As the title makes clear, this book deals specifically with the controversies concerning art and sacred images in the Gallican Church during the early modern period. The author maintains that it was the French bishops, led by Charles of Guise, cardinal of Lorraine (1524–1574)—who produced a memorandum requesting the need for precise regulations on the place of religious art in the church—who convinced Pope Pius IV to address the issue at the plenary session of the Council of Trent in 1563. Tackling what he argues is a neglected aspect of the controversy over images, the author addresses the sixteenth-century French publications on the place of art in Christian worship.

The author's definition of the early modern period is expansive and unusual. It spans from 1528, when “an unknown offender chopped off the head of a Virgin and Child figure” in Paris (31), to the eighteenth century, with the twelfth and final chapter examining: “A Deistic Disparagement of the Christian Dispute about the Veneration of Images.” Thus, the author takes us from the French religious wars and disputes of the sixteenth century to its final chapter, which focuses on André François Boureau-Deslandes, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Jean le Rond d'Alembert, Voltaire, and Denis Diderot, bringing us close to the French revolutionary period.

Following an introduction that lays out the central argument and that emphasizes the “national” Gallican character of the French Catholic Church, cemented as early as what the author labels the “Middle Ages,” which I assume means the twelfth century, the author turns to the history of the church in France in the fraught early modern period, here meaning approximately from the mid-sixteenth century to the late seventeenth century. This chapter covers the rending of the church by rancorous disputes, the Wars of Religion (1562–1578), and outbreaks of iconoclasm, which the author correctly attributes to anger at the church itself and in which images are an easy target when the actual authority cannot be easily vanquished. With a focus on specific figures, the remaining chapters examine their roles in the ongoing controversies. The author covers a dizzying array of writers from Pierre Viret, Jean Crespin, and Richard Verstegan and their respective role in the sixteenth-century controversies to the thinkers who turned to the patristic era's disputes as support (chapter 3). With a chapter on John Calvin's scorn for images (chapter 4), another on Jesuit iconophilia (chapter 5), another on Francis de Sales's apology for images that reaches back to Gregory the Great's defense (chapter 6), and one on Jansenist ideals for a Christian artist (chapter 7), the chapters unfold an ongoing argument among French believers that pivots back and forth on the role of images until the revolutionary period.

For a scholar interested in the complex story of French religious history, this is an encyclopedic look at all the thinkers, artists, philosophers, and religious leaders who played a role in that controversial history. Every major and minor actor in this story is explored, filling in a large gap in the history of iconoclasm in France. Even though the footnotes were at the bottom of the page, a welcome utility, this reviewer was disappointed that the book lacks a bibliography and an index, so it is very hard to track sources and references.