The eighteen essays collected in this volume set a remarkably high and consistent standard of enquiry, thoughtfully introduced and footnoted with daunting thoroughness. Inevitably, as the product of a conference, the book has a mixed agenda. It seems at first sight like a text belonging to the new currents of interest in religion in the humanities, though not to the history of social and religious practice, church history or the history of ‘spirituality’. The fundamental assumption is that there is something tougher, more intractable, at the centre of religious belief itself. The issue is what that thing is. The scene – and the anxieties – are set out admirably in Jeffrey Hamburger's three contributions to the volume which include a characteristically perceptive and sensible introduction: what is it to discuss religion as a set of ideas in an age of secularity and theoretical scepticism about any value system which places a higher value on heresy and heterodoxy? Religion and the issue of the authenticity and ‘reality’ of belief have been displaced covertly or overtly either by secularist methodologies – style criticism, the ‘visual turn’ being one – or by the ‘linguistic turn’ and social readings. Somehow religion dissolves into presentist social and anthropological concerns, and that thing at the centre – the attributes of God and Christianity – is circumvented as mere ideology, the basis for reactionary iconography. Hamburger cites the chilling iconoclasm of Derrida: ‘The motif of homogeneity, the theological motif par excellence, is what must be destroyed.’ What future for religion, that which binds? But Hamburger astutely turns these arguments around. Medieval belief and notions of meaning were inherently pluralistic – a point made also in Caroline Bynum's vigorous revision of the character of doctrines (in the plural) of transubstantiation in relation to image-making. And is the new theology of ‘theory’ with its adroit and fleet-footed high priests of interpretation any different, any less orthodox in its claims to authority, any more beyond criticism? Certainly eucharistic study has never looked more interesting, and its relationship to images less glib. Yet the tone of the introductory sentiments somehow establishes a ‘bind’ that runs through the book: we know the topic is important, but we cannot easily speak directly to it for fear of appearing hegemonic or falling into mere catechism and pious Christian-speak. The product of this is a book of very high standard but a strangely cautious mindset. Those turning to the book for theology – itself perhaps more in need of definition than is the case here – will be satisfied by the writings of Schmitt on the imagery of the Virgin Mary and McGinn on the Trinity. And at the same time they will be confronted by another aspect of the ‘visual turn’, the new(ish) preoccupation with sight, visuality and epistemology. Many of the essays (by Morrison, Bedos-Rezak, Chazelle, Heck, Hughes and Carruthers) concern cognition, space, diagrams, typology and rhetoric – high minded, ‘top-down’ theoretical concerns. In all cases the topics are handled masterfully. Yet the centre reappears whether we like it or not. This is not in any sense a fault, simply a measure of the way scholars at present are tending to think about representing ideas. But it raises issues about historical transformation, and of course ourselves. Great theologians like St Anselm developed an anthropology to understand the ultimate act of representation, why God became Man. A price is to be paid if the study of God shifts too far from ordinary carnal concerns in pursuit of a modern ‘immaculate conception’ of medieval art which shows the workings of notional assent, as opposed to real assent, i.e. faith. The schools generated a powerful and widely influential moral theology, a set of ethical practices. Scholastics such as Alexander of Hales, Robert Kilwardby and Giles of Rome stressed that theology, unlike the human sciences, is an affective science: the Bible is different because all human books are based only on reason. Divine science appealed to the affect or inclination of the mind, not just its intellect, aspectus; theology inculcates virtue and its end is affective knowledge. Does this volume really do justice to this understanding of at least one important dimension of what it is to think and act theologically, and how images mean? Would an interest in affect have been too close to some generalised history of spirituality, or the social implications of moral theology, or anachronistic psychologising? The anxiety about representation focuses very largely on picture-making. But one essay, by Speer, is given over to architecture and to Suger's St-Denis: is there a theology of the cathedral, and how well posed is such a question? Here Panofsky, the high priest of iconology, of the nexus of art and big ideas, is scrutinised. We might blame Panofsky for slickness and over-ambition: but are small ideas really preferable to big ones? Panofsky was not interested in the affective character of divine science, and his reading of Dionysianism overlooked its all-important esoteric character. Speer sees Panofsky's conception of Suger's interest in the transformative power of Dionysian theology as ‘based on a transhistorical assumption of a congruity between modern and medieval notions of aesthetics’ (p. 66), noting that the concept of fine art is a Renaissance conception. Speer asks ‘Can we really speak of a formal effectiveness or even causality between a theological idea and an art work?’ This is reasonable, and it is in a sense the key issue of the book; but it proceeds from the same ultimately Platonic roots as Belting's Bild-anthropologie, tackled at the end by Hamburger in his final essay. Aristotelian accessus literature of the thirteenth century perhaps belies this caution, in having worked towards new notions of authorial sensibility and responsibility invested in literary style. Besides, there is a distinction between legitimate hermeneutical caution, and an actual setting aside of traditions of western thought which help us to see that some of the things discussed in this volume are ancestral to ourselves. Perhaps the real problem is the Renaissance and idealism, not theology. In any event, this is an extremely serious and beautifully produced volume which will help all scholars not only to think, but to bring their reading up to date.