For a recent issue of The Sixteenth Century Journal, Lora Walsh discusses Dissimilar Similitudes: Devotional Objects in Late Medieval Europe by Caroline Walker Bynum. Click here to learn more about the book. See the button to the left to read the full review. An excerpt appears below:

“The book that now binds together revised versions of six previously published articles takes its name from pseudo-Dionysius, who claimed that things deeply dissimilar to the divine nevertheless can "elevate our minds in specific ways toward heaven.” The consummate image on the dust jacket enfolding these articles (now book chapters) shows the Virgin Mary’s hand holding a crown of roses near a man’s rosary beads, while forcing us to manipulate the book as three-dimensional object to see that the flower in Mary’s other hand is a prayer plucked from the man’s lips. Inside the book, the image is reproduced and discussed in an introduction that frames the chapters’ theoretical and practical approaches to the (dis)similarities we find among a variety of medieval objects, between medieval European objects and comparanda from distant times and places, and between objects and the unrepresentable Other.”