1190–1308’, Speculum xci [2016], 63–114) to illustrate the ways in which the Virgin Mary triumphed as patron not only of the cathedral but in due course of the nations, the colleges and of a variety of individual Paris magistri. Here we might speculate whether it was imitation of the Parisian model, or a broader identification of the Virgin with wisdom or philosophy personified, that explains the emergence of Mary as patron saint of the university churches of both Oxford and in due course Cambridge. This is a concise yet evocative study, abundantly furnished with maps, images and seals. As a source of new insight into the medieval university it will be read with profit by experts and novices alike.