The relationship between image and text has a long and complex history. Emerging from the 2012 conference at Dumbarton Oaks, the essays collected in Sign and Design: Script as Image in Cross-Cultural Perspective (300–1600c.e.), edited by Brigitte Miriam Bedos-Rezak and Jeffrey F. Hamburger, comment and expand on this history in exciting ways. In their introduction, the editors describe the volume's intentional shift from “an interest in text and image to a concern for the dialogic role of image in writing,” which in turn corresponds to a shift from the binary of image and text to a quintet of “the interactive grouping of support, space, letter, image, and word” (2). One of the goals of Sign and Design is described as pausing “before considering the reference, meaning, or agency of scripted material so as to capture the moment when the hand drew the letters, remembering them not only as shapes but also as gestures of devotion, worship, ritualistic performance, public statement, and cosm(et)ic illumination” (14). That is, this collection of essays assesses the visual, communicative, and performative functions of image as text and text as image, as well as a range of phenomena in between. Relatedly, the book often addresses the hierarchies and assumptions that privilege Western forms and concepts of expression.

The collection also builds on a particular body of Hamburger's recent scholarship, as indicated by the title of the first section, “The Iconicity of Script,” which bears the same name as Hamburger's 2011 article, “The Iconicity of Script: Writing as Image in the Middle Ages” (Word & Image 27, no. 3 [2011]: 249–261), further expanded in his book Script as Image (Peeters, 2014). Bedos-Rezak's scholarship, which focuses on semiotics and identity-making in medieval material culture, also frames the conversation.

Organized thematically into three sections, the thirteen studies set out in this volume are relatively diverse, as seven of them address non-Western subjects (the “cross-cultural” of the subtitle): Aztec pictograms, Pre-Columbian glyphs, Byzantine epigrams and monograms, Jewish and Islamic calligraphy, and ancient Mesopotamian cuneiform (which extends far beyond the 300–1600 c.e. range of the book's subtitle!). The editors of the volume expect readers to make constructive connections across essays, and model as much in their introduction, noting, for example, the distinct ways in which Islamic, Jewish, and Christian letters relate to images (11).

The essays in the first section, “The Iconicity of Script,” are concerned with the visual or iconic nature of text. In many ways, Anne-Marie Christin's essay “Visible/Legible: An Iconic Typology of Writing” sets the stage for the rest of the volume; in it she provides a brief account of the pre-history of writing and argues that the written word has its origins not in speech, but in visual communication. The remaining chapters of this section provide several case studies in the iconic nature of text. For example, “Pictorial Talking: The Figural Rendering of Speech Acts and Texts in Aztec Mexico” by Elizabeth Hill Boone and “From Many into One: The Transformation of Pre-Columbian Signs into European Letters in the Sixteenth Century” by Thomas B. F. Cummins track the internal and external developments of the respective language systems. The former describes the adjectival or attributive use of speech scrolls in Aztec pictography (which records concepts rather than spoken language) and then argues that, “Mexican pictography comes closest to other writing systems when it organizes individual glyphs into streams of iteration, linear sequences that convey the content of speech acts” (50). The latter presents the European use of the Roman alphabet to systematize and subjugate indigenous languages (and therefore people).

The second section, “Text: Imaging the Ineffable,” discusses the use of letters to circumscribe the uncircumscribable, particularly in the form of diagrams and calligraphy. In “Dynamic Signs and Spiritual Designs,” Herbert Kessler writes on the Carolingian Moutier-Grandval Bible, on which he has published numerous times. In this instance, however, he focuses on the historiated initial Q of John's first epistle, which contains the disembodied hand of God, which holds a golden circle/ring and is in turn encircled. Kessler argues that the three circles (Q, circle, ring) reference Calcidius's fourth-century astronomical diagram, adapted to visualize the unity of the Trinity. Katrin Kogman-Appel demonstrates in “The Role of Hebrew Letters in Making the Divine Visible” that liturgical poems, which often begin with the name of God, provide opportunity to use script as substitution for anthropomorphic depictions of God.

Finally, “Performativity: Iconic Script and the Body” turns to performative aspects of the written word, whether in public epigrams or monogram hybrids that can be indecipherable. For example, Cynthia Hahn, in “The Performative Letter in the Carolingian Sacramentary of Gellone,” reads the historiated initials of the Gellone manuscript as performative in nature. More specifically, she argues that they do not simply document or illustrate the liturgy, but actually instruct the viewer in how to perform and interpret it.

As a wide-ranging collection intended to continue the conversation of what was clearly a generative conference, Sign and Design is overall a successful project. It is indeed cross-cultural in its sampling. While the color reproductions are appreciated, figures 5 and 6 are of poor quality and appear pixelated. As a wonderful resource on imagistic script, an accumulative bibliography would have been a useful addition (the first chapter is the only one to conclude with a bibliography). The prose of the essays is often poetic and engaging, though some of the technical language could be a barrier to non-specialist readers. Still, the content and methodology will certainly be of interest and use to graduate students and scholars in fields such as art history, material culture, manuscript studies, history, and religious studies.