The literature on iconoclasm has grown enormously since David Freedberg wrote a series of books and articles on the subject in the 1970s and ’80s. Texts such as Margaret Aston's England's Iconoclasts (1988) have examined the historical circumstances in which the critique and destruction of images and objects occurred, while others, perhaps most importantly Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel's Iconoclash (2002), have taken a theoretical approach and problematized the concept of iconoclasm itself. Art, Piety and Destruction in the Christian West, 1500–1700, a collection of seven essays about a wide geographic area including England, Germany, France, Italy, and Spain, does a bit of both. The contributions address a range of media, including architecture, stained glass, textiles, and painting, and in all but one case are concerned with the effects of the Protestant Reformation on aspects of visual culture. One of the most compelling aspects of the collection is the way it uses the Protestant critique of images to address a series of issues, including the relationship between iconoclasm and preservation, the idea of censorship as a productive force, the ideology of display, and the concept of defacement as creation.

In his essay “Salvaging Saints: The Rescue and Display of Relics in Munich during the Early Catholic Reformation,” for example, Jeffrey Chipps Smith examines the way relics were used by Bavarian Catholics responding to Protestant image critiques and encroachment on Catholic territory. At the same time that he traces Catholics’ attempts to gain relics through a range of means, Chipps Smith also emphasizes the importance of the relics’ display (in what might be termed their ideological repositioning) in their new home.

While Chipps Smith is concerned with the way mobile objects can be motivated to produce a specific reception, three essays look at works in situ. David Karmon argues that the Maison Carrée in Protestant Nîmes was spared defacement or destruction by iconoclasts because it held special resonance for Protestants. Adam Kraft's Eucharistic tabernacle in Nuremberg, and the medieval windows of St. Mary's, Fairford, Gloucestershire, are the subjects of chapters by Corine Schleif and Sarah Brown, respectively. Schleif looks at how the tabernacle became imbued with new meaning after it had ceased to serve a liturgical function, while Brown describes how the windows were saved from destruction and became valued for their aesthetic qualities.

The only essay not concerned with the image critiques of the Protestant Reformation addresses a related subject: the relationship between defacement and creativity. Using the rich graffitti in Arborio, Italy, as a case study, Véronique Plesch examines the apparent defacement of local religious imagery, suggesting that it constitutes an important record of local history.

An important idea running throughout the collection is the way that early modern image critiques resonate with our own period. This issue is most directly addressed in the chapter by Charlene Villaseñor Black, which studies the effect of the Inquisition on depictions of images of the Virgin and St. Anne in post-reform Spain at the same time that it compares the early modern example to more recent censorship cases.

This collection of essays is admirable in its focus on a range of media. To the entries on graffitti, relics, architecture, and stained glass can be added Virginia Raguin's essay, which examines how the form of liturgical objects and textiles signified faith in the English Reformation.

Taken as a whole, the collection works well. Raguin's introductory essay incorporates a range of ideas about image destruction, as well as a series of related terms including preservation, display, creation, and censorship. One or two of these terms is taken up in each essay, so that the texts function not simply as discrete units, but more resonantly, each echoing the other. Karmon's discussion of the Protestant's appropriation of the Maison Carrée, for example, raises questions about the relationship between preservation and ideology that are addressed in a somewhat different way by Brown's chapter on the medieval windows of St. Mary's. Because each chapter is specific in its historical focus, and at the same time resonant with wider conceptual issues, the book should be of interest to a broad audience.