Caroline Bynum's work has long wrestled with paradoxes, taking up phenomena that defy easy description, classification, or understanding. Dissimilar Similitudes brings together a suite of essays that addresses the ways later medieval Christians conceptualized religious objects in relation to ideas about the divine to analyze how objects hold and create meaning. Building on her previous arguments in Christian Materiality, Bynum begins from the starting point that “the line between holy and ordinary . . . was porous, indeed; almost anything might acquire the charge or spark of sacrality” (17). She posits in turn that “the power of the object lies . . . not so much in indexicality as in the paradox of what we might call ‘dissimilar similitude’ that is, both in the dissimilarity [of object to referent] and in the wholeness of heaven they, taken together, present and re-present” (43). Such dissimilar likenesses, as pseudo-Dionysius described, were understood to be fundamentally important for they “elevate our minds better than resemblances because they do not mislead us, but provoke us to find deeper similarities” (48). To this end, Bynum argues for privileging “what things themselves tell us” (50). Her readings start from the thing itself—whether cradle, crown, or footprint—as holding the key to its own ontology and religious meaning. This construction acknowledges that objects could and did have radically different meanings to different people at different times and that those differences are themselves telling of the historical moment.

Chapters 1 and 2 address such questions through a series of case studies. In the first instance, Bynum analyzes several extant late medieval small wooden sculpted “holy beds,” or devotional cradles, objects associated with the infancy and thus the humanity of Christ that religious women from northern Germany and Flanders used as aids to devotion. In the second, Bynum turns to surviving examples of nuns’ crowns, that is, cloth and velvet caps worn as crowns by women who became nuns in northern German convents and compares them to similar smaller crowns used to adorn statues of the Virgin Mary and the Christ child. In the case of both cradles and crowns, the power of the objects lies in their “visual ambiguity and . . . intense tactility; [their] insistence on performance” (73). Indeed, the cradles, some with small Christ-child dolls and bells, demand one to rock, manipulate, and enact gestures of care and attention. So too with the crowns, both those worn and those used to adorn, which required a tactile devotional performance. In this sense, with cradle and crown, it was not so much how such objects looked but the tactile interactions that they invited that represents the core of their religious meaning and their transformative force; to wear the crown or cradle the Christ child was to remake the spiritual self.

Chapters 3 and 4 turn to broader questions of sacrality, likeness, and presence. Here, Bynum asks the reader to think like an historian of religion, that is, comparatively and anthropologically, to consider the effects of encountering religious objects outside of, or different from, a specific faith context. Contrast—or dissimilitude—then provokes a different, heightened sense of the nature of religious devotion, both in the past and the present. The enduring force of presence is taken up, differently and powerfully, in Chapter 4, which addresses the presence of medieval material objects into the present day that intertwine medieval Christian devotion and anti-Semitism. Bynum examines, for example, footprints left by a doubting rabbi's wife in the Mary Church in Mecklenburg, Germany; a tabletop on which Jews supposedly martyred a consecrated host in 1492 in the Mary Church in Sternberg; and a “holy grave” that once may have contained either fragments of a desecrated host and/or the bodies of those accused of its desecration in Brandenburg, German; among other replicas, reproductions, and images retelling narratives of host desecration, all still on display. The persistent presence of such objects raises “insistent questions about matter and memorialization” (164). In this intersection, Bynum argues, it is the objects themselves that we need to come to terms with, because “as objects, they carry with them some specific materiality, some indication of derivation from a particular, historically locatable source” (177). Objects are carriers of history: “An object that was there and is here connects us with that was because it still itself is” (179). This power lies at the heart of memorials, statues, and other forms of commemoration—small and personal as well as large and public—that shape our contemporary relationship with our pasts. Drawing on W. G. Sebald, Bynum suggests that it is the reflective power, not an empirical quality, that gives objects their carrying capacity, that allows them to “bear the marks of moments in history that lived into the twentieth century” (180). In this sense, objects are of a markedly different quality than texts or images—than representations—for they both present and re-present the past in themselves and in their persistence through time.

In the final two chapters, Bynum broadens her frame further still to ask why comparisons among religious traditions are useful and then to offer a comparative analysis in turn. Bynum makes a forceful argument against what she calls “the tyranny of morphology,” that is, the penchant to compare (especially among those who study images) only things that look alike, or appear the same. In doing so, scholars miss other similarities despite the initial dissimilitude of form. The deepest meanings of things often lie in other more effective comparisons. Bynum juxtaposes Hindu and Christian devotional objects to move beyond a likeness or set of shared visual characteristics or representations to uncover phenomenological and religious meanings that reveal the presence of the divine. She then unfolds a model of such a comparative reading in the final chapter on “Footprints.” Elusive in their object-ness, footprints are the absent presence, an imprint, a trace—and thereby evoke the thing that made them without containing or being that thing. Much like medieval seals, they functioned as “proofs of presence” (226). Divine footprints offer a useful comparison for Christ's footprints, Buddha's footprints, and those of Muhammad, which all became objects of veneration and were reproduced through measurements, visual copies, and material echoes. Bynum's provocation in this last essay is to consider not so much the footprint as object, but the trace, the trail, and the gap it leaves between remnant (on earth) and departed Other (ascended into heaven). This gap is what we ought to keep our focus on for it is there that one encounters the “stuff” of historical work, the dissimilitude that provokes reflection and wonder.