Augustine beyond the Book: Intermediality, Transmediality, and Reception . Edited by Karla Pollmann and Meredith J. Gill. Brill's Series in Church History 58. Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 2012. xxiv + 364. $144.00 cloth.

(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)Augustine beyond the Book: Intermediality, Transmediality, and Reception . Edited by Karla Pollmann and Meredith J. Gill . Brill's Series in Church History 58. Leiden, Netherlands : Brill , 2012. xxiv + 364. $144.00 cloth.Book Reviews and NotesProviding excellent reading and suggesting substantive grist for further research, these fourteen papers were presented at, or commissioned for this volume after, a 2009 conference held at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences (NIAS).The first section, "Visualizations of Augustine," includes Karla Pollmann on Augustine as an authoritative figure in life-cycle commissions in the high Middle Ages by competing religious communities. Each used the Augustine narrative to promote its claim and status as the true order purportedly established by Augustine. It also includes Vladimir Cvetkovic, who does not use Augustine's teaching in icon theology because his theology of divine light, free will, and grace does not match the Orthodox theology of uncreated light and thus lacks the notion of synergy between God and human beings in their process of deification. Cvetkovic provides a cogent tutorial on the characteristics and theological significance of the dialectics between light and design within distinct forms and functions of the icon. Meredith J. Gill describes convergence of Augustinian themes in Counter-Reformation depictions of living spaces of wealthy patrons that presented fictionalized iconography of Augustine's saintly attributes personifying the Liberal Arts and the active/contemplative dilemma. In these scenes, his shadow is a metaphor for his "almost nothing" before Creation (as ambivalence, abyss, and falling away), and light for apprehension of God and divine grace.In "Dramatizing Augustine on Stage," Dorothea Weber writes about Augustine as a frequent protagonist in medieval and early modern plays, which were probably intended to strengthen Christian resolve (rather than convert Jews or, laterally, Protestants). Until the mid-eighteenth century, the omniscience attributed to Augustine as auctorial character corresponds with his enormous general regard as a teacher of the Church. Thus in plays featuring nothing about his life, Augustine was frequently the figure who interpreted the sequence of events and supplied crucial backstories. In later centuries, the Confessions became the primary text for portrayals of an erring man searching for truth who is finally converted. Goran Proot recounts the importance of drama to the Jesuit and Augustinian schools established in the Low Countries in the years following 1574. Bound volumes of detailed performance programs were resources for teachers creating plays for their own classes. Some tens of thousands of school dramas all served both political authorities and the church by robustly affirming Catholic doctrine in splendid festival programmes, processions, and public pageants.The third section, "Augustine in Confessionalized Contexts of Spirituality and Devotion," includes Carolyn Muessig on Augustine in manuals of sermons for preachers, and how Augustine was referred to by lay people who had absorbed pastoral depictions. Julia D. Staykova tells why the early seventeenth century translations of the City of God and the Confessions depended on the widespread popularity decades earlier of St. Augustine's Meditations (or his Manual , or his Soliloquies ), an inauthentic compilation of devotional materials drawn from the Confessions, various medieval meditative sources, and the Bible. Feike Dietz demonstrates the devotional effect of widespread distribution of particular distillation of Augustinian (or Pseudo-Augustinian) thought via early modern printed collections of emblematic mottoes, pictures, and epigrams. …