This is a wonderful book. Through an original engagement with depictions of giants in German and Northern Italian painting and sculpture between the thirteenth and the sixteenth centuries, this work makes a significant contribution to the history of wonder in European culture. The introductory essay, “Toward a global history of giants,” reaches back into a premedieval genealogy of monstrous beings to which medieval people were heirs. In antiquity, biblical and legendary giants tended to be perceived as embodiments of primal chaos and were consequently imagined to reside at the margins of human civilization. The medieval Christian Church incorporated and partially tamed the giants, as we are shown in Pinkus’s first extended example, the early-thirteenth-century wall paintings in the choir of the church of St Jakob in Kastelaz at Tramin, in the South Tyrol. Here, massive nude figures of a giant and a giantess occupy the lowest painted register together with a textbook collection of hybrid creatures. Others have written about the iconography of this cycle, but Pinkus introduces a persuasive argument that these variously monstrous subjects, which appear below the Majesty of the Lord and the Apostles, embody the temptations and vices of the unchristianized world.

Accommodated within western Christian culture, the giant would remain, Pinkus shows, an ambivalent presence: domesticated to a degree, yet never wholly free of the connotations of savagery, immorality, and violence. In a chapter devoted to the late-fourteenth-century paintings of Schloß Runkelstein, also in the South Tyrol, it is argued that the ambivalence of giants – extensively represented in these awe-inspiring pictures – suited the self-image of an emerging class of ministerials, officials below the nobility who found an apt model in the giant, emblematic of raw strength and energy yet also capable of being civilized. Different visual techniques are used to convey the enormity of the giants represented here, and in this context Pinkus introduces his notion of a “Scaling Turn,” evident in previously unseen experiments with relational scaling of figures, often to a disconcerting effect.

The subjective effect of disorientation potentially triggered by an encounter with painted and sculpted giants is theorized by Pinkus as an instance of the medieval sublime. Distinguished from the Kantian sublime, rooted in the vastness of nature, it is argued that the medieval form was understood to be catalyzed by human craft or art. Pinkus and his collaborators see the deliberate use of such art in the diverse distortions of scale evidenced in the visual material generously illustrated in this book.

Entering the late-medieval city, the giant in German territories frequently took the form of a “Roland.” The oversized statues locally called by this name, a number of which are still to be encountered in the market squares or front of the town halls of German cities, are shown by Pinkus to be only in part related to the young, rash hero of Carolingian epic. In their scale and in the details of their iconography, they carried stronger connotations of the gigantic, here tamed and channeled as a protective force in the urban community. A residual echo of the giant’s barbarous and violent past remained, it is argued, as a hint of the danger to that community should disruptive forces be permitted to break out.

The Roland statue faced at an angle to the Christian Church, as the palladium of secular civic authorities who were frequently at odds with a local bishop or abbess. A more explicitly Christian gigantic hero was St Christopher. Michal Ozeri discusses enormous depictions of Christopher on the exterior of churches in the Alps, seen by travelers against the dramatic background of the mountains. Christopher’s own legendary evolution from a member of the remote race of dog-headed people conforms to Pinkus’s typology of late-medieval giants as former monsters now civilized and – largely – benevolent.

Orly Amit discusses the effigies of giants erected in 1415 on London Bridge to greet King Henry V on his return from the battle of Agincourt. It is plausibly argued that the giants simultaneously represented the defeated French as barbarous and offered powerful protection to the Londoners. The latter believed themselves (following the account written in the twelfth century by Geoffrey of Monmouth) to be the descendants of Brutus the Trojan, who, having discovered the island to be populated by giants, overcame these and founded the city of New Troy, now London.

A case is made in this book for a particular concentration of interest in giants in the towns of the German lands, partly because of many allusions to these in German stories of the period, which Pinkus shows to have been supplemented by motifs derived from classical Mediterranean myth. A further source of tales of giants, not considered here, were the megaliths of the Neolithic period, which, scattered across a much wider area, gave rise to local legends and traditions. The Vita tripartita of St Patrick (of uncertain date between the ninth and twelfth centuries) told how the saint came upon an Irish long barrow, reputed locally to be the grave of a giant. Patrick revived the giant, who related his story before being baptized and laid once again to rest. As the London case also demonstrates, talk of giants was widely current. Other English towns boasted origin tales in the same genre, such as that of the giant Colbrand, defeated at Winchester by Guy of Warwick (one of the giant’s bones was displayed in the cathedral as a relic), and Ascupart, overcome on the seashore before Southampton by Bevis of Hampton. Ascupart and Bevis were represented on enormous painted boards flanking the north gate of the city. In northwest France and Flanders, a group of towns from the fifteenth century onward witnessed processions of giants, sometimes paired as a giant and a giantess wife (such as Douai’s Gayant and Madame Gayant), who were regarded affectionately as occasionally unruly but generally reliable civic protectors. In modern times, these processional effigies have been “baptized” by the civic authorities, who thereby claim the alliance of powerful forces not under ecclesiastical control. Elsewhere, the legend of civic foundation concerns not a giant but a monster, such as the Tarasque of Tarascon, which had to be tamed by St Martha before the city could prosper and which, subdued and drawn on a leash by the saint, would for centuries be processed annually in effigy. It is evident that giants in the medieval city are too monstrously large a subject for any single book. Whether embodied in a giant or a monster, the legendary strength of the civic patron was at once a force for order and a shadow of deeper, darker forces never entirely subdued beneath the appearance of civilization.