This book, edited by two professors in the Department of History of Art at UNED University of Spain, focuses on the images of Jews and Muslims in artistic objects and buildings during the last centuries of the Middle Ages and in the early modern period, both in the Iberian Peninsula and in other Mediterranean states. Its aim is to grasp diverse political and religious uses of the representation of otherness in the Christian Mediterranean, as well as the use of some Islamic objects and aesthetic styles to preserve and create identities both by the crown and by some noble families from the fourteenth to the eighteenth centuries.

The book is divided into three parts, along with a very thought-provoking introduction by the editors on the goals and methodological approach of the volume. The first part is devoted mainly to the Jewish and converso question. Different chapters analyse the image of the Jew in paintings of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, a period marked by mass conversions of Jews to Christianity after the 1391 pogroms. Here, Yonatan Glazer-Eytan's well-documented paper clearly stands out, due to the depth and complexity with which he has studied the differences between the stereotyped representation of the Jew in fourteenth-century Aragonese paintings of host profanation and the juridical prosecution of Jews accused of that crime. The papers written by Amadeo Serra and Maria Portmann focus on the link between the mass conversions of the end of the fourteenth century and the pictorial representations of Jews. Serra's study of the altarpieces of the sacraments from the Carthusian monastery of Porta Coeli and of the Holy Cross from the St Dominic monastery of Valencia is truly remarkable, and the links of the patrons with the attack on Valencia's Jewish quarter in 1391 are beyond any doubt. However, the connection between the iconographic programmes of these works and ‘conflicting attitudes toward Jewish conversion’ (p. 14) does not seem so clearly proved. The same is the case with the assertion that ‘[Vicente] Ferrer's agreement with the Crown's rejection of forced conversion explains why a devotion of particular rootedness among the Franciscans, the Holy Cross, developed in one of the chapels of the Dominican monastery’ (p. 35). Nor can I agree with Portmann's claim that the forced mass conversions of the end of the fourteenth century ‘were modelled on what the Franciscans had been preaching since the thirteenth century on the Silk Road, in India and in China’ (p. 84). The final chapter of this section is devoted to the relationship between Inquisition and painting, and to the identity of some Spanish painters of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It includes very interesting pages about artists prosecuted by the Spanish Inquisition, and others who joined the Holy Office. Nevertheless, the study of the socio-religious identity of some painters presents some points which are worth discussing. The converso origin of some sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spanish painters cannot be proved by the fact that they painted scenes from the Old Testament, as suggested by Fernando Marias (p. 107–8).

The second part of the book is dedicated to the links between artistic patronage and identity in medieval and early modern Iberia. The political use of Roman and Visigothic materials (spolia) in Christian and Muslim buildings of the twelfth to fourteenth centuries is interpreted by Juan Carlos Ruiz Sousa as a part of a political and ideological programme. In a similar way, Elena Paulino also studies the political and ideological use of Al-Andalus artistic elements in palaces built by some Castilian noble families in the fourteenth century. At the same time, she underlines that the appropriation of Al-Andalus artistic elements could in some cases lack religious or political connotations and respond only to the consumers' artistic taste. In fact, as Antonio Urquízar-Herrera points out in his very interesting paper, the use and preservation of Islamic objects by the Spanish nobility of the early modern age could have different meanings. On the one hand, in the cases of the marquises of Comares and the counts of Tendilla, Islamic objects such as the trousseau and the ring of King Boabdil of Granada were used to remember the glorious deeds of these families in the last part of the Reconquista. On the other hand, the Islamic objects owned by the Venegas family recalled its illustrious origin, since it descended from King Yusuf iv. This section also includes a remarkable and well-documented chapter authored by Nicola Jennings on the artistic patronage of some fifteenth-century converso families of Jewish origin. This inspiring paper studies artistic patronage as an element in the political, social and religious promotion of some powerful conversos.

The last part of the book focuses on the visual representation of Islam – identified with Ottoman Turkey – in the Iberian Peninsula and in some Italian states during the early modern period. Several chapters consider the image of the Turk in ephemeral art, sculpture and painting and architecture. Logically, Charles v's victory in Tunis in 1535 and the Battle of Lepanto provided the main motifs for representing defeated Turks, although the political meanings of these images could change due to different circumstances and times, as studied in their respective papers by Borja Franco and Francisco Garcia, Cristelle Baskins and Giuseppe Capriotti. Finally, Laura Stagno's chapter is truly remarkable, because of its chronological width and its emphasis on the plurality and complexity of interpretations of the image of the Turk in Genoa.

To sum up, religious, political and racial overlapping and changing identities are analysed through a range of artistic elements, from ephemeral art to engravings, from stucco decoration to paintings, in this diverse and suggestive book.