Since Michael Clanchy published From Memory to Written Record more than three decades ago, medieval literacy has been a burgeoning field. Based on a workshop, as well as a series of panels and roundtables at the International Medieval Congress from 2007 to 2009, Writing and the Administration of Medieval Towns (and its companion volume, Uses of the Written Word in Medieval Towns: Medieval Urban Literacy II) presents 16 chapters focused on the development of literacy within urban institutions. For the editors, Marco Mostert and Anna Adamska, this is familiar terrain. But whereas their previous contributions have focused on central and eastern Europe, Writing and the Administration of Medieval Towns is marked by a pronounced pan-European focus. Contributions range from the Swedish town of Sigtuna in the north to the Spanish city of Castile in the south, and from the Low Countries in the west to Transylvania in the east. The editors indicate that this constituted a deliberate choice to move beyond the most urbanized parts of late medieval Europe, and instead to look at the peripheries and the development of their urban cultures. This broad geographic spectrum is one of the volume's strengths since it permits pan-European comparisons.

The first, and longest, section, with seven chapters, focuses principally on the origins of administrative literacy. Many contributions, such as Inger Larsson on Sweden, Geertrui Van Synghel and Jeroen Benders on the Low Countries and Hannes Obermair on South Tyrol, chronicle the origins of written records, and detail when towns first got charters and legal codes, or when city councils started to produce written documents such as town books (Stadtbücher). As Katalin Szende notes in her chapter on medieval Hungary, the introduction of charters and other written documents is important historically because they introduced literate thinking into a ‘pre-literate’ context (p. 125), thereby bringing about significant social, political and cultural changes. Record survival is a central issue for such research, and here, as both Szende and Agnieszka Bartoszewicz note, there is a source bias since the vast majority of what survives are legal or financial documents.

The second section shifts to urban chanceries, and how records were kept, and who had access to them. For example, Andreas Litschel notes the growing legal importance of written proofs in medieval Lüneburg, where the council increasingly became a record-keeper for the town. This transformation was in part a response to growing concerns over forgery and the difficulty in authenticating a document. Other articles, such as Michael Jucker and Bastian Walter on the Swiss cantons (as well as Strasbourg in Walter's case), and Christoph Friedrich Weber on Italy, concentrate less on archives as places, and more on the issues associated with their being repositories of confidential documents. At stake is how early modern councils proceeded with highly sensitive information, sometimes even protected by secret codes.

The final section examines town scribes and notaries, paying specific attention to their education. Branka Grbavac charts the growth of notaries on the Dalmatian coast, noting that most notaries were not from the region, but rather from central and northern Italy. Ágnes Flóra looks further to the east to examine the duties and training of notaries in Transylvania, many of whom had studied at universities (most often at Wittenberg). Although placed in the first section, José Miguel López Villalba's article on the duties, salary and training of town scribes in Castile would have fit well here. The final chapter by Marco Mostert takes a broader look at the types and growth of schools in this period. He concludes with the apt observation that we need a comparative and social history of western education, perhaps signalling a future area of collaboration between Anna Adamska and himself.

Overall, this is a valuable collection of essays. It is not often one sees collections of conference presentations that are so thematically coherent. Further, many of the authors do a commendable job of summarizing their respective national historiographical debates, making much specialist literature available to a broader audience. For the reader not yet fluent in several European languages, such summaries offer welcome insights into otherwise inaccessible scholarship. For general readers, this volume provides an enriching overview of an important topic. For specialists, the pan-European focus offers new perspectives and points of comparison beyond one's own terrain.