When we visit an art gallery we are generally aware that the Renaissance painting of the Virgin Mary that we are looking at, perhaps by a well-known artist, was originally intended for an entirely different setting and conceived for an entirely different purpose. In the gallery setting, where we have learned to appreciate the painting for its aesthetic and figurative qualities, it is all too easy to lose sight of the power that that painting once had. To remind gallery-goers of the potential power of such images is considered inappropriate. When Jane Garnett and Gervase Rosser sought to do just that, in a 2005 photographic exhibition of miraculous images, they were met with the comment: ‘It is outrageous. I thought that the Ashmolean Museum was about the promotion of art, not the promotion of superstition and bigotry.’ Analysing how miraculous images ‘work’ in their social context is the focus of their book. It is the product of years of study – mixing history, anthropology, sociology and art history – in the Italian region of Liguria. Geography is important here, although the book's approach and findings are applicable throughout most of the Catholic world. Garnett and Rosser explore the origins and workings of the cults that have developed around miraculous images, most often outside a church (and outside the Church): images which began as a statue ‘found’ in the fork of a chestnut tree or as a fresco painted on a wall. A generation of scholars has attempted to account for the enduring miracle-working power of these images. David Freedburg famously suggested that religious images worked because their viewers conflated the subject with its representation. Garnett and Rosser take issue with this, proposing their own version of the anthropologist Victor Turner's notion of communitas: images, at once mystic and mundane, and the cults which support them, composed of legends, memories and stories, allow laymen and women to ‘re-enchant’ the world, so creating a new sense of community in a particular place and time. Through the rich collection of illustrations, the volume encourages us to look at the images in a new way, by understanding their social lives, from the Renaissance to the internet age.