This collection of eight essays results from a conference held in York in 2013 focusing on cultural exchanges between England, Ireland, and Italy in the period ca. 1270–1400. All of the contributions in the published collection are defined as case studies in the rich interchange between the states of the Italian Peninsula and Britain in the later medieval period.

The essays do succeed in elucidating significant and, in some instances, insufficiently studied aspects of Anglo-Italian relations. Margaret Bridges investigates “Writing, Translating and Imagining Italy in the Polychronicon” of Ranulf Higdon. Carolyn Colette moves beyond the borders of Italy and England to Avignon, to discuss the 1333 literary and bibliophilic exchange between Petrarch and Richard de Bury, bishop of Durham. The importance of ecclesiastical independence of Roman law manuscripts in Northern England is studied by Michele Campopiano in “The Reception of Italian Political Theory in Northern England: Bartolus of Saxoferrato and Giles of Rome in York,” while Ignazio del Punta rediscovers a well-traveled path in his “Italian Firms in Late Medieval England and Their Bankruptcy: Rereading an Old History of Financial Crisis.” Another incidence of deeply studied economic history reinterpreted through a broader lens is Bart Lambart's “Nostri Fratelli da Londra: The Lucchese Community in Late Medieval England”; Helen Bradley amplifies this in her “Saluti da Londra: Italian Merchants in the City of London in the Late Fourteenth and Early Fifteenth Centuries.” The apocalyptic material derived from the prophecies of the twelfth-century Calabrian abbot Joachim of Fiore and applied to anti-Lancastrian sympathies in England is rehearsed by Victoria Flood. Her “Political Joachism and the English Franciscans: The Rumour of Richard II's Return” follows the persistent belief, often spread by spiritual Franciscans, that Richard did not die soon after his deposition in 1399, but would return to overthrow the tyranny of Henry IV and usher in a new age of the spirit. Finally, Helen Fulton discusses the development of “Urban History in Medieval and Early Modern Britain: The Influence of Classical and Italian Models.” There is also a brief introduction by Campopiano and an afterword by Fulton.

Taken together, these essays succeed admirably in assessing specific aspects of English economic, political, religious, and cultural life, and, as in all anthologies, some are more rewarding than others. The major flaw in the collection is the absence of an integrating essay, one that situates the case studies in a broader context. The Anglo-Italian interactions dealt with in this volume are presented as discrete, each informed by the focus of a specific study. What did the two communities know about one another? What shared frame of reference did they enjoy—or acquire—as a consequence of their interaction? There is a wide bibliography on Anglo-Italian relations in the Middle Ages, so it is unfortunate that there is so little contextual material.

English travelers in Italy, for example, returned not only with stories and experience but often with the desire to record them. John Capgrave's Solace of Pilgrims, William Wey's Itineraries, and William Brewyn's 1470 guide to Rome and its principal churches were popular, as was Informacyon for Pilgryms, printed by Wynkyn de Worde in 1498. Sir Richard Guildford's account of his travels (1511) is particularly apposite to the theme of Fulton and Campopiano's collection because Guildford was a courtier whose second wife was a relation of the Pallavicini. The slightly later texts of Richard Torkington and Andrew Boorde add an even more complex patina to these connections.

I am equally surprised by the absence of any investigation of influential Italians writing about and resident in England—especially Poggio Bracciolini, who unhappily served in the household of Cardinal Beaufort, bishop of Winchester (1418–23). There is also only cursory mention of Tito-Livio Frulovisi, the author of the first humanist biography in England, Vita Henrici Quinti, commissioned in England by that great collector of Italian manuscripts Duke Humphrey of Gloucester. Very influential scholars who studied in Italy and returned with Italian knowledge are ignored: Pietro Carmeliano, John Colet, William Grocyn, William Sellyng, and Thomas Linacre do not make even cameo appearances.

I mention these men merely to reinforce the stated hope of the editors that further research will follow. The anthology as it stands is largely—but not exclusively—from an English perspective and focused on English experience, despite some material from Bruges, Florence, Avignon, and elsewhere. Culture in the late medieval world was crafted, spread, and established largely through personal connections and reading, as the current volume illustrates. It is necessary, then, that a more complete mosaic be fashioned from those small pieces of evidence that reflect the complex, rich, and multifaceted cultural relations between Italy and medieval England.