406 book reviews Religion and the Arts © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2022 | doi:10.1163/15685292-02603012 Pinkus, Assaf, Visual Aggression: Images of Martyrdom in Late Medieval Germany. University Park PA: Penn State University Press, 2021. Pp. 216+50 color/85 black and white illustrations. $ 109.95 cloth. Unusually brutal depictions of the deaths of martyrs populated the Upper and Middle Rhine during the fourteenth century. Unlike the typified, clinical images of martyrian deaths of the period, which portray figures in transcen- dent detachment from their suffering, these intense images favor a distress- ing emphasis on corporeal anguish. Surviving examples portray figures sus- pended in permanent states of torture, pain, and bodily dissolution, assembling what Assaf Pinkus astutely deemed “galleries of violence.” In his latest mono- graph, Visual Aggression: Images of Martyrdom in Late Medieval Germany, these scenes of execution and mutilation are explored from a somaesthetic stand- point that integrates visual reception and bodily response into the current dis- course surrounding violence in the later Middle Ages. Convincingly, the author positions galleries of violence as cysts that grew from the moral and ethical conversations surrounding the body, as well as cruelties committed against it, that arose in fourteenth-century German-speaking lands. Previously, Pinkus outlines, the body had been thought of as the property of the Church, on loan from God; however, after the spread of Dominican ide- ologies and Thomistic thought across the region, the body became the private property of the individual. Now conceptualized as a thing in relative equi- librium with the soul, its boundaries in relation to others—and to society— became subject to redefinition. Positing that violence committed against the body, newly understood as a moral problem, became an issue of artistic spec- ulation, the author argues that the images of corporeal torment found in gal- leries of violence encouraged viewers to imagine such afflictions upon their own corporeal forms. Reconsidering these visuals under new implications, he notes that the medieval devotional texts that promoted imitatio Christi, or the imitation of Christ (often through bodily and emotional suffering), were for a restricted audience and may have been irrelevant to the public’s reception of such violent imagery; following this intellection, the visuals included in Pinkus’s discussion were not necessarily intended to bring viewers closer to a holy entity, but saturated them with the physical agonies of the characters rep- resented to produce a “different, unpredictable, irrepressible meaning for the public.” The book consists of five chapters. The first two, “Visual Rhetoric” and “BetweenTheological and Juridical Positions,” contain relatively adherent argu- ments that have been bifurcated, perhaps for the convenience of the reader. They center the strangely non-narrative martyr imagery in the northern choir