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Revelation. After a chapter on the origins of the text, chapters are devoted to Augustine, Hildegard of Bingen, and Joachim of Fiore. In his chapter on Augustine, Beal adverts to another feature of Revelation, its function as an othering machine into which an opponent is inserted in order to heighten his malignity and show that “this cosmos is not big enough for the two of us” (54; see also 134, 154, 200–204). This is certainly the case, but this aspect was not discovered by Augustine, being rather a formal feature of apocalyptic texts. Beal’s snapshot approach encounters more problems in the second part of the book. Chapter 6 pits Luther’s early dislike of Revelation against Cranach’s popular illustrations of the text and declares victory for Cranach. Beal never mentions, however, that Luther changed his mind about Revelation in his new Preface to the 1530 German Bible, setting out an historicizing interpretation that was to have significant later influence. Also problematic is chapter 7, “New World of Gods and Monsters,” which deals with how Western colonizers identified pagan gods with the demons known from the Bible and Christian history, a story that has only marginal relation to Revelation. A chapter on contrasting Catholic and Protestant views of Revelation in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries would have been more apropos. Other chapters are more interesting, especially that devoted to the African-American folk artist James Hampton’s sculptural reenvisioning of “The Throne of the Third Heaven” (Rev. 4:1–4) now in the Smithsonian American Art Museum.