Order into Action: How Large-Scale Concepts of World Order Determine Practices in the Premodern World, ed. Klaus Oschema and Christoph Mauntel. Cursor Mundi, 40.Turnhout: Brepols, 2022, 332 pages.

The papers in this volume have their origin in a conference held in Heidelberg in 2016 that sought to explore medieval concepts of large-scale order. Two examples of such instrumental constructs are the European division of world geography into three parts – Asia, Africa, and Europe, and the Mongols’ association of their empire with a Mandate of Heaven. But the conference’s organizers had even loftier plans. They encouraged participants to consider whether they could measure practical responses to the large-scale concepts they identified. The central question, then, posited in the volume’s title and explicated in the introduction, is whether broad conceptions of the world shaped or determined actions.