How and for what reasons were medieval liturgies honouring saints of regional interest constructed? How did these texts and their music relate to the wider concerns of the worshipping communities which created them? Benjamin Brand considers these and other enduring questions in the case of the dioceses of medieval Tuscany in the early and central Middle Ages. He shows that the liturgical material for saints including Donatus, Minias, Zenobius and Fridian are not merely interesting for their own sake as witnesses to a regional tradition of textual and musical composition, but also that they were connected to the wider observance and development of cults surrounding saints' relics and more generally to the political manoeuvres of prelates and cathedral foundations. Brand begins by considering how the authority of the bishop was upheld in many cases by the authoritative model provided by the saint, with the bishop as dominus et constructor of the relic cult and indeed of the cathedral as repository of sanctity through the translation of relics. This unilateral authority was gradually undermined by the increasing power of cathedral canons who, as guardians of the shrines and the liturgies, refashioned the cathedral as diocesan ecclesia matrix. Cathedral rites, when emulated by lesser churches, disseminated both cults and cathedral authority and were transmitted through the use of ordinals, repositories of ritual knowledge which could be copied and distributed. It is interesting that Brand identifies the rise of the ordinal with the diminution in the authority of the cantor, the usual authoritative source of liturgical knowledge. Ample use is made of the musical material to which the texts were set, and care is taken to ensure that the non-musician is able to follow these discussions: melodic analyses focusing on such elements as ambitus and text-setting are within anyone's reach. It would have been helpful to have seen more examples of the texts to which the arguments so frequently refer: whilst there are outlines of saints' offices in the appendices, these are merely incipits with an English gloss, and more close reading throughout the volume would perhaps have been preferable. None the less, Brand has a real mastery of the liturgical, musical and historical literature which underpins his own work, and readers will want to follow his extensive and helpful footnotes to explore the peripheries; the recurring argument made for the relevance of the liturgy to extraliturgical developments such as ecclesiastical politics and regional tensions, and by extension the relevance of this study to disciplines cognate to his own multivalent approach, may therefore seem somewhat unnecessary. Brand's work is a perfect example of the way in which liturgical evidence together with its architectural and hagiographical surroundings, as ‘prisms’ or indeed gemmae pretiosae, can shed light on the culture in which these monuments to sanctity were created. This persuasive and learned study makes rewarding and stimulating reading.