A tremendous collaborative achievement - an authoritative appraisal of the current study of monumental brasses. The book includes a survey of previous research, a guide to how to look at medieval brasses - heraldry, costume, armour and inscriptions. Subsequent chapters look at various aspects; using wills to date brasses, stylistic developments, the re-use of brasses, their art-historical context, collections of rubbings and conservation issues. The contributors to this volume are Claude Blair, J. Roger Greenwood, Malcolm Norris, John Page-Phillips, Jon Bayliss, Kay Staniland, John A. Goodall, Cecil Humphrey-Smith, David Meara, Nicholas Rogers, Martin Stuchfield and Peter Heseltine, Paul Cockerham. For the church crawler, the enthusiast, or the scholar a definitve study which testifies to the vitality of the subject.