We study the relation between Cremona transformations in space and quadratic line complexes. We show that it is possible to associate a space Cremona transformation to each smooth quadratic line complex once we choose two distinct lines contained in the complex. Such Cremona transformations are cubo-cubic and we classify them in terms of the relative position of the lines chosen. It turns out that the base locus of such a transformation contains a smooth genus two quintic curve. Conversely, we show that given a smooth quintic curve C of genus 2 in ℙ3 every Cremona transformation containing C in its base locus factorizes through a smooth quadratic line complex as before. We consider also some cases where the curve C is singular, and we give examples both when the quadratic line complex is smooth and singular.