This is a very welcome book in several respects. Most importantly, comprehensive studies of visual representations and the use of visual imagery in the medieval world of learning are still relatively few. Yet allegorical depictions of the learned artes was a common topic across a variety of visual genres, from the stone carvings at church portals to paintings and book illuminations, as this study shows so vividly – not least through a copious number of illustrations, though this is certainly no coffee-table book or glitzy exhibition catalogue.

The book opens with an introduction, which briefly lists a number of the seminal works on medieval educational culture, from the classics (Lesne, Southern, Panofsky, Delhaye) and to more recent works, predominantly Stephen Ferruolo, C. Stephen Jaeger and Ian Wei. The approach to the cathedral school milieus draws heavily on the works of the latter three. However, more, and more recent, contributors to the field could well have been mentioned – this reader wondered a bit about the absence in this historiographical introduction of younger scholars who have been working on this subject for the last two decades, many of them women. This was a bit unexpected.

The first chapter, which sets the frame for the book, from the outset places the visual imagery in a textual context. We are introduced to a number of central didactic texts as well as the outline of the pictorial programme – predominantly that of the personified Liberal Arts – that is the book’s main focal point. A sub-section of the chapter deals with the economics of the school milieus, an important, but often neglected aspect that the author should be commended for drawing attention to. The subsequent chapters roughly follow the structure of the Seven Liberal Arts, from the trivium, starting with grammar, to the quadrivium, ending with astronomy. This slightly pedestrian approach makes the book easy to use as a work of reference, but this traditional (and quite understandable) structure also runs the risk of presenting the artes as distinct disciplines, instead of the ideal of a holistic, interconnected system of knowledges – of paideia or Bildung, which twelfth-century educators strove for. However, the author is keenly aware that the ambitious holistic ideal and the mundane realities of the classroom, when it came to specialisation and the purpose of education, did not comply. She is never carried away by the high-flown rhetoric of the twelfth-century educational “revolution” and her interpretations remain methodologically sound and well-argued, and backed up by substantial textual evidence. In my opinion, the strongest chapter is the one dedicated to the image of the magister, that is, unlike depictions of the artes, of the abstract and symbolic, the portrayal of the central human subject in the classroom: the teacher.

The main points of criticism that I have are therefore of a more general nature and do not impinge upon the quality of research displayed in this volume. I was a bit disappointed to find that the book does not advance a theory, hypothesis or main argument about its subject. One almost feels that the author is a little bit too careful when interpreting the phenomena she has studied in great depth and with acumen. The book is therefore first and foremost a survey of a wide variety of forms and examples of depictions of the artes liberales and of school-scenes, combined with readings from a wide variety of central texts from the medieval school milieus that mirror this imagery. Thus, the conclusion is quite short. It would have strengthened the otherwise thoughtful study if the author would have advanced some concluding reflections on the function of this imagery in a Christian spiritual context. Why do these emblems of secular, worldly knowledge figure so prominently in church decor – even as framing the very entrance to sacred space (usually on west portals)? Can we deduct from the central locations of these images and carvings, that the advance of knowledge, the expansion of learning and education was perceived as so central to the concerns of the Church as this time, to merit such a central position in pictorial schemes of public architecture on the unprecedented massive scales as the great cathedrals?

In a similar vein, this reader would have wished that the author had engaged more critically with the extensive and expanding research literature on the subject of the medieval school milieus before the advent of the universities, much of which she cites but does not discuss further. Finally, the subtitle is slightly misleading, because rather than “Europe” it is essentially a book about twelfth-century northern France. It is stated that: “the geographical focus is principally determined by the bulk of surviving evidence” (p. 5). Other, non-French material is included for comparative reasons, but that this intriguing learned imagery was indeed a much wider phenomenon, beyond the locations of the nucleus of northern French cathedral school milieus, and found in the outer peripheries as well, might escape the attention of a reader new to the subject.

These criticisms aside, the book is generally well-written, well-argued and -structured and may come in handy both for students and seasoned scholars. The bibliography is comprehensive and there is a useful index, which also contains entries to individual manuscripts that might serve as a helpful tool for future students of the subject. As an introduction to an intriguing world of learned imagery and visualisation of abstract thought, the book is therefore a most welcome addition to the growing body of research into the medieval schools and a reminder to scholars, who usually work mainly – or even almost exclusively – on texts, that the visual arts have a lot to offer to the usually rather bookish and logocentric discipline of the history of learning and science.