Insights and Interpretations: Studies in Celebration of the Eighty-Fifth Anniversary of the Index of Christian Art ed. by Colum Hourihane (review)

REVIEWS 240 tion rather than passive spectatorship (195). Green spaces provide relief from a perceived health threat—sometimes made real by the plague—but, inversely, they provide sites for perceived moral deviance. Williams concludes ultimately that the matter is one of “striking a balance” where “the desire to preserve and blend greenery with the urban fabric becomes increasingly self-conscious” (209). The final section of the collected essays treats morality. Except for Tim Harris ’s chapter on the “Perceptions of the Crowd in Later Stuart London,” which outlines how the London (political) crowd “could be both loathed and revered, hated and loved, by the same people”—a phenomenon he identifies as a “schizophrenic attitude”—the contributions to morality theorize more generally about the city. Peter Lake argues in his essay (“From Troynouvant to Heliogabulus ’s Rome and Back: ‘Order’ and Its Others in the London of John Stow”) for an inverse or “underside of order” as means of seeing “what, even as they praised the place, frightened and alarmed contemporaries about London” (220). Lake catalogs deftly those perceptions of the city that are simultaneously positive and alarming, ultimately concluding that they represent the “logical, moral, and rhetorical consequences of that lack of an unambiguously positive contemporary language for the description and praise of commercial wealth” (247). The scenes of Nigel Smith’s contribution (“‘Making Fire’: Conflagration and Religious Controversy in Seventeenth-Century London”) are less ambiguous , even as they cut rapidly between brief sections titled “Heresy and Hollywood ,” “Apocalypse and the Fire-Engine,” “From History to Prophecy: Writing Fire,” “Retribution, Division and the Great Fire of 1655,” “Goodness Gracious , Great Balls of Fire,” “Urban Fire Interpreted,” and, finally, “Firespeak.” The argument is clear, easily understood, and provocatively depicted: fire poses a physical, moral, and apocalyptic threat to the city. Smith documents an argument —citing the Great Fire of 1666 and William Finch’s apocalyptic pamphlet A Third Great and Terrible Fire, Fire, Fire (1655)—that maintains that because London is the “site of the most intense change, be it social, political, or religious, fire becomes the leitmotif of both civilization and the fear that civilization will end in annihilation” (292). Indeed, the essays in Merritt’s edited collection of early modern London are wide-ranging, covering the span from Stow’s nostalgia to an anticipated apocalypse, but they provide an informative and well-documented look of individual mental worlds in relation to the city, of its perceptions and portrayals. ROBERTO ALVAREZ, English, Cornell University Insights and Interpretations: Studies in Celebration of the Eighty-Fifth Anniversary of the Index of Christian Art, Index of Christian Art Occasional Papers 5, ed. Colum Hourihane (Princeton: Index of Christian Art / Princeton University Press 2002) xvii + 236, 101 b/w ill. This book, a collection of essays by the staff of the Index of Christian Art and by visiting scholars and researchers, is in celebration of the eighty-fifth anniversary of the foundation of the Index. The essays are all largely iconographical in their approach and together they encompass the entire medieval period, although there is a strong emphasis on late medieval art. Each and every study draws heavily from the Index’s rich files and demonstrates the wealth of infor- REVIEWS 241 mation the archive can provide. Indeed, the Index of Christian Art stands as the largest archive of medieval Christian art in the world. Besides its home at Princeton and the four hard copies in the Vatican, Utrecht, Los Angeles, and Washington, D.C., the Index is also available to institutions and universities online , a fact that has dramatically increased its number of users. The first essay in the book is by Colum Hourihane, the current director of the Index. This article discusses the fundamental role the Index played in the early development of iconographical studies. Hourihane places the Index and its founder, Charles Rufus Morey, as the fixed corner stone in a fluid scholarly triangle that included the great iconographers Erwin Panofsky and Henri van der Waal. Hourihane’s contribution is a very important one for all those with an interest in iconography and the history of its development. Nevertheless, this article is not solely concerned with historiography and he goes on...