Kathleen Kamerick’s study of late medieval art and piety in England is partly a history of strong reactions to images. The book begins with the 1429 heresy trial of a Lollard, an adherent of a heretical reform movement led by John Wyclif and others. The accused, Margery Baxter, had suggested to a friend that the images in the local church were not only the base material creations of “lewd” craftsmen but were also idols inhabited by demons (13–14). This Lollard contempt for religious images was often accompanied by acts of destruction. In the 1380s, for example, two men in need of firewood took an ax to a statue of Saint Catherine and delighted in the notion of enacting a “new martyrdom” through their chopping (127). Kamerick’s book ends with a glimpse of the sixteenth century and the state-sponsored iconoclasm that marked the spread of the Reformation. As a sign of the times, a famous cult statue of the Virgin Mary, Our Lady of Ipswich, was destroyed in a London bonfire in 1538 (118).

In contrast to these negative reactions, the author also includes examples of how images were embraced as effective tools of devotion. In 1373, the anchoress Julian of Norwich experienced a series of “showings” that in many ways resulted from her meditation on images such as the crucifix. These concrete visual objects allowed Julian access to “spiritual vision” by way of the thoroughly corporeal act of “bodily vision” (134). In the fifteenth century, another female mystic, Margery Kempe, recorded her own mystical experiences in which paintings and sculptures were formative. The result was, as Kamerick puts it, a “dynamic interaction between image, mind, and body that culminated in weeping” (142).

As demonstrated by these extremes, images were both feared and celebrated in late medieval England, occupying a powerful yet seemingly tenuous position in both worship and theological debate. The author’s stated goals include differentiating between image theory and image practice. Thus, she is interested not just in parsing the often-complex theological arguments concerning the visual but also in the “evidence of people’s beliefs about and responses to holy images” (3). In short, her “aim is to explore late medieval religious life by examining what was thought and taught about holy images, and what roles they played in the life of the parish and in devotional practices” (4). By the end of this study, it becomes clear that what was “thought and taught” about images is far less revealing than the personal and communal ways in which images functioned in the parish churches that dotted the English countryside. It is the exploration of this everyday life of images that is Kamerick’s strongest contribution.

The books point of departure is the Lollard attack on images as explicated in chapter 1, “The Cause of All Evil: Idolatry in Late Medieval England.” Although this chapter is a good summary of the various medieval arguments for and against images, the author never clearly articulates how her work offers new insights about Lollardy. Further, it becomes clear from Kamerick’s investigation of Lollard texts that visual images were not the only target of critique; it was the entire hierarchical and symbolic structure of leadership and Christian worship (including the Eucharist) that the Lollards wished to dismantle (26). Nevertheless, the author offers a useful review of Lollard iconophobia and the apologies written by church leaders in response. These arguments for images and their use were transmitted through a variety of texts, such as sermons and devotional and instructional manuals, which are explored in chapter 2, “Diverse Doctrines: Religious Instruction and Holy Images.” Especially useful here is the careful explication of texts such as Dives and Pauper and The Pore Caitif. In Kamerick’s analysis, the character of Pauper is a “defender of the clergy and orthodoxy” (48) and offers a “protocol of image worship, directing the onlooker where to focus, what to think, and how to feel”; ultimately, he provides a kind of “psychology of image veneration” (50–51). And overall, she argues, The Pore Caitif does not “judge images themselves to be dangerous, but concentrates on educating the eye of the beholder, instructing readers how to cultivate the appropriate mental posture” (53). Such vernacular texts helped lay people understand the veneration of images as mainly a mental and emotional encounter, or as Kamerick phrases it, “an interior movement of the spirit” (54).

A close-up view of how images functioned for two well-known female mystics is offered in chapter 5, “Art and Moral Vision: Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe.” Although admittedly extreme in their behavior, Julian and Margery give testimony that clearly proves the efficacy of images. The chapter concludes with a fascinating discussion of how intromission, a late-medieval scientific theory of vision, became an explanation of spiritual vision as transmitted by the popular preacher’s manual De Oculo Morali (150–54). Interestingly, this scientific/spiritual explanation of vision works against Kamerick’s framing of her chapter in terms of the specific gendered experience of female viewers. If spiritual vision is ultimately about the “mind’s eye” (152), then it transcends the body and is available to both men and women equally. In chapter 6, “Staying the Senses: Image and Word in Prayer Books,” the author moves from specific viewers to specific images as contained in Books of Hours. This chapter serves both as a review of the typical visual and devotional themes made available by these devotional books, and as a good summary of the dynamics of “reading and … beholding” (160). Kamerick suggests that the “material artifact” of the codex can reveal the “shifting attention to words and pictures … the eye’s movements and also its lingering gazes, and the physical motions of hands and genuflecting knees that together composed the reading of these books …” (190). Disappointingly, the author’s many examples of texts and images exist only in a generalized account of trends and themes and are never combined with the specifics of time and place or the performance of specific viewers.

Kamerick’s most original and valuable work is found in the book’s middle chapters, in which the author approaches her topic not from the level of theological debate and clerical hierarchy but from the point of view of the parish church and the regular men and women who “energetically engaged in creating the material culture of their religion” (8). Chapter 3, “Fair Images in the Parish,” relies on archival evidence from East Anglia to demonstrate the degree to which lay people “found a vital connection between … pieces of wood and stone and the supernatural” (9). The chapter opens with the testimony of Roger Martin from a late-sixteenth-century memoir concerning his parish church, particularly the many church furnishings lost due to the Reformation, including decorated tables, a gilded tabernacle, and a statue of the Pietà (69). Other textual traces of lost images are found in surviving wills, in which parishioners gave money to sponsor paintings, wooden and alabaster sculpture, stained glass, rood screens, and other architectural renovations. The wills reveal a deep, emotional investment in the visual world of communal worship: specific images “inspired almost possessive feelings of intimacy” that were often due to the “constant proximity” of the images to where people sat in the church (78). This interest in images extended to the relatively mundane need for regular upkeep, restoration, and lighting. Many wills record monetary gifts to finance votive candles for illuminating statues or paintings and thus representing in perpetuity the prayers of the devotee. Clothing, jewelry, and money were often left for the care of images, evidence of a “particular image’s hold on affection and memory” (101).

The power of images as touchstones of time and memory in the parish church is further explored in chapter 4, “Something of Divinity: Holy Images in the Community.” Here Kamerick draws on more varied archival sources such as “papal letters, bishops’ registers, and churchwardens’ accounts” to explain the communal functions of images (11). Displayed in the public space of the church, modest images could take on more than just local significance, becoming “emblems of regional, spiritual, and … political identity” (112). As Kamerick writes, “They were encircled by concentric rings of meaning, which might include belief in an image’s miraculous powers, economic activities centered on the image, attacks on a saint’s image, and efforts by secular or religious authorities to prescribe proper behavior toward images” (112). This ripple effect of influence and meaning was demonstrated as well by the ongoing creation of the image through “gilding, repainting, and repairing” (113). This upkeep was both personal and communal and found its most perfect expression in the activities of religious gilds or societies. One such group was formed solely to maintain a candle in front of an image of John the Baptist (115). Kamerick’s careful exploration of the mundane archival records of local communities reveals the powerful ways in which images lived in the parish and the degree to which people invested in them spiritually, emotionally, psychologically, and financially. An image was not simply a statue on an altar but a fully integrated part of the community. “Removing an image was not inconsequential,” Kamerick suggests, “for it would have disrupted the ritual life of the parish, perhaps altered some part of its income, and diminished the bond between this particular piece of earth and heaven” (118).

Although Kamerick successfully brings to life the personal and communal experiences of religious images, her overarching argument is less compelling. Her stated, main thesis is that the traditional justification for images as visual books for the illiterate masses (as famously formulated by Gregory the Great) is inadequate and incomplete. While this notion is mentioned throughout the book, this reader kept hoping it was just rhetorical; but by the end, it is revealed as central: “As this study has attempted to show, the pervasiveness of holy images in religious culture meant, inevitably, that they moved beyond the confines of pure representation and challenged their narrow definition as ‘books of the laity’ ” (192). Yet, as Kamerick herself makes clear in her first chapter, theologians had long argued that images were valuable for a variety of reasons; and, as the author certainly knows, these reasons have long been explored by historians of art and religion. Thus, Kamerick constructs (perhaps unwittingly) a kind of straw man and positions herself not in relation to recent scholarship but in relation to one oft-repeated argument that originated in the Early Christian period.

As a result, Kamerick fails to frame her project in terms of recent historical and art-historical scholarship, such as Eamon Duffy’s The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England 1400–1580 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992) and Michael Camille’s The Gothic Idol: Ideology and Image-Making in Medieval Art (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989). These omissions represent a missed opportunity to grapple with two complex versions of high- and late-medieval image theory and practice. Duffy not only creates a richly nuanced picture of late-medieval religious practices (some of which overlaps Kamerick’s work) but also offers a compelling argument concerning the nature of those practices and the need for reform in England. He presents the Reformation not as inevitable but as a disruptive shock to basic religious beliefs and practices. Although Camille deals with an earlier period, he constructs an equally complex world of images, demonstrating that the medieval fear of idolatry was not just about the misuse of images. Instead, textual and visual references to idols and idol worship were multivalent and loaded with ideological and political meaning.

As a whole, Kamerick’s book functions as a general introduction to debates over images in the late Middle Ages. Unfortunately, the author fails to present an original argument concerning these debates, even to the point of ignoring some of her own research. The book’s final sentence suggests that by the mid-sixteenth century, fear had “hardened into conviction,” and images were clearly and unproblematically seen as the “cause of idolatry” (196). But what about the lay people in their parish churches? After Kamerick’s careful reconstruction of their beliefs and practices, it is difficult to accept that they were so easily convinced that images were idols.