This stunningly beautiful treasure trove of architectural and material culture images explains the transition from late medieval Catholic devotional art to a new Reformed model. Mochizuki's definition of material religion as combining ‘the objecthood of art history, the faith of theology, and the socio-cultural context of history’, providing ‘an interdisciplinary visual anthropology of religion’ (p. 322) acts as a catalogue for her own brilliantly executed and comprehensive scholarly work. While Mochizuki's writing sometimes verges on the trendy (‘was about’, ‘proactive’, ‘random’) and this can be somewhat jarring, and while there are occasional small errors in the text and notes (this reviewer's name was misspelled), and occasional stabs at creating contemporary analogies – such as references to the present-day conflict in Afghanistan and Iraq – the work is, on the whole, magisterial (and it is just possible that such cosmetic ‘contemporalising’ may broaden the audience for the book). The author opens each chapter with an image of an anecdote which she then decodes and opens out into broader reception context. The book's three divisions – the Word made material, the Word made memorial, the Word made manifest – helpfully delineate among different historical modes of representation and reception, discussing iconoclasm and Bruno Latour's notion of ‘iconoclash’, showing the transference from archeiropoetic objects (such as Veronica's veil) to text paintings used by the Reformers. Not every change was as distinct or different as might be imagined; the Reformers borrowed much from late medieval sacred imagery. The bibliography and notes are exhaustive. This is a book that should not be, cannot be ignored. It is an encyclopedic rereading of a major field of thought. Its contribution is enormous.