This book has a scintillating subject. There is no doubt that the works of Matthew Paris (c. 1200–59), Benedictine monk of the abbey of St Albans in the middle years of the thirteenth century, chronicler, illuminator, have a particular pull for students of medieval manuscripts: a named artist of substantive originality with a traceable career, a traveller, a dining companion of kings, a witness and recorder of great events. The focus here on Matthew's innovative series of maps, chronicling the journey from England to the Holy Land throws into focus a number of fundamental themes: the abstraction and rendition of space and time in two-dimensional images, the uses of imaginary or depicted journeys as a surrogate pilgrimage for devotional purposes, the relation of such images to viewing, the body and liturgy. After a brief introduction to Matthew and his St Albans context, Connolly takes us on a connected group of journeys through his maps – into questions of imagined pilgrimage (especially in relation to monastic audiences and spiritual practices), into the conceptualisation of space with the map as ‘sensate vehicle’, into the ways that the maps conceive of time (as history, genealogy and prophecy), into their relations with the liturgy and the liturgical re-enactment of Easter. Connolly's command of the relevant conceptual and historical literature is excellent, and his readings are impressive, despite what may to some seem the datedness of the late 1990's theory (I am thinking of things such as ‘scopic pleasure’ and the ‘desirous gaze’). The sumptuous illustrations, which accompany the discussion, of course whet the appetite, as one imagines the good fortune of those who could actually turn Matthew's gorgeous pages.

The problems are that the great complexity of what is being done by Matthew in turning all these experiences (actual and imagined) on all these levels into a series of diagrams – that is, a singular achievement of Matthew's genius – is not quite emulated by his commentator. Although the volume's plan is clear, its last chapter – in taking account of a Royal rather than monastic manuscript, in Connolly's view made not by Matthew Paris but at the St Albans scriptorium in imitation of him – is a kind of appendix or afterthought. As a conceptual strand running through the book, Connolly fails to differentiate between Matthew Paris the man and the style of the St Albans scriptorium – although he wants the Royal manuscript, with its image of Matthew on his deathbed, to be by a different and later hand. In part this is because he focuses in particular on the great Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, ms 26 rather than on all four manuscripts produced in the orbit of Matthew within St Albans that offer map itineraries. This matters because his subject could be an artist and his particular vision or it could – within the dispensation of the argument about mental vision and monastic audience – be a particular set of devotions and attitudes within the context of the St Albans community (if not more widely), as visualised in a locally created and function-driven iconography. I was surprised by the relative lack of interest in what might be called the ‘artefactuality’ of the objects concerned – that is, Connolly's focus on the mental and imaginary space implied by the maps and on the gaze underplays what might be called their reliquary significance as books that function as shrine-like objects which enclose a kind of sacred secret in their images that when opened, in the case of the maps, afford the peruser (viewer? reader? worshipper?) a revelatory vision of the Holy Land, as well as the prize of a surrogate pilgrimage there. The fold-out flaps stuck to the tops of some pages which need a further opening or closure only add to the performative complexity of interiority, inscription and enclosure which has recently been tied to the notion of a poetics of the reliquary in the work of S. Chaganti (The medieval poetics of the reliquary, 2008).

Despite what is clearly a significant period of gestation since the thesis (of which this the revised monograph) was submitted in the University of Chicago, not all ‘thesis-ism’ has been expunged. There are some very odd bits of English phraseology (for example p. 36 ‘apparently the first of such an account’) and too many repetitions (why is J. Z Smith introduced to us as ‘a theorist of ritual’ not once but twice, pp. 63, 136?). There are some substantial errors in Latin (e.g. ‘devotio moderno’ for ‘devotio moderna’ – p. 21 twice), which reduce one's confidence in Connolly dealing with an author so rich in Latin as well as in imagery as Matthew Paris.