For the London Review of Books, Alexander Bevilacqua reviews Jérémie Koering’s recent title with Zone, Iconophages: A History of Ingesting Images. Read the full review here. Learn more about the book here. An excerpt appears below:

“Even so, Koering recovers rich traces of a fundamental human quest: the effort to make contact with the divine. Whether pagan, Byzantine or Western Christian, believers all pursued healing of the body and the spirit, and sought proximity to the sacred as best they could. It wasn’t so much that the ‘image’s power was fragile, relative and mysterious’, in Koering’s words, but that the workings of the godhead were inscrutable. If seeing is believing, then touching was receiving, and grinding up and drinking holy things the ultimate assimilation.”