Religious images can be traced all the way back to our cave-dwelling ancestors, and so can their destruction. This is due to the fact that the sacred objects of some people can be viewed as ‘idols' by others, that is, as representations of falsehoods, or as markers of the wrong identity, or as dangerous sources of pollution that must be destroyed.

Iconoclasm has been a hallmark of Western culture ever since the ascendancy of the Christian religion. First, images of Christ and the saints replaced those of the old gods of the Graeco-Roman world and of the ‘barbarians' of the northern regions. Then followed wave upon unpredictable wave of iconoclastic dissent throughout the Middle Ages, including that of Muslims and of a few Byzantine emperors, reaching an apogee in the sixteenth century, as Protestants swept their churches clean of Catholic ‘idols' and Spanish conquistadores – at exactly the same time – replaced the ‘idols' of native Americans with Catholic images of the same sort as those that Protestants were hacking to pieces or reducing to ashes in Europe. Ever since that pivotal century, revolutionaries of all stripes have come along for whom waging war against idolatry became a sacred or secular duty, from the radical Jacobins of the French Revolution to Wahhabis of Arabia to the Bolsheviks and Maoists of the twentieth century. In all of these instances, from ancient Rome to the present, iconoclasm has always had a profoundly political dimension.

In some cases the political edge of iconoclasm is easy to identify. For instance, as this review is being written, armed Sunni militants in Syria and Iraq are busy destroying Shiite Muslim shrines and symbols along with Christian ones too, as they seek to dismantle national boundaries and establish a new caliphate in that region. Curiously, although hardly any among us would question the fact that this recent iconoclasm in Iraq and Syria is overtly political, many still have trouble perceiving the political dimensions of earlier bouts of iconoclasm.

Correcting this myopia in our present day and proving that the destruction of religious symbols is always a political act is the aim of James Noyes's wide-ranging book. It is an admirable quest, and a difficult one too, for the study of iconoclasm – a relatively ignored subject until thirty years ago – is now carried on in various disciplines and dealing with it intelligently requires considerable erudition and a familiarity with wildly disparate approaches.

Given that Noyes covers a wide array of these various approaches, his book defies classification. Though it focuses on specific historical moments, it seems more concerned with theoretical and methodological issues than with narrative or with history itself. References to the work of semioticians, art historians, theologians, political scientists and literary critics often eclipse references to historical documents or the work of historians. Engaging with oft-quoted authorities and ensuring that some of their catchphrases are strategically deployed – especially Greenblatt's ‘self-fashioning’ and Habermas's ‘public sphere’– Noyes focuses on his own interpretative framework at every turn while displaying the breadth and depth of his erudition. This ambitious work also crosses a great number of religious, geographical and chronological boundaries. When all is said and done, then, theoretical concerns drive Noyes's fearless narrative as well as his analysis.

The book consists of two parts, with two chapters in the first part and five in the second. In the first part, chapter i analyses Calvinist iconoclasm, with a tight focus on Geneva between 1535 and 1564, and chapter ii jumps to Wahhabist iconoclasm in the Arabian peninsula in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. These two wildly disparate cases of iconoclasm are identified by Noyes as ‘prototypes’, and as conclusive proof of the political nature of image destruction. Ridding a society of its ‘idols’, he argues, involves much more than mere destroying: iconoclasm is a means towards an end, a way of creating a new political and social order. For Noyes, time and place, as well as culture and religion, matter little when it comes to iconoclasm: the phenomenon itself is inherently political. In the second part of the book Noyes concentrates on ‘case studies’, and here the crossing and stretching of boundaries reaches dizzying levels, especially when it comes to stretching the meaning of ‘iconoclasm’. One chapter focuses on the French Revolution and the desecration of the royal tombs at the Abbey of St Denis. The next focuses on the physical decay of Venice in the nineteenth century – and on interpretations of it – as a form of iconoclasm. From there, the reader is asked to climb aboard the bomber squadrons of the Second World War and to consider the consequent destruction and reconstruction of entire cities as inherently political ‘iconoclastic’ acts. The final two chapters bring the reader up to the present era, with one case study on the Balkan wars of the 1990s – in which many mosques were destroyed – and another on Islamic ‘iconoclasm’ in our own day, ranging from the literal, such as the obliteration of the Bamiyan Buddhas by the Taliban in Afghanistan, to the figurative, such as the September 11 attacks on the Twin Towers and the construction of skyscrapers and shopping malls around the sacred square of the Kaaba in Mecca.

Comparative and highly theoretical studies such as this pose a challenge to specialists in our highly compartmentalised scholarly marketplace. Whether this impressive display of ambition and erudition by Noyes finds its own niche or transcends them all is beyond the capabilities of any narrowly-trained specialist to predict: Noyes simply covers too much ground for anyone who is uncomfortable with extreme boundary-shifting. But there is no denying that his central argument is as sound as it was when it was voiced repeatedly by countless inchoate iconoclasts over the past two millennia: to smash an idol is not just to strike against the status quo, but to redefine it.