In Philip II of Spain and the Architecture of Empire, Laura Fernández-González undertakes a study of architecture and ceremony during the reign of Spanish Habsburg king Philip II (1556–98). Early in this period, in 1561, Madrid became the permanent seat of the Spanish king and his royal court, as well as the site of the councils entrusted with the administration of the vast Spanish Empire. The book is composed of an introduction, four chapters, and an epilogue. The first chapter, titled “‘A World, an Empire, under Construction’: Domestic Architecture and Spanish Imperial Authority,” offers an overview of the changes proposed to transform Madrid’s urban landscape into a space fit for the royal court of a powerful monarch, the legislation aimed at improving the design and construction of the city’s housing stock after the royal court permanently settled there, and the extent to which many of the desired improvements to Madrid’s urban fabric went unrealized during Philip’s lifetime.In 1540, Philip’s father, Emperor Charles V, established an archive for royal documentation in a fortress in Simancas, a town outside Valladolid. Chapter 2, “Ruling an Empire through Paper: Architecture and the Simancas Archive,” documents the architectural transformations of this original archival space during Philip II’s reign. Under Charles V, the archive had been housed in a small room in one of the castle’s towers. As the Spanish Habsburg domains grew in complexity and size, so did the volume and diversity of their documentation, creating the need for a new archive. As pressure to accommodate the growing volumes of royal paperwork mounted, construction of an additional chamber was undertaken in 1567. Beginning in 1570, Philip II envisioned a major expansion of the archive in Simancas, and newly designed spaces, specifically planned to meet the needs and functions of the institution, were built in the periods 1571–88 and 1589–98, transforming the fortress into one of the great European royal archives, now, as Fernández-González describes it, with a “Renaissance sensibility” (79). Floor plans, elevations, and other visual materials provide details of what the architects and the king proposed for this new archive—which entailed vast structural and spatial transformations of the existing building—and illustrate the significance of these changes. Comparisons with older, well-established royal archives, like that at the Torre do Tombo in Lisbon, which dates to the 1370s, demonstrate the influences of those archives on some of the changes implemented at Simancas.In 1581, King Philip II of Spain became King Philip I of Portugal, marking the beginning of the Iberian Union, which lasted until 1640. In chapter 3, “The Global Empire and Its Circulations: Philip II and the Iberian Union,” Fernández-González analyzes the ceremonies surrounding Philip I’s royal entry into Lisbon in 1581, examining contemporary chronicles of this event as well as various images (prints, paintings, drawings) dealing directly with or influenced by the celebrations. Chapter 4, “On History and Fame: Philip II’s Kingly Image and the Spanish Monarchy,” addresses the role of written and visual chronicles of battles and of the royal funerals produced after Philip II’s death in 1598 in the construction of his image as a universal monarch. Fernández-González pays particular attention to the composition of the series of paintings that make up the fresco cycle in what is known today as the Hall of Battles, located in the monastery of San Lorenzo de El Escorial, built under Philip’s patronage from 1563 to 1586. The king commissioned the frescoes, which include depictions of the Battle of La Higueruela, won in 1431 by the Trastámara king John II of Castile (1406–54) near Granada, in 1584 as part of the decorative repertoire of the monastery. They are analyzed here both as works of history and as sites of memory.This book makes some significant contributions to existing historiography, but overall the study is uneven. Fernández-González’s discussion of the architectural transformation of the Simancas archive is strong and represents a valuable addition to the literature on the architectural history of this building. Her detailed examination of the architectural project designed by the architects Juan de Herrera and Francisco de Mora in the 1570s and 1580s reveals how the structure and style of the building were transformed. The changes are contextualized within a larger European vernacular tradition in the construction of treasuries and archival chambers, and the direct imprint of Philip II in the designs is demonstrated. The book’s treatment of Philip I’s royal entry into Lisbon is likewise significant. As Fernández-González notes, the 1581 royal entry has received less scholarly attention than the entry of King Philip II (III of Spain) into Lisbon in 1622, which followed much of the iconographic program established by his predecessor (99). This analysis of the 1581 royal entry, therefore, expands current understanding of the ceremony, its iconographic designs, and its subsequent influences.Much less successful, however, are the author’s attempts to draw connections between ceremonial practices and their forms in the wider Spanish Empire and the circulation (and adoption) of various urban designs, forms, ideas, and images. This is in part because this study adds little in the way of primary documentation or interpretation to what is already well known about the various topics addressed in the book that deal with the possessions of the Spanish monarchy and those of the Habsburg monarchy more generally. And because there is no real engagement with the arguments and contributions of that vast existing historiography, the informed reader often finds cursory summaries and citations of works without page numbers, or is left wondering why more pertinent works are missing from endnotes and from the discussion. The connections the author draws are, therefore, often rhetorical rather than grounded in existing studies or evidence.Furthermore, the possessions and empires over which Philip reigned as king of Spain were different from those he ruled as king of Portugal. Yet this book never quite reconciles the political fact that the images of empire contained in the 1581 royal entry into Lisbon made reference only to the kingdoms Philip I ruled as king of Portugal and to its empire. This distinction is evident in the iconography of the Portuguese materials analyzed in the book, but the author never directly explains such historical facts and contexts. Nor are they ultimately fully developed in the study as whole, leaving unclear the meaning of phrases such as “global empire.”