Making Livonia is an exemplary collection of detailed, well-presented essays on a corner of medieval Europe that sounds a bit like the location of a Shakespearean comedy: Livonia, the territory today marked mainly by Estonia and Latvia—Europeanized, so to speak, by an intense period of crusading “conquest, Christianization and colonization” beginning in the late twelfth century (1). As editors Marek Tamm and Anu Mänd note in their informative introduction, Livonia retained through the seventeenth century something of the characteristics of a frontier society, a “heterogeneous territorial conglomerate ruled by various overlords” (1) composed of, and contested by, the crusading Teutonic Order drawn mainly from German-speaking lands to the south (represented by Bremen canon Albert of Boxhövden, who, as third bishop of the Livs, founded Riga as a missionary, trading, and governmental outpost), Indigenous peoples (speaking Finnic or Baltic languages), the Livs and the Letts, settlers from Sweden and Denmark, the Orthodox Church and its following of Russian artisans and merchants, and both the Roman Church and the Hanseatic League. Several essays locate the work of important individuals and families in a network of opportunity. Marek Tamm's essay on Albert of Riga, Anu Mänd's on the Tallinn burgomaster Hans Viant, Ilkka Leskelä's on the Finnish trading Skalm family, and Ivar Leimus's piece on the mint master Paul Gulden all witness the interface between individual achievement and an informed web of geographically dispersed connections.

The first half of the volume treats the Crusade period, tracing what Linda Kaljundi terms “ideological and institutional connections” (93): Tamm on Albert of Riga, Marika Mägi on the changing social and political functions of Estonian hillforts, Kersti Markus on the performance of power in the Danish Crusades, Kaljundi on the representation of “newly converted native peoples” (93) recruited in the Crusades, Juhan Kreem on the mobility of Teutonic Knights. Wojtek Jezierski writes on the politics of emotion in the Latin Chronicle of Henry of Livonia (1224–27) and the anonymous Middle High German Livonian Rhymed Chronicle (ca. 1290), Anti Selart on the legal status of land donated to the church in the thirteenth century, and Tiina Kala on how manuscript fragments reveal intellectual contacts between Tallinn and European centers of learning.

The second half of the volume concerns Livonia in the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries, essays focusing less on the military and religious colonization of the region than on its social history. In addition to the essays by Leskelä, Mänd, and Leimus, these essays use the image of the network to develop a reading of emerging social organizations in the developing cities, principally Tallinn: Taipo Salminen on city scribes in Tallinn, Krista Kodres on the representational aesthetics of wealthy burgher homes, and Gustavs Strenga on the circulation of memory among Cistercian convents. All essays are richly argued and detailed, and (sometimes implicitly) work to substantiate the principal claim of the volume—that “different local, regional and pan-European” (5) networks and agents played a decisive role in the making of Livonia: trade (the Hanseatic League); religion (the Cistercians, but also the mendicant Dominican and Franciscan orders); and the military, notably “supra-regional” (9) religious military orders like the Teutonic Order.

Livonia emerges as a distinctive site of intersection among the various players in the region and in its complex engagement with European institutions. Noting that the essays gathered here are methodologically diverse, the editors suggest that the collection illustrates “the possibilities of a relational and network-oriented approach in historical research with a special emphasis on individual actors and their agency” (4). Actor-network theory locates individual agency in the opportunities offered by a networking structure, implying that even nonhuman elements—“objects, ideas, technologies, etc.”—may emerge as consequential agents alongside human counterparts. Making Livonia most often, though, deploys a relatively informal understanding of networking (“no comprehensive theoretical programme” informs the anthology), and while few of the essays fully engage the theoretical implications of actor-network theory, all persuasively document networking activities in the more familiar non-Latourian habits of personal, social, cultural, and institutional relationships (4). This fine collection gathers a network, so to speak, of biographical, cultural, military, and social history toward an engaged reading of making Livonia.