A clear map of the journey that Taylor has taken in the extensive research for his latest book can be seen not so much from the single, somewhat crowded map (pp. 36–7) but more easily from the three substantial appendices (pp. 567–637). The latter constitute an invaluable census and commentary on the 498 shrines and miraculous images from colonial-era Mexico which receive fuller discussion in the main text. These comprise 238 sited images of Christ or the cross, 240 of the Virgin Mary and twenty of other saints which date from the 1520s to the early nineteenth century. In the first appendix they are subdivided geographically; in the second ‘When shrines began’ they are subjected to chronological analysis; while the third is devoted to discussion of other saints, who include not only the predictable San José (husband of the Virgin), Santiago (St James the Great) and San Miguel (archangel), but also the Franciscan, Sant’ Antonio (of Padua), the Augustinian, San Nicolás of Tolentino and the Jesuit San Francisco Xavier. Although the latter trio were championed by their respective religious orders, San Nicolás was also a favourite patron of black and mulatto confraternities and settlements (perhaps because of his reputation as advocate of souls in Purgatory). After a powerfully suggestive introduction, in which the author subjects his approach and chosen sources to invigoratingly honest analysis of their lacunae and other shortcomings, thereby conveying the challenges of studying the subject posed by the available sources at the same time as laying out his argument, Taylor divides his book into two, roughly equal sections. The first, ‘Bearings: Historical Patterns and Places of Image Shrines’, tells a story of consolidation and growth in the seventeenth and even eighteenth century, rather than one of rise and decline in the Weberian sense of ‘disenchantment of the world’ in the face of ‘modernisation’. His choice of ‘Theater’ for the book's title is directly linked to Taylor's conviction that one needs to be alive to the shrines and images as places of activity and performativity. As a corollary to this approach, Taylor pays due attention throughout to ‘the material culture of devotion and notions of landscape’ in the challenge of ‘sensing the unseen’ (p. 7). Among the many surprising findings uncovered by his patient sleuthing is that although Mexico City was already promoted as ‘capital of the sacred’ by 1580, cult images only took off in the New World in the seventeenth century. ‘Of the 206 datable shrines, fewer than 22 (perhaps half this number) were established in the sixteenth century before the 1580s; 138 began between the 1580s and 1700; and 46 began between 1700 and 1820’ (p. 87 n. 94). However, the most surprising of Taylor's findings is the lack of popularity of bone relics in New Spain, relative to that in Spain (and elsewhere in Catholic Europe). This was notwithstanding the arrival from 1578 onwards of a number of relics of paleo-Christian martyr saints from the Roman catacombs. Instead, the focus was on the Blessed Virgin, Christ and the Cross. Another distinguishing feature of shrine images of Christ and the Virgin in New Spain – which reverses the Old World pattern – was that there were more dark or ‘black’ Christs and fewer black images of the Virgin. Although, with characteristic reluctance to take the obvious explanation by way of a ‘short cut’, Taylor refuses to attribute this simply to a desire to render the images more like their Indian devotees. Instead, he asks us to remember that not only were the large majority of both Christs and Virgins light-skinned, but that also the black Christs generally displayed facial features more European than indigenous American. Furthermore, he notes that the Virgin of Guadalupe's dark complexion and Indian appearance does not become axiomatic until the mid-eighteenth century. Taylor then adds the interesting detail that ‘roughly one third of … [the] crucifixes and crosses … were of nature, extracted from the trunk, branches and roots of trees’ (p. 226, italic original). It is well enough known perhaps that the story of the Virgin of Guadalupe's apparition to Juan Diego was first circulated in print only in 1648, i.e. over a century after the events it describes, but the teasing suggestion that perhaps the modern cult of Tonantsi, the Aztec earth deity, was not a pre-conquest devotion that had been reworked in Christian form as the cult of the Virgin of Guadalupe, but in fact had been itself shaped by the latter is both fresh and thought-provoking. That this nugget of suggestive detail appears in an endnote (p. 244 n.165) points to a remarkable feature of this book where annotations offer generous and genuine commentary, rather than constituting testimony to mere learning.

The second part of the book, ‘Soundings: Divine Presence, Place and the Power of Things’, opens with the chapter: ‘Making miracles’, which is based on the 1,176 miracle stories that Taylor has gathered relating to his 498 shrines. In contrast to the Old World, where a single shrine in Germany might record some 12,000 miracles during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, in New Spain there is almost a complete absence of miracle books. Similarly distinctive, unlike the Old World where, in parts of Germany, founding miracles for shrines tended to take the form of ‘holiness tried and triumphant’; or, as in Spain, where ‘holiness was lost and found’; in New Spain most common was that the holiness of an image was suddenly revealed ‘through an apparition, activation, or other sign of divine presence and favor’ (pp. 324–5). Space forbids discussion of more than two further chapters of this second section. The first of these, ‘Relics, images and other numinous things’ poses more questions than it answers, but is none the worse for that. It begins by conceding that it is something of a mystery why popular cults celebrating bone relics did not become more popular in New Spain – despite the presence of ‘thousands of certified remains of saints [brought over from Europe]’ (p. 361) – particularly given, on the one hand, the importance that pre-conquest Mesoamerican society placed on the veneration of ancestors, and on the other, the Spanish settlers’ ‘interest in ancestry and recognized relics’ (p. 361). However, notwithstanding the fact that religious orders such as the Franciscans, Dominicans and Carmelites as well as the Jesuits were great collectors of bone relics, the latter were: ‘not often available to the public of New Mexico in the way that images were. Things of the saints and saintly were always treasured, but during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries they ceded pride of place as relics to images in the material culture of divine immanence’ (p. 361). Buried away in another of the author's meaty endnotes (pp. 394–5 n. 93) is the extraordinary detail that perhaps no fewer than 15,000–20,000 religious paintings produced in Mexico City were ‘exported’ to missions in northern New Spain during the seventeeth and eighteenth centuries. The second chapter to which I would like to draw attention – ‘Religious prints and their uses’ – takes as its starting point David Freedberg's comment that ‘the history of art is subsumed in the history of images’, before going on to consider a visual genre that has attracted much less attention in subsequent scholarship. This allows Taylor to shed light on domestic devotion since a 1643 inquisition decree – an archival source which the author makes extensive and excellent use of throughout the book – ‘suggests not only that home altars and private chapels were common, but that also they could be quite elaborate sites of devotion’ (p. 427). It also allows him to pose the challenge that his readers take note that prints’

This book is not ‘just’ the culmination of a distinguished career's-worth of reflection upon its subject and its craft. By means of skilful deployment of what his friend, the late Inga Clendinnen, called ‘exact imagining’, which has led him to a creative awareness that historical study is ultimately (and at its best) ‘a restless kind of discipline of context’ (p. xi), Taylor has conveyed to the reader both a truly inspiring sense of incompleteness together with an irresistible appreciation of the myriad possibilities for future research.