nteresting book that examines the changing European economic system during the 12th-13th centuries (which Little characterizes as the transition from a gift economy to a profit economy) and the spiritual changes that accompanied it. Little suggests that the spiritual reactions of urban-dwellers to cities, trade, and money was deeply ambivalent, and traditional forms of religious life no longer sufficed. Some religious groups responded by avoiding the problem, retreating to the countryside in monasteries or as hermits, and others addressed it. Chief among the latter group were the mendicant friars (the Franciscans and Dominicans). Little then examines the paradox of the situation: it took an order founded on the principle of voluntary poverty in order to provide spiritual solutions to the profit economy. It's an interesting thesis, but Little's book is too short to support it adequately. While he shows that the mendicants adopted to city life in their rhetoric and theology, he never quite hits on why they did it (or, maybe more precisely, why they did it better than anyone else). There is very little on why the friars were able to fill this gap when lay orders were not, and even less on how the friars themselves viewed such an adaptation. Besides a mention of it's paradoxical nature, very little time is spent analyzing precisely how poverty fit into all of this. That said, it's definitely a book worth reading. If nothing else, Little does an excellent job illustrating the spiritual difficulties and paradoxes that arose in cities of the time, and he very nicely sketches the multitude of responses.