The relationship of looking and thinking is neither obvious nor uncontroversial. Some sort of connection is implicit in the word ‘theory’, from thea meaning sight, and it is evident from this book, as from the many studies of medieval ‘visuality’ that have appeared over the last two or three decades, that the connection is still proving to be stimulating. This nexus is discussed in the introduction to the present volume by Fraeters and Pieters. The concern of this collection of essays is to explore how thinking and seeing were means of making things explicit or conscious or memorable. Throughout the volume the impact of the work of Mary Carruthers is very evident, though other texts such as Madeleine Caviness's seminal study of ‘Images of divine order and the third mode of seeing’ (Gesta xxii/2 [1983]) are not noted despite the attention paid to the Victorines early in the present collection. The essays, rightly if conventionally, take a broad view of what seeing and image-formation are, and work within a notably long time span, 1150–1650, ending with Constantijn Huygens on blindness and ‘reading blindly’ (Gosseye and Pieters). In the introduction it is claimed (p. 3) that the basic question posed by the essays ‘is how texts and images convey specific meanings that can be taken to stand for the cultural moments to which they belong’. Nothing controversial or indeed particularly new in that: but one is bound to ask whether the issue of ‘how’, of agency, is in fact addressed, as opposed to the ‘what’ of specific meaning.

The essays are grouped into three parts, the first together with a prologue being on ‘spiritual’ vision and necessarily including much on the Victorines (Van ’t Spiker), but also gendered vision in Hildegard of Bingen (Góngora), Hadewijch (Fraeters) and Simon of Aulne (Deploige). Part ii considers the important interaction between image and subject in its most ‘Gregorian’ domain, that of instruction, with studies of Heinrich Suso (Van Aelst), women's prayer as presented in Middle Dutch psalters (Desplenter) and the Chronique de Floreffe (Vanderputten). The third section considers agency, with studies of the Chiarito Tabernacle (Baert), the impact of the Lentulus letter on the appearance of Christ (Bussels) and, finally, in a study by Van Eck, of agency tackled from the perspective of the work on agency by the late Alfred Gell, whose work, anthropological in nature and aims, discusses agency while deliberately setting aside the question of the operation of that agency through the work of art's appearance: aesthetics are excluded. The essay makes the interesting and I think justified claim that Gell's theory is actually rhetorical in nature: the ostensive form of an artwork as a ‘technology of enchantment’ persuades us the viewers to think and (more importantly) behave differently. Gell's question is ultimately social. But if so, why not just go at the issue from the perspective of rhetoric? This issue of object (as opposed to subject) agency is increasingly key to discussion about the ‘how’ of any art object, not only those of the medieval and early modern periods. It is not clear – and the reader must test the idea – that the essays presented here really take account of this central but elusive question in their methods, which typically circulate around the established nexus of imagination-image and text rather than art agency (i.e. why this object, as opposed to that object, works as it does despite the fact that both might have the same ostensive ‘specific meaning’). A key term is apparent in the collection title: through text and image. Is it true, for instance, that gold displays ‘metaphysical capacities’? Do we mean capacities apparent in the gold, within the surface, or of the capacity of the surface to point through and so ‘beyond’ as if all surfaces were glass? How, actually, does this pointing work, and how, exactly, might we decide that the recognition of such capacities might be gender specific? If, as Rubin and Bynum have suggested, spirituality was indeed physicalised in the fourteenth century, how did the actual crafting of works of art embody this? Is not all sensory experience physicalised, and was aesthetic experience and thinking always ‘beyond’ the object and sensory and intellectual delight? Thought and sight, the key terms of this book, have an irreducible explicitness that cannot escape nontranscendental aesthetic attention (i.e. embodied physical or sensory attention) even if they may ultimately be united in some higher form of seeing.