Review by Choice Review
A good, readable translation of the fifth revised and corrected version of Male's classic work L'art Religieux de la Fin du Moyen Age en France (1949). Editor Bober conveys much of the subsequent scholarship in expanded footnotes. However, it is distracting to find these useful notes at the volume's end without page references, and full of minor typographical errors. More serious is the fact that, despite Male's acknowledgement that the contact between East and West during the Crusades allowed Byzantine sources to play a significant role in late Medieval art, recent Byzantine scholarship on several pertinent topics (e.g., Hans Belting, in Dumbarton Oaks Papers, no. 34/35, 1980/81 on the Man of Sorrows) has not made it into the notes. Specialists who have read Male in French will nonetheless be delighted by the new plates (generally good) and the conveniently assembled references. Undergraduates and general readers should also be well served by the new English edition. Male's is a beautifully synthetic book, albeit firmly stamped with early 20th-century biases and what we now see as methodological flaws. However, even when one disagrees with his line of argument, or knows that his point has since been superseded (which is not, on important points, all that often), Male's text remains provocative and full of gems that have still not been mined.-L. Brubaker, Wheaton College, Mass.
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Choice Review
