This collection of eleven essays centers on two related contentions: that the commemoration of the dead represented a “total social phenomenon” in the Middle Ages that had a significant impact on nearly every aspect of medieval social and cultural practice, and that the European Reformations transformed, but did not eradicate, the commemorative practices that were constitutive of medieval memoria. The first of these arguments is the central focus of this collection's first three essays, which analyze the commemoration of the dead in sacred spaces and communities, including parish churches, monastic houses, and charitable foundations. The second argument is teased out across seven essays that examine the impact of religious reform in England, the Low Countries, and the German lands.

The range of these essays is startling, both in terms of the media that the authors incorporate and the geographical and temporal terrain that they cover. The local variations that the individual contributions illuminate are, however, brought together by two more programmatic essays that bookend the collection. The first of these is an introduction that offers a helpful orientation to the historiography and lexicon of the medieval commemoration of the dead. The second framing essay is a reflection by Otto Gerhard Oexle on the “End of Memoria” in the nineteenth century, which serves as this volume's conclusion. It must be said that Oexle is ubiquitous in this collection; essentially every essay acknowledges him as a founding father of the study of medieval commemorative practices, and his arguments about the centrality of memoria in the Middle Ages serve as the jumping-off point for this book as a whole. Oexle's work has long emphasized the capaciousness of medieval memoria and demanded that attention be paid to the ways that specific communities and local traditions encourage variation in seemingly universal practices. Thus this collection is a testament to how productive that mandate has been among a generation of scholars who have pushed the temporal boundaries of memory studies dramatically forward.

While all of the essays in this volume argue for the continuation of memorial practices that maintained the presence of the dead among the living beyond the rupture of the sixteenth-century Reformations, few generalizations can be made beyond that one. In Cornwall, for instance, Paul Cockerham sees older forms of corporate commemoration eclipsed by forms of familial remembrance and the “personalized appropriations of churches” (120) by the gentry in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Bert Timmermans argues in a similar vein that urban notables privatized space in Antwerp during that city's re-Catholicization through the foundation of monastic communities that inscribed their control over the community's sacred geography. By way of contrast, Truus van Bueren and Charlotte Dikken's essay on stained glass windows in Gouda demonstrates that post-Reformation donors chose to commemorate the deliverance of the community as a whole from Spain. In the post-Reformation Dutch context, historical and communal commemoration flourished, but this evolution was at odds with the early modern memoria documented in Cornwall and Antwerp.

Several essays in the collection focus on questions of what was lost or marginalized in the evolution of memorial culture after the Reformations. Susanne Ruf's essay on Lutheran memorial objects analyzes the preservation of formerly sacred objects like chalices, crowns, and candlesticks in Lutheran communities, even as their liturgical significance faded away. Anton Schuttelaars examines church burials in the Dutch town of ’s-Hertogenbosch, arguing that the persistence of this practice among Protestants and Catholics alike inevitably resulted in the grave slabs in the parish church's floor being forgotten, broken, or overlaid. Other essays in this collection highlight the alteration of paintings and elimination of certain types of religious foundation in Protestant Europe, but such attention to marginalized forms of memoria is largely superseded by this volume's broader focus on the persistence of memory across a wide range of material and institutional forms.

The essays in this thoughtfully arranged volume all reflect careful scholarship and editing. The one potential problem with the collection derives from its attention to local communities and their commemorative practice. Essentially, despite the wide range of confessional and linguistic cultures covered in this volume, the essays do not always lend themselves to comparison. Many of the essays offer only a limited view of how their findings might apply in other areas (Franz Gooskens's essay on apostle houses is a welcome exception), which limits the potential impact of their arguments. There is a trade-off, then, between an emphasis on local variation and the applicability of the findings from the analysis of such variation. These limits do not, however, detract substantially from the utility and creative insight of this collection, which offers a host of examples that collectively argue for the persistence of memoria after the European Reformations, despite theological developments that might have led to its demise.