Behind the rather unexciting title of this book lies a fascinating collection which addresses some important debates about the Reformation. Eleven essays explore the central question of the relationship between word and image, and the place of both in relation to confessional identity and popular culture. Research has revolved for some while around questions of iconography and iconoclasm, but this collection aims to go beyond both, and look at the use of images as a way into understanding social behaviour and the formation of religious identity. It argues that the encounter between word and image within the pages of the early modern printed book brings into question many of the basic binaries on which we tend to rely, of Catholic against Protestant, public against private, and literature against visual culture. It also reminds us that the book as an object was a point at which various forces within early modern culture encountered one another, including theology, trade, consumption, emotion and the senses.

The collection opens with a comprehensive and insightful survey of the terrain by Alexandra Walsham, who charts the development of historical thinking from the starting point of what used to be received wisdom, namely that the Reformation saw the defeat of the image by the printed word. She shows the inadequacy of this notion, and explores the many different directions in which research is now unfolding, from understanding the Protestant theology of the image and the adaptation of medieval imagery, through the increasing emphasis on reception, to the ways in which words and images were expected to complement each other. She reminds us that images could be polemical, devotional, edificatory, aesthetic, affective or even in themselves iconoclastic. She also notes that there was a ‘Reformation of the eyes’ in this period, when the experience of seeing was undergoing its own transformation, from an assumption of immediate apprehension to an idea of negotiated meaning.

Confounding older assumptions, one clear theme to emerge from these essays is the extent to which word and image were inextricably intertwined in both Catholic and Protestant texts. Lee Palmer Wandel’s essay on catechisms puts Calvin alongside Canisius in considering how reading was a visual process not restricted to the page but involved in a range of cultural practice. Catechesis in this period was shifting from an aural to a visual encounter, and this essay looks at how a catechism could educate the eye to see differently, to perceive God in material form, be it Canisius’s idea of the Incarnation or Calvin’s notion of divine inscription upon the natural world. David Davis explores the use of images of revelation in English Bibles, showing both the variegation in Protestant attitudes and practices and the shades of meaning which can be teased out of such images when carefully contextualized. It is clear that imagery had an important if never unproblematic place within Protestant culture, and that images continued to be read alongside the printed word.

Imagery was particularly contentious in works published in the Dutch Republic. Feike Dietz suggests that where they did appear, as in Johannes Boekholt’s Levendige herts-theologie, the explanation lies less in the growth of religious toleration and more within the mechanisms of international exchange. Els Stronks’ essay on illustrated Biblical poems in the Dutch culture also suggests that the encounter between word and image was more contentious within Dutch religion than elsewhere. She argues that religious toleration may have been advanced less through adaptation and acceptance than through avoidance and delay, and that religious differences in this setting were perhaps less reconciled than ignored or repressed, thereby adding an extra dimension to discussions about toleration.

Several of these essays revolve around a single image or printed work. Walter Melion’s analysis of a Dutch image of 1588 reveals the extraordinary complexity of a single print from Haarlem which could accommodate a Catholic, Mennonite or Calvinist reading. Amanda Herrin shows how depictions of the Creation in Visscher’s Theatrum Biblicum of 1643 navigated ‘a terrain of biblical sensitivities’ with extraordinary subtlety, grappling with the theological problem of double creation. Adam Morton takes as his starting-point a single but highly complex English print from the 1620s, exploring its ambiguous and polymorphous nature. He builds from this a strong case for the need to advance our discussions of the encounter between religion and ‘popular culture’, insisting that religion cannot be viewed apart from the culture in which it exists, and that Protestantism, rather than either repressing, or exploiting a popular culture from which it was distinct, was in fact ‘seeping into wider culture’.

The complexities of the printing trade emerge from Dirk Imhof’s account of one Jesuit’s attempt to commission prayer-books for soldiers in Farnese’s army, despite not always knowing how to pay for them. Mia Mochizuki tells the extraordinary story of the Jesuit printing press which voyaged to Japan, printing works in Goa and Macau on the way, and considers the role of the printed image as a cultural agent within a global framework.

Erin Lambert’s study of illustrated hymnals begins with a beguiling picture of Lutherans and Catholics worshipping back to back in their shared church in Bautzen in 1567. At first sight this looks like visual testimony to the success of this bi-confessional community, but Lambert demonstrates how music and text could simultaneously suggest both coexistence and antagonism. Here was a visual expression of confessional identity in which shared experiences could not erase religious differences.

Whilst the Reformation undoubtedly wrought changes in the use and understanding of the image, these transformations were by no means straightforward, coherent or complete. Medieval and secular imagery continued to appear in post-Reformation guise, and visual imagery could take on different confessional implications in reworked settings. This fine collection of essays displays many new ways of thinking about printed texts and their varied interactions with early modern culture and will serve to enrich an already fertile field of debate.