Relentlessly as well as pleasantly informative, in this substantial volume Adeline Rucquoi casts her net wide, and it is a fine net, heavily weighted. In four chapters, each of about a hundred pages, while the reader witnesses with something like awe the process of evacuating an almost bottomless card index, the author mounts watch on every road leading to Finisterre and in reporting back resists the temptation to limit herself to just two examples whenever a dozen or so can claim entitlement to attention. Yet in her expansive conduct of the journey to St James's shrine, with one sentence regarding a Florentine pilgrim of 1477 running to more than eighteen lines, and at the end of a review of pretty well every type of record concerning the Compostela pilgrimage, the author concludes that that medieval world ‘n'est peut-être pas si différent de celui que nous connaissons’. En route, the reader has been treated to coverage of the subject wider and more generous even than that provided in the pioneering works of López Ferreiro or Vázquez de Parga et al. though even so he may on occasion find himself asking for more – on King Alfonso x, for example, who is cited for his juridical works but not for his disruption of the pilgrimage itself. Likewise, further attention might have been paid to Compostela's increasingly limited strategic relevance to the process of Christian reconquest after about 1150 and to the consequences for it of the enhanced significance of the Guadalupe pilgrimage after the 1340s. Moreover, although this is a valuable work for the bibliography embedded in its footnotes alone, with upwards of eleven hundred of them the absence of an index to that bibliography is tiresome, the author's orientation bibliographique wholly failing to allay the need for frequent forays in pursuit of information. Significantly perhaps, amongst the multitude of authors prayed in aid one unindexed authority is Samuel Purchas (d. 1626), the three pages of whose Pilgrimes are cited at least as many times as his testimony regarding the pleasures of the way, despite that author's own admission therein (i. 74) that for all his having ‘written so much of travellers & travells … [I] never travelled 200 miles from Thaxted in Essex, where I was borne’.