Kyle Killian, Saint-Pierre d’Orbais: Social Space and Gothic Architecture at a Benedictine Monastery. Medieval Monastic Studies, 9. Turnhout: Brepols Publishers, 2025, 273 pages, 87 color & b/w ill.

From the late seventh century until the community’s suppression in 1791, successive generations of Benedictine monks passed their days in a monastery at Orbais, located about 120 kilometers east of Paris on the Surmelin River. They prayed and worked, they saw to the spiritual needs of the people living near them, and their associations with bishops and secular leaders put them into contact with the currents of change flowing from well beyond their locale and region. The course of history at Orbais, then, matches that of many middling monasteries across Europe. Kyle Killian asserts that the monks sought to situate themselves in their changing world by making physical changes to their abbey church. The thesis will appear as a conundrum to some readers: even while the author seeks to situate the story in religious, intellectual, political, or economic terms, the book remains squarely an architectural history of formal changes that remain extraordinarily difficult to read.