The sixth-century author of a Christian topography personally designed illustrations for its text: ‘Come, ye blessed of my Father’, the Saviour calls from one of the book's pages as the living and the risen dead line up below his throne (Vat. ms gr. 699, fo. 89r). But the outcomes of divine judgement are not shown yet; we only see them in an eighth-century work, the Sacra parallela, where the city walls of heavenly Jerusalem shield the righteous while flames engulf the damned and a giant worm coils around their necks (BN, Paris, ms gr. 923, fo. 68v). In the manuscript, this grim picture accompanies a passage about penitence. At about the same time as its text was illustrated, depictions of hell's various torments start appearing on church walls: snakes, for instance, bite a slanderer's tongue or suck at the breasts of a woman who has failed to nurse her children. There is no doubt that such images of punishment were meant to warn against committing the corresponding sin. They throw light on the ideas which those who sponsored or viewed them entertained about virtue and vice, order and transgression, crime and justice.

Lymberopoulou, Duits and their team have carried out the herculean task of recording every single representation of hell in medieval wall-paintings on the Greek island of Crete. One hundred and two churches from the thirteenth through fifteenth centuries are catalogued district by district. Colour photographs illustrate each entry. Architectural plans specify the position of infernal scenes (found most often in the western part of church buildings, farthest from the altar). Thus documented, the Cretan material forms an unparalleled and truly invaluable resource for all students of Christian art.

The authors did not choose Crete at random. First, an unusually large number of medieval churches are preserved all over its countryside. Second, from 1207 till 1669 the island was a Venetian colony. The work of local painters thus reflects the religious beliefs of an agrarian society, as well as the tension between two forms of Christianity: Eastern Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism. Half of the essays which accompany the catalogue aim at setting the Cretan murals against their religious and social background. The chapter written by Charalambos Gasparis is a splendid example of document-based social history: a great deal of archival material survives from the island, and Gasparis quotes long extracts from unpublished primary sources. Dionysios Stathakopoulos makes similarly pioneering use of the late-Byzantine preacher Joseph Bryennios, whose admonitions have as yet received little attention from scholars, even though their text was printed in 1768–84. Duits traces several motifs that Cretan representations of hell share with those by western European artists. Lymberopoulou sifts through the iconographic data that she and her colleagues collected: the fornicator (shown fifty-five times) emerges as ‘a clear winner among Cretan sinners’; second prize goes to the farmer trespassing on his neighbour's property (forty-three occurrences); thieves come third with a score of thirty-three images (one of which its painter inscribed, probably with the name of some notorious local thug, ‘Leontis’). The rest of the commentary volume contextualises Cretan hell scenes by comparing them to those from other regions: Cappadocia, mainland Greece, Cyprus. The essays here offer fine examples of descriptive prose (‘the women have pendulous breasts with articulated nipples’, ‘a dynamic nude dangles above a little fire’, ‘demons lead a long, sad chain of naked and fettered souls’, etc.) and present, in the case of Laconia, many a little-known specimen of infernal iconography.

A few pedantic remarks: The ninth-century ruler Boris i must not be confused with his tenth-century namesake Boris ii (p. 282). The donor Maximus portrayed in a last judgement icon from Cyprus is not a priest-monk but a bishop, since only bishops may wear a polystaurion (pp. 392–3). Correctly transcribed, the text from Fig. 127 should read ἡ μὴ προσφέρουσα ἐν τῆ ἐκκλησία προσφορ(ὰν) (p. 797).

The authors’ ground-breaking work brings up several questions that only further research could answer: Why is it that depictions of hell first appear in the ninth century? Are there regional differences in the iconography of posthumous punishment? Are infernal images at all related to actual judicial practice? How did they function as a means of social control? What effect did they have on those who saw them? Last, but not least: did that Cretan thief Leontis ever mend his ways?