This study of early modern title-page and frontispiece images is a welcome translation of Remmert's Widmung, Welterklärung und Wissenschaftslegitimierung: Titelbilder und ihre Funktionen in der wissenschaftlichen Revolution, published in 2005. There have been some slight changes to the text and a few additional images are included. The work provides a useful source of reference, containing over a hundred (predominantly Continental) title-page illustrations in the mathematical sciences. It also provides some excellent examples of how such material can be used to shed new light on some canonical discussions.

Remmert explains that his selection of images was guided by two themes: the dispute over the Copernican system during the seventeenth century and efforts to legitimize the mathematical sciences. Chapter 2 outlines the Jesuit exegetical debates that formed the background to the four biblical vignettes in the title page of Clavius's Opera mathematica (1612). Remmert's carefully researched study reveals that the four vignettes are not only of astronomical events in the Bible which relate to debates about terrestrial motion, but more specifically refer to incidents about which a non-literal interpretation had been condemned by Jesuit exegetes, in many cases citing passages from Clavius. Chapter 3 examines the emergence and deployment of a body of Copernican iconography in seventeenth-century front images – with particular attention to the transmission of elements from Stefano della Bella's frontispiece to Galileo's Dialogue concerning the chief two world systems of 1632. These two chapters provide perhaps the most convincing examples of how a line of visual argument can be retraced from a set of images. Chapters 4, 5 and 6 are concerned with visual conventions in the legitimation of the mathematical sciences – Chapter 4 with the association of the mathematical sciences with war and trade; Chapter 5 with Tycho Brahe's use of the figures of Atlas and Hercules to depict the new astronomy as the legitimate heir of the old; and Chapter 6 with construction of a visual tradition of founding figures in five Dutch title-page and frontispiece images. Chapter 7 addresses Jesuit authors' visual patronage strategies, with particular attention to imagery of a garden of mathematical sciences.

There has been recent interest among historians of science in the use of visual evidence, and seventeenth-century images legitimating the new astronomy provide a peculiarly fertile site for reflections on the status of the visual – this being a not insignificant part of the argument of the images themselves. Remmert's study of the reuse or referencing of title-page designs or elements within them is particularly interesting. These illustrations portray the construction of a history for the disciplines they depict, but presented together like this we can also see how these images are also about constructing and alluding to a history of image production. We are, as Remmert shows so well, supposed to see where these images have come from – but also that they have come from somewhere.

Speculation about the intended meaning of these images is made problematic by the notorious difficulty of identifying how far the author was involved in the design and selection of sources for these images. From the minority of cases where we can know something about this, we learn only that it varies greatly. This makes it difficult to avoid problems such as, for instance, attributing quite detailed knowledge of Jesuit theological debates: this seems beyond the scope of a designer or engraver, but it also makes positing the involvement of the author a somewhat circular solution to speculation on possible meanings.

There are rare moments when we have enough evidence to proceed without leaving the economy of image production. Remmert, for instance, discounts William Marshall's title page of John Wilkins's Discourse concerning a new world (1640) as a source for an element of the frontispiece of Cellarius's Harmonia macrocosmica (1661) on the grounds that there are no references in the text to Wilkins's work. However, we could equally eliminate it as a likely source on the basis of image production alone: English engraving in this period was entirely derivative of the more accomplished Dutch – and whilst Marshall quoted liberally from his more esteemed Continental counterparts, it is extremely unlikely that they would have referenced his work with the same enthusiasm.

This is a peculiarly difficult class of objects, as Remmert observes, since these illustrations were frequently intended for multiple audiences, given multiple or ambivalent meanings, and designed for multiple contexts – collected and circulated both within the books they illustrated and on their own. The detection by early modern censors of unintended meanings in some of these images provides some small consolation that problems of interpretation are not solely the product of distance, and that, perhaps, ‘correct’ readings were delimited more by pragmatics than by design.