1The book compiles thirteen contributions in French and in English, each of them shedding a different light on iconoclasm and the processes of transformation the images went through in sixteenth-and seventeen-century France, England and the Netherlands. This is a pivotal era regarding the status of images as religious, political and intellectual debates reappraised the tenets of representation and printing techniques increasingly contributed to the birth of a visual culture. Some chapters develop interesting arguments on iconoclasm understood as the physical destruction of sacred images especially during the Reformation, but most contributions question the array of meanings and possibilities iconoclasm can lead to. It reflects the collection’s ambition to deal with wide geographical, chronological and semiotic material in order to present the extended gamut of iconoclastic modes.

2The first section of the book is concerned with showing the unexpected ways in which artistic and literary representation can be dislocated. Michèle-Caroline Heck shows that breaking an image is not necessarily destroying it physically. She points at that it can be the result of an internal deconstruction, which ultimately contributes to advertising it as work of art. A literary image can also be broken down into an array of significations as shown by Stuart Sillars’s captivating discussion on the mirror scene in Act IV, scene 1, of William Shakespeare’s Richard II. The mirror held and then shattered by Richard II did not only refer to a rare and costly object, it also brought up visual and moral images, mirror-for-princes references and a reflection on perspective as a statement of power. Following up on Sillars, Christian Belin recalls Pierre Nicole’s theory of representation and shows all portraits to be intrinsically dissimilar and flawed. Man’s original deformity makes any attempt at representation a counterfeit and any portrait a broken image. However, and paradoxically enough, the divorce from mimetic ideals guarantees the portrait’s efficiency as representation.

3The second section of the volume shows the ways classical and biblical legacies are deconstructed only to be rewoven. Agnès Lafont tackles William Barksted’s epic poem The Mother of Adonis: Or, Lustes Prodigies (1607) and how the author reworks the myth of Myrrha, the Ovidian figure of incest and lust, to reveal the erotic potential of the fable. Rich and various intertexts are interwoven into the poem and create the figure of Myrrha as a multilayered self. Similarly, Charles Moseley focuses on the reconfiguring of biblical legacies. He argues that the visual habit of mind survived in Protestant countries thanks to the English theatrical culture of the late 16^th century. The development of emblem books that combined pictures and texts contributed to educating and standardizing the audience’s visual culture so that the spectators could recognize the pictorial vocabulary when transposed on stage. Thus, Margaret Tassi argues that a play like Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus inevitably recalled pre-Reformation biblical and religious iconography despite its intention to appear in line with Protestantism. Lavinia’s broken body and ordeal made her a martyr of sorts that aroused the sympathy of the audience and resonated with the physical destructions of images and statues of the Virgin Mary.

4Memory was then the safeguard of a culture that could not be totally bereft of its visual dimension. Inès Kirschleger’s chapter shows that, in that respect, French Protestants continued to use the biblical image of the dove to portray the fate of their persecuted community in the immediate aftermath of the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes. She also points out that it served to reunify their disrupted community. Therefore, during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the relation between iconoclasm and idolatry was more complex that it seems. Ralph Dekoninck’s typology proves that, paradoxically enough, the iconoclastic mode is the consequence of idolatry and the assumed powers of the sacred image as proved by extreme cases of iconoclasm—the literal consumption of sacred images with the hope of being cured of illnesses.

5The third section of the volume presents figures of authority being destabilized. Catherine Pascal highlights the simultaneous process of deconstruction and idealization at stake in Nicolas Caussin’s The Holy Court (1624). Mary Stuart’s innocence is advertised through antitheses and comparisons which endow the Catholic queen with the highest virtues while they demonize her half-sister Elizabeth and claim her illegitimacy. Images of authority were also denounced, parodied, praised, or broken during the Second and Third Anglo-Dutch Wars. Martin Dzelzainis argues that visual culture thus acted as a form of political propaganda. Nevertheless, Nicholas Myers underlines the resilience of images of authority, notably that of Charles I whose Eikon Basilike was endowed with a sacred aura and circulated as a relic of the martyred king almost immediately after his execution. Even John Milton’s Eikonoclastes (1649), while attempting at deconstructing the late king’s work, contributed to Charles’s authority. Myers argues that Milton’s iconoclastic discourse needs to be put into perspective though since his conception of the image, unlike that of most of his Reformed contemporaries, calls for a metaphorical rather than a physical destruction of images. Laïla Ghermani goes on to explain that what needs to be shattered is the mental images, much harder to detect and reform. His Eikonoclastes thus intends to empty the late king’s Christ-like imagery and expose him as human, while the mystic body of monarchy lives on. Thus, Lois Potter shows that with the Restoration came the revival of arboreal metaphors notably in theatre and poetry. The oak was used as a biblical and a royal metaphor: it stressed the literal restoration of Charles II as a young oak and heir to his father’s virtues. This arboreal filiation an ultimately contributed to the metaphorical restoration of Charles I as a nurturing figure.

6To conclude, while the overall structure and coherence of the collection may at times puzzle the reader, the volume casts a significant light on a critical moment of the history of the image. What is more, the book teems with appealing analyses and examples and will be useful to anyone interested in a complete and stimulating overview of the many ways in which an image can be broken. The chapters function therefore as the many shards of a broken glass which, put together, convey a fresh and exhilarating perspective on an already widely studied topic.