LAUSR

The Routledge Companion to Medieval Iconography is a useful and timely resource in the study of medieval culture. In thirty-eight chapters, illustrated with 127 black-and-white images and eight color plates, the international contributors walk the reader through overviews and historiographies of their respective topics; many essays also include select bibliographies. In the preface and introduction, Colum Hourihane provides a succinct summary of the history (and baggage) of iconography in the discipline of art history. The first of the volume’s three parts, “The Great Iconographers,” contains essays on twelve significant medieval art historians, beginning with Andrea Alciato in the sixteenth century and including the usual suspects, such as Émile Mâle and Erwin Panofsky, as well as those who “troubled” iconography—most notably Michael Camille. The comparatively brief second section, “Systems and Cataloguing Tools,” walks the reader through major methodologies of classifying images with special attention paid to digital databases. The third part of the book, “Themes in Medieval Art,” is the longest, with twenty-two chapters on topics including liturgy, politics, medicine, music, gender, and sexuality. As Hourihane notes in his preface, there were necessary limits to the collection’s scope. Still, this reviewer was disappointed that Muslims and Jews are only discussed at length in the two chapters dedicated to otherness and monsters—that is, despite the up-to-date and progressive nature of the volume (as evidenced, for example, by the strong representation of Material Collective members), it presents a decidedly Christocentric picture of medieval Europe, which feels like a missed opportunity. The prohibitive price (consistent across all Routledge Art History and Visual Studies Companions) is also unfortunate, as this inspiring book not only provides an accessible orientation to the field but also critically and creatively engages with relevant case studies, thereby making this collection valuable to novices and experts alike.