This book is one of a small flurry of recent publications on the history of the Decalogue, including Dominik Markl (ed.), The Decalogue and its cultural influence (Sheffield 2013), Lesley Smith, The Ten Commandments: interpreting the Bible in the medieval world (Leiden 2014) and my own The Reformation of the Decalogue: religious identity and the Ten Commandments in England, c.1485–1625 (Cambridge 2017). The volume comes out of an international interdisciplinary conference held in Ghent in 2014, which itself formed part of a research project funded by the Flemish Research Foundation into the relationship between the prominence of the Decalogue in vernacular literature and the development of cultural processes of introspection and individuation ‘said to have culminated in the idea(l) [sic.] of the Renaissance individual’ (pp. 3–4). While this raises some tantalising questions, they go unanswered, for the fairly brief introduction to the volume does not do very much more than establish the growing significance of the Decalogue in the Christian world from the thirteenth century onwards, describe the collection's genesis and give an overview of the essays contained therein. While they cover a very interesting range of topics, they feel more like a loosely connected series of short vignettes than a coherent collection with an organised or unifying theme or argument. While this is not uncommon with volumes of conference proceedings, perhaps a stronger introduction, and more purposeful direction from the editors, might have made for a more authoritative contribution to the field.

It should also be noted that the chronological focus of the volume is overwhelmingly medieval – only two or three of the eleven essays really deal with the early modern period in any detail – and that the most common approach is a literary one, with the majority of essays focusing in upon a single text, or upon a small corpus of works related by author or genre. The individual essays are rather short, and so while they offer a series of fascinating glimpses of larger projects, their brevity limits what they are able to achieve. In addition, what is lacking from many (although certainly not all) of the essays is a sense of their wider significance: how they might cause us to rethink our understanding of the place of the Decalogue in relation to the broader cultures and cultural shifts with which it interacted across the medieval and early modern periods.

Lesley Smith's authoritative discussion of how the commandments became much more prominent in the twelfth-century schools, especially following their incorporation into Peter Lombard's Sentences, sets up the volume brilliantly. Luca Gili's contribution on the other hand is a rather strange one, as his focus is on trying to explain the absence of the Decalogue from Dante's Divine comedy. Charlotte Cooper's discussion of the treatment of the commandments in Christine de Pizan's Epistre Othea highlights the odd mismatches in that work between the quatrains, glosses, allegories and (in some copies) images relating to each commandment. Cooper suggests that ten alternative lessons were being suggested by de Pizan, and some of the connections to the traditional Decalogue do seem rather random, but others actually make more sense than she gives credit for when contextualised against existing explications of the commandments. For example, discussions of the obligation to preserve life and the necessity of judicial killing were common features of commentaries on the commandment ‘thou shalt not kill’. Gregory Haake's essay presents an interesting discussion of the inclusion of idolatry as a trope within the lyric poetry of Dante, Scéve and Ronsard, but after entertaining several thoughtful possible explanations for its use he concludes that ultimately it was ‘but a poetic device’ (p. 88).

Robert Bast's article is a masterful and ambitious attempt to ‘measure’ the impact of the long medieval history of pastoral efforts to make the Decalogue central to the religious lives of the laity. He concludes that while in some respects their teachings failed, aspects of Decalogue instruction were probably internalised by the people. The question, however, is ultimately too massive to be comprehensively resolved in such a short piece. Greti Dinkova-Bruun describes the contents and significance of the treatment of the Decalogue in Richard of Wetheringsett's pastoral manual for the clergy Qui bene presunt, arguing that the manual has been unfairly and unwisely overlooked. One of the volume's editors, Juri Desplenter, explores two vernacular treatises on the commandments written by the fourteenth-century lay theologian Jan van Leeuwen, the so-called ‘good cook’. He suggests that, contrary to previous speculation, van Leeuwen's writings were largely independent of those of his more famous mentor, the mystic John of Ruusbroec. Lucie Doležalová’s essay discusses a series of medieval mnemonic poems which followed Augustine in linking the Ten Commandments with the ten plagues of Egypt. She notes that authors struggled to make the strange concordances work, often mangling the structure or order of the commandments or plagues to try to concoct suitable pairings. These associations were probably unhelpful for anybody who did not already know about both precepts and plagues, but perhaps acted as spurs to memory and moral reform for those who did.

Krysztof Bracha contributes a very interesting discussion of the commandments in late medieval Polish preaching, where the Decalogue seems to have been a more prominent aspect of catechesis than (for example) in England. Henk van den Belt's essay is an interesting discussion of woodcut illustrations of the commandments in Lutheran catechisms, but it fails to locate them effectively in the historical traditions established by the medieval Concordantiae caritatis and Grosse Seelentrost, as explored by Ilja Veldman amongst others. Waldemar Kowalski brings the volume to a close by describing treatments of the first three commandments in Polish Catholic catechisms of the 1560s and 1570s. The volume contains a short index of names, but would have benefitted from a broader index pointing to key themes, terms, places, concepts etc. This is a volume which will certainly be of interest to scholars of medieval (and to a lesser extent early modern) religious and literary cultures in particular. But while there are some real gems here, overall the focus of the collection is rather narrow, and for a general introduction to the topic one of the other volumes cited at the start of this review might be a better option.