Just as nature fails to produce the ‘perfect harvest’ with predictable regularity, so does the quantity of medieval urban periodical publications vary. The crop of 2005 falls well behind the richer harvests of previous years, in quantity though not in quality of the published work. Two impressions of this work: first, there are fewer obvious ‘themes’ which seem to preoccupy the authors' minds; but, secondly, articles by German and Austrian scholars show a greater concern with the exposition and analysis of major urban themes than do those from the English-speaking world. One wonders why. Could it be that German-speaking urban historians are less hesitant to re-address the seemingly obvious? Two prime examples here are presented by the contributions of Ferdinand Opll and Benjamin Scheller.