The fabulous panoply of scenes carved into the misericords that once supported the bottoms of medieval monks and canons across England is ripe for an important new treatment, and in Betsy Chunko-Dominguez it has found a suitably erudite and appreciative investigator. She opens her book by arguing, rightly, that it is a fool's errand to seek a single ‘correct’ meaning for every carving but also disputes with scholars who have emphasised incoherence or contradiction between margin and centre, or between the pious and the lewd. Seemingly incongruous iconographies, she argues, in fact operated at different levels within the one Christian interpretative hierarchy, a riddling challenge as much for cotemporaries as for modern historians. Sexual imagery, say, was neither simply subversive nor funny but just as richly allusive and complex as an episode from a saint's life. Her book largely positions religion – or, rather, the religious – as the dominant force within the interpretive field. Thus, ‘husband beating’ is an injunction to celibacy; deformed human bodies, a warning of spiritual corruption; hell, a didactic tool. Some of these interpretations will be familiar to readers but they provide the grit that proves the rich multi-valency of misericord carvings, and Chunko-Dominguez's short text is exceptionally wide-ranging and comprehensively cited. In fact, her weaker arguments come when she departs from her focus on contemporary hermeneutics and tries to uncover authorial intention. The first is when she contends that carvings of busy-bee agricultural workers were the ‘conscious choice’ of the carver in the face of accusations of rural laziness (p. 94). She makes a similar argument about carvings of carvers being examples of ‘artisanal self-awareness’ (p. 147). Actually, I would argue, the inverse is more plausible – this was the divinely-ordered society of estates satire, dictated by the seignorial interests of the patron, in which the peasant laboured as he ought, eschewing the alarming social flux of the long fifteenth century. As such, it would fit more neatly into her reader- or meaning-focussed approach. The second is when she describes Reynard the Fox carvings as the work of anticlerical carvers slipped under the nose of presumably rather dim-witted canons, and thus ‘socially recuperative’ (p. 142). This veers towards the centre/margin distinction critiqued in chapter i (p. 30). The book begins with its focus squarely on ‘interpretive responses’ (p. 4) and the outlining of a coherent multi-valency but concludes that ‘misericords … negotiate spaces in between … artist and object, viewer and viewed’ (p. 147). The author-carver rejoins the reader-cleric as a source of meaning; the cultural turn turns back. None of this should detract from what is a succinct, pithy and broad survey of the medieval interpretive field and a brilliant application of visual analysis, an important historicisation of and corrective to a somewhat neglected subject. Rather, as Chunko-Dominguez passes through the vast iconographical range of medieval misericords, the challenges and tensions in her subject return. Is there still room for paradox and inconsistency, even irresolvable mystery, both for us and for a medieval audience, in these odd programmes of shitting hunters, hanged foxes and worthy peasants?