Anastasija Ropa, The Medieval Horse. London: Reaktion Books, 2025, 215 pp., numerous color ill.

Of course, the horse played a major role in the pre-industrial, pre-motorized world, whether in war, for transportation, for entertainment, or for agricultural work. Numerous scholars have already engaged with this topic, and here we face yet another, certainly extensively researched and pleasantly written monograph on the medieval horse. Anastasija Ropa, lecturer at the Latvian Academy of Sport Education and experienced horse owner and trainer, offers a wide-ranging and informative study on the horse in the Middle Ages which will contribute impressively to our understanding of this animal at that time, although her monograph is certainly not exhaustive, often leaving out literary-historical and art-historical evidence. She begins her study by going into media res, withholding the expected research review to justify her own approach. The apparatus, however, confirms that she has plowed through many relevant studies and drawn from them for her own reflections. More transparency would have been welcome, but I believe that this is the approach preferred by the publisher because it makes this book, like all the others in this unspecified series (medieval falconry, Albertus Magnus, Christine de Pizan, Margery Kempe, the Teutonic Knights, etc.), more marketable to the general audience.