This edited volume has its genesis in the Neale Colloquium in British history, which was held at University College London in 2006, during the course of which the renowned historian, Jean-Claude Schmitt, delivered the annual Neale Lecture on ‘Unorthodox images’. Schmitt's lecture opens the volume and is followed by eight papers, all of which were delivered at the colloquium, with the exception of an essay by Catherine Rider on ‘Magic and orthodoxy in late medieval English pastoral manuals’ which was specially commissioned for the volume. The remaining essays address topics such as ‘Fascination and anxiety in medieval wonder stories’; ‘The materiality of unbelief in late medieval England’; ‘Private reliquaries and other prophylactic jewels: new compositions and devotional practices in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries’; ‘The middleness of ritual magic’; ‘Enchantment in medieval literature’; ‘Constructing exotic animals and environments in late medieval Britain’; and a ‘Comment on Jean-Claude Schmitt's Neale Lecture’ by Robert Bartlett, which was delivered as a response at the colloquium. It seems that in recent years themes such as orthodoxy and heresy (or even unorthodoxy) and the reevaluation of such terms have once again become attractive research areas; the choice of ‘Orthodoxy and heresy’ as a theme for the 2009 International Medieval Congress at Leeds is testament to this development. The essays in this volume largely interpret the term ‘unorthodoxy’ broadly, eschewing older definitions which often limited it to deviations from a fixed body of religious doctrine. Here, the marvellous and the exotic, the original and the provocative, and that which provoked wonder or horror in the medieval world, join with the more strictly doctrinal deviations. Schmitt draws attention to this larger canvas of ‘unorthodoxy’ by suggesting that the term might be translated in Latin by any of the following: haereticus, inordinatus or mirabilis. Indeed, one of the provocative questions considered in many of the essays is simply: how ‘unorthodox’, in fact, should we consider ‘unorthodoxy’ to have been. Frank Klaassen argues in his essay ‘The middleness of ritual magic’ that, in many instances, ritual magic drew upon and reinforced conventional religious belief and practice, even while subverting ecclesiastical authority. One of the ways, of course, in which the marvellous and the exotic could be ‘tamed’ in the later Middle Ages, according to Carl Watkins, was through their incorporation in medieval exempla, in which they existed not simply to amaze or, indeed, confuse but to facilitate a larger didactic purpose which ring-fenced its material with a strictly orthodox interpretation. However, there was always the danger that unwitting incorporation of these elements might allow the Trojan horse of ‘heresy’ to run amok unbridled and thus endanger the citadel of Christian orthodoxy. This provocative volume will be essential reading for all who have an interest in late medieval religion and literature, and indeed in the worldviews of medieval laypeople which were sometimes consumed as much with doubt and scepticism as profound faith.