Cities of Ladies: Beguine Communities in the Medieval Low Countries, 1200-1565. Walter Simons
armed combat. More work needs to be done in all these areas, but each of these studies is a small masterpiece in its own right. Ultimately, this volume is not for the novice. The offerings vary far too widely in subject matter and are far too tightly focused to make for easy reading, and the contextual demands all the authors make on the reader's background knowledge will put it simply out of reach for beginners. This is a book by specialists for specialists, but in its best moments, it makes significant contributions to the development of an extremely important topic. One hopes it is a harbinger of more to come. BERT HALL University of Toronto