I want to commend this book to readers interested in Christian aesthetics and notions of representation in the arts of the medieval Church. Drawing on expertise from church historians and history of art scholars, these interdisciplinary readings explore widely art and concepts of representation in Christian aesthetics (chs i, ii, vi), the interpretation of the Bible in art (chs iv, v, vii, xi), narrative and the dramatisation of doctrine (chs iii, iv, x), the role of women and the artistic representation of women in medieval Christianity (chs v, vii, ix), and theatre and the dramatic aesthetics of the Christian faith (chs i, viii, x). In the absence of section divisions to guide the reader, these overlapping themes emerge in the book's treatment of a medieval Christianity seen in its truest expressions in the arts. Aesthetic criteria are also fundamental in making sense of church iconography and devotional pageantry (ch. iv), orthodox aesthetics and iconoclastic objections to the theatre (ch. iii), sculpture and the transposition of Scripture into material arts (ch. vi), faith and the poetic imagination annealed in stained glass (ch. v), the interplay of the body at prayer and sacred space (ch. viii) and the particular contexts in which the medieval Church needs to be understood in dialogue with the theatre (chs iv, ix, x). In doing this, and much to its credit, the book treats the arts of the medieval period neither as decorative church arts nor as piety devoid of Enlightenment categories, but as powerful forms of meaning-making in which believers made the Christian faith and its aesthetics expressions a living, breathing and thoroughly human thing.

Performing the sacred describes the book's concern with the performance aesthetics of interpretation. Read collectively, these eleven essays outline what could be described as a non-mimetic ‘dramatic’ theory of medieval visual culture. In brief, Christianity performed in art what it sought to imitate in sacramental life: ‘Do you want to watch the show? Then be the show!’ (p. 46). Whether talking about the Christian liturgy, fresco interpretations of biblical texts on church walls, or the depth of human emotion inscribed in carvings of Christ on the cross, all of these enabled the all-encompassing perspectives of ‘the mysteries of the Christian faith altogether’ (p. 61). The book is therefore not narrowly concerned with medieval theatre and sacred plays, but more broadly with the relationship between word, image and act. For believers of medieval Europe, artistic representations of the sacred were enfleshments of sorts, ‘enactments’ of divine mystery in time. In this sense, most compelling for this reader is the recurring notion that the agency of the believer confronted by a painting or icon in a church, or when immersed in sacred space as part of the body of believers, was in medieval art central to the intention of the artwork: the viewer's response was implied in and necessary to the artistic intention. In this sense, the arts of the Church were ‘performance’ arts: church arts did not merely bear witness to the dramatic form of the Christian story, they drew the viewer into the very harmonies and dissonances of this drama. If the book has an argument, then, it is that the medieval Christian imagination and its aesthetics of interpretations were shot through with the tensions, peaks, messy complications and open-ended resolutions of dramatic play. What this means is that, just as Eastern icons turn mere viewers into actors enmeshed in the divine mysteries they unfold, the liturgical and biblical arts turned spectators into ‘actor-participants’ in the form and substance of the Christian story. Readers will rightly detect the influence of Hans Urs von Balthasar's The-Drama in this analysis, though he is cited only sparingly in the book (pp. 2, 34). This reticence is either a shortcoming or simply an unacknowledged limitation of the project's research parameters.

Either way, anyone looking for theology in Performing the sacred needs to be less insistent and determine instead to learn from an intellectual span which makes the interlinking of piety and beauty (p. 77), and the role of representation in moral and aesthetic reasoning central to the project (ch. ix). Neither is the book interested in philosophical aesthetics for their own sake. Fronted largely by academics working in American and Italian institutions, and going beyond, for example, a special emphasis on Florentine sacred dramas, the book is conceived in terms of visual interpretations of the faith in theatre, pageantry and art. Read in this light, these conference proceedings comment astutely on the dynamics of representation, artistry and meaning-making in the Christian story. This speaks also to the significance of the book's underlying but incisively deployed notion of ‘audience participation’ in theatre. The concept is referred to in a depiction of a fifteenth-century Italian passion play (p. 26), and is more substantively depicted in a discussion on the ‘participatory spectator’ in the eighth chapter (pp. 140–72). Other contributors show that the dramatics of the Christian story evident in poetry, literature and art, need to be analysed through the aesthetics of representation on the theatrical stage. This is where readers familiar with von Balthasar's project will most easily appreciate the intellectual impulse making this text a provocative contribution to Christian aesthetics and the stage.

Von Balthasar argued that the all-encompassing claim in the Christian notion of the ‘Word-made-flesh’ on world history and in the life of the believer was an essentially ‘dramatic’ frame of reference. The theatre, involving viewers in the drama of the stage, could speak to history's true drama of the incarnate one who enters the human story and is thereby revealed as the sacrament remaking humanity from within. Yet the drama of Christ who ‘brings visible and invisible together and then acts within the world’ (p. 33) does not drop down from on high like a mythical origin story: it is revealed as God's story retold in the contours of a living faith, one in which the believer enters into the story. This means that there is no eternal tragedy (e.g. the good-versus-evil of archetype or religion) driving history towards an inevitable end. Nor is God an absentee ‘Godot’ whose unseen rule subjects the lives of a tenant underclass to dissolution under its whim. ‘Christ died for us’ is an essentially dramatic proposition (see esp. pp. 40–6); the Christ of Resurrection is theatre at its best.

From this standpoint, the essays in this book show that the theological drama common to prayer, preaching and the pageantry and arts of the medieval Church holds in tension the body of Christ as the focal point in salvation history and, crucially, the Christian's role in acting out the ethics and aesthetics of eschatological justice and hope. Nothing short of a ‘performing’ faith could make space, for example, for the subversive preaching of women taking on the persona of Christ in the medieval Church (ch. vii). And here is where this book finally pays off. The convergence of divine and earthly perspectives assumed by the arts discussed in this volume sees human persons not as mere spectators of the salvation drama but as audience-participants in the most erudite sense of the term. Ultimately, then, the importance of this book lies in the boldness with which it shows us why the arts matter in the medieval Church, and by extension, why the arts matter at all.