Many factors impede serious study of misericords, from their less-than-elegant function and location to the highly miscellaneous nature of the subjects carved on them. Add their perishable medium and the invisibility of these subjects when their surrounding space is activated, and it is no wonder that scholars struggle to formulate and support any generalizations about them. In the past it was all too easy to smirk at titillating subjects and feign outrage at overtly scatological and sexual scenes, but a wave of scholarship starting in the 1990s made a serious attempt to incorporate misericords into its study of images on the margins. In Paul Hardwick's view, this scholarship overemphasized the secular meaning of carved misericords, in effect conflating their “marginal” location with a marginality based on evoking responses inappropriate to their location in consecrated space. His book aims to correct this scholarly wrong turn. Starting from the position that the “primary lens” for all “ecclesiastical arts of the period” should be “English late medieval Christianity,” his book “places [the scenes on misericords] more firmly within the doctrinal and devotional culture of the period” (2). Because the clergy commissioned them for a location in the choir where their viewers were entirely clerical, and therefore generally male and educated, “symbolism is in fact the guiding principle of misericord decoration, and may be found everywhere” (2). Though D. W. Robertson is not cited, his influence seems to pervade this study by a fellow Chaucer scholar.

Presented in six thematic chapters, this work concentrates on the half of surviving misericords that are figurative, though Hardwick is convinced that the flora also have symbolic meaning. Scenes from romances appear, as do the Wild Man and the Green Man; all are susceptible to moralization and Christian interpretation, with some room for individuals to interpret differently. Each chapter has a similar structure: generalizations about the subjects within the theme are followed by case studies, usually two.

In chapter 1, “A Fair Field of Folk,” Hardwick first surveys scenes of laypeople living their daily lives. Scenes of leisure pursuits function as cautionary warnings to the cleric and scenes of the laity at work teach the lesson that each person must perform in accordance with his god-given station in life. The plowman receives extended analysis in an argument that his image moves from a fourteenth-century notion of the plowman as true Christian to a Lollard appropriation of this laborer as a “figurehead and spokesman” (40), which may have lead “to systematic targeting of such representations of the ploughman in the years leading up to 1400 and beyond” (42). Hardwick raises here an intriguing but completely unverifiable possibility, hampered as he is by lack of knowledge as to whether misericords displaying plowmen ever existed in numbers sufficient to support his point.

Focusing on overtly religious subjects represented on misericords in chapter 2, “Doctrine and Debate,” Hardwick insists on their seriousness, contesting Christa Grössinger's generalization that a church's “lower spaces were exempt from spiritual matter” (50). He first considers the clergy, who call attention to their munificence as donors by including carvings of their crests and heraldic devices, but Hardwick is sure that these identifiers have the more important purpose of soliciting prayers for their souls. Monks and clerics may also be portrayed directly; more perplexing is the “ecclesiastical fox,” often preaching to a gathering of birds. Hardwick notes Kenneth Varty's interpretation of the fox as the butt of priestly hostility toward friars, but he prefers to understand these preaching foxes as “a warning against false words in righteous array” (50). Though explicitly religious scenes make up a small portion of the surviving whole, Hardwick plausibly argues that iconoclasm would have disproportionately targeted religious subjects, leaving the possibility that many more once existed. Another case study, that of the ape physician, focuses on the example in St. Mary's Church in Beverley. Based on contemporary texts, he first concludes that this ape functioned as a critique of irrational Lollardy, then suggests a positive reading in which the ape may refer obliquely to transubstantiation. Inherent ambiguity may be a product of a climate in which discussion of doctrine was dangerous.

Following this line of thought about the religious climate into chapter 3 “Influence and Invention,” Hardwick dismisses the idea that carvers enjoyed the freedom to select their subjects and supports the notion of close clerical supervision, although he acknowledges the lack of evidence. Prints must frequently have served as models (and perhaps drawings in manuscripts as well). Both playfulness and misunderstanding on the part of carvers are invoked as explanations for such puzzling subjects as a gurning fool, a theory that seems to contradict the earlier insistence on clerical oversight.

“Masculinity and Power,” the subject of chapter 4, offers an interpretation of the phallic imagery carved into choir furniture, which Hardwick sees as complementary to misogynistic scenes, especially those characterizing women as lustful, vain, domineering, and, through the vehicle of lay piety and devotion, apt to appropriate masculine discourse. Perhaps a critique of clergy who fail to embody the masculine authority God granted to them, genital display blatantly asserts that authority while revealing the anxiety that probably provoked the imagery in the first place. Given Hardwick's assumption that the audience for misericord scenes consisted of clerical males, deeper examination of their formation, concerns, and ethos would have been welcome.

Chapter 5, “Exemplary Animals,” the first of two chapters devoted to representations of animals on misericords, focuses on “mundane,” “domestic” animals. Not surprisingly, Hardwick's interpretations rely on symbolic meanings: if an animal had “known symbolic qualities” (112), they played a role in its selection for representation. Relying largely on the bestiary tradition, as well as Chaucer, he discusses a few animals rather quickly before settling on his extended analyses of the ape physician and the encounter of the fox and the cock. In each case he finds a serious message appropriate for clerical viewers.

In a rather short chapter 6, “The Monsters at the Margins,” Hardwick delves into two specific subjects: the Wild Man, and monsters on misericords in Ireland (specifically, the late fifteenth-century examples in Limerick Cathedral), a land that he places “on the margins of the known world” (140). The many fantastic beasts among the Limerick misericords suggest the overwhelmingly large number of forms that sin can take, but Hardwick finds hints of a “political resonance” as well (152): the non-Irishness—as defined by costume and hairstyle—of the human figures mixed in with the monsters may be anti-English, though, as usual, ambiguity remains. And ambiguity is the note on which the brief conclusion ends this book, an ambiguity that must be studied, in Hardwick's view, through the lens of late medieval Christianity.

A reader will learn much about the iconography of late medieval English misericords from this informative and entertaining book, but the puzzle of their functions as image-objects remains unsolved. Hardwick imbeds them in religion but does not face squarely the implications of their physical materiality in sacred space, where they do, in fact, slyly and almost invisibly, occupy margins. Offering a bodily respite, something to lean on, why do misericords offer a scene rendered illegible when they provide that respite, and why such a wild profusion of subject matter? The burgeoning field of misericord studies still has basic questions such as these to address.