Communicating the Passion is a volume of twelve essays, plus an introduction, investigating how late medieval people were encouraged to compassionately share in the Passion of Christ and then live their lives in light of this central event in salvation history. Encouragement came through such varied media as devotional texts, theatrical reenactments, sermons, and visual art, often in mutually-informative interactions. The volume is interdisciplinary in approach.

Pietro Delcorno's "Introduction" makes a strong case for the importance of the topic. It situates the volume at the nexus of performance studies, history of emotions, religious art, preaching, devotional and mystical writing, gender studies, and medieval Christian positioning of Jews. Although not cited by all contributors, Sarah McNamer's Affective Meditation and the Invention of Medieval Compassion (Philadelphia, 2010) and Holly Johnson's The Grammar of Good Friday: Macaronic Sermons of Late Medieval England (Turnhout, 2012) are foundational to the volume. Not surprisingly, as the mass medium of the late medieval period, preaching plays a central role. The methodological and historiographical discussions provided by the authors, along with the essays' bibliographies, offer readers an excellent overview of the vibrant field of late medieval devotional culture.

Many of the essays are wonderfully readable; none requires technical expertise to engage. Studies from eastern and western Europe are included - Bohemia, Hungary, England, Poland, Italy, and Finland - as well as studies of widely disseminated texts such as Meditations on the Life of Christ and best-selling model sermons. About half of the essays include well-reproduced color images; several include substantial transcriptions of valuable texts. Attention is paid to clergy and laity, men and women.

Strategies employed for communicating the Passion in ways that generate compassion for Christ are at the heart of the book. Beyond recounting biblical narratives, preachers, writers, and painters wanted to engage the emotions of their hearers, readers, and viewers, so they presented the reality of the Passion as realistically as possible, using all the sensory tools available. Eliška Kubartová analyses Bohemian nuns watching the Passion through the lamenting eyes of the Virgin Mary and Mary Magdalene. As elaborated by Katrin Janz-Wenig and Lenka Panušková, these same nuns were encouraged to experience emotional shock by meditating on the arma Christi and kissing an image of Christ's side wound.

Dávid Falvay stresses emotional engagement with the very human suffering of Jesus in the Meditations on the Life of Christ and the early frescoes it inspired in Santa Maria Donnaregina in Naples. Márta Sövényházi, a Hungarian nun and scribe, as presented by Ágnes Korondi, added colored images copied from woodcuts to devotional Passion texts, including many drops of blood to emphasize the magnitude of Christ's suffering. Tamás Karáth argues that the sighs and groans, indeed the longing, of biblical characters in and devout hearers of the Passion narrative constitute the "footing of spiritual life" (161).

The English Benedictine preacher, Robert Rypon, discussed by Holly Johnson, offered monks "imagescapes" of the Passion, rich in sensory metaphors. Olga Kalashnikova demonstrates how elements of fictive orality in the sermon texts of Milíč of Kroměříž point to a "guilt-gratitude-fear" (219, 223) approach that became bolder over the course of his preaching career. Stanislava Kuzmová shows how the Passion of Christ served as model for preaching on saints, bringing the Passion to hearers' mind throughout the liturgical year.

In the "blockbuster" Good Friday sermon of an anonymous German Franciscan (printed under the name of Johannes Gritsch) analyzed by Pietro Delcorno, audiences were to engage in a collective performance of the Passion, interiorizing its script and imitating the Virgin's perfect participation in its events. Giacomo Mariani presents the "semidramatic" sermons performed by Roberto Caracciolo, along with members of the audience, that included vernacular devotional poetry, dialogues, and even the preacher wearing a crown of thorns. Crucifixes with movable limbs, "speaking" tongues, and vessels for blood helped to dramatize scenes such as Christ's seven last words and his deposition from the cross, as Carla Bino underscores the connections between art and liturgical context. Three statues in the Hattula church in southern Finland, studied by Jussi Hanska, depict Christ, Simon of Cyrene, and a Jewish executioner as ongoing visual reminders and incentives to devotion.

The expectation that compassion for the suffering Christ would demarcate the Christian community and lead to repentance and good deeds was "baked in" to these communication strategies. Elaboration of this outcome comes through more explicitly in some essays than others. On the level of individuals, a particularly interesting approach discussed in Pietro Delcorno's "Introduction" and used on the cover of the book, is the "Sunday Christ." In this image, Christ is wounded by the tools of those who work on Sundays, from farm implements to sewing needles. Recognizing the great pain one's sin inflicts on Christ goads one to repentance. The verbal "imagescapes" of preacher Robert Rypon, analyzed by Holly Johnson, are grounded in the psychological spiritual conviction that "virtuous living begins with a mind populated with the right images" (183). Thus, Rypon juxtaposed elements of the Passion onto metaphors of things common in monastic life, such as baking bread, making books, and looking in mirrors, to help his hearers imagine themselves "model[ing] their lives on the radical charity shown by their God in taking human form and submitting himself to suffering and death at the hands of his own creation" (183). Olga Kalashnikova begins her essay on the preacher Milíč of Kroměříž with the example of his own conversion from a successful secular administrator to a popular preacher through the preaching of Conrad Waldhauser. She then traces the increasingly emotional dramatization of his rhetorical strategies as he and his "New Jerusalem" community engaged in spiritual warfare "as protagonists in [their] spiritual battle for the apostolic church" (223).

On the level of society, communicating the Passion was designed to define boundaries - Christians with compassion for Christ on the inside, Christians and Jews without such compassion on the outside. Pietro Delcorno writes in his essay that, according to the preacher Grütsch/Gritsch, "the Passion continues in society, in the form of personal sins or of patent injustices, which reproduce the sufferings of Christ within the social body [...] Hence, performing compassion for the suffering of Christ implied the commitment to take care of his social body too - as well as to recognize the behaviours and the social groups (such as the Jews) who were excluded from it and from any mercy" (283-84).

The boundary-generating inherent in theological anti-Judaism comes to the fore in Jussi Hanska's essay. Despite the gospel testimony that Romans were responsible for the torture and execution of Jesus, Jews were regularly blamed for these deeds. The statues of the cross-bearers in the Holy Cross Church of Hattula encouraged both compassion for Christ and anger toward his tormenters, including the Jew carrying hammer, pliers, and nails and wielding a club. Hanska writes, "The common mental experience of grief for the Passion of Christ brought together the parishioners [...] Hence, this group of statues - with its anti-Judaic iconography - also played a role in tightening the social fabric of the community" (381).

Although music and its affective potential are mentioned in several essays, this volume would have been enhanced by an essay focused on songs and hymns. Tamás Karáth's "Hearing the Passion" focuses on sighing and weeping in works by Richard Rolle, claiming that these offer a script for non-verbal emotional expression, an essential part of mystical experience. Because the communication of the Passion in the sources examined here seek to make the Passion present to the believer, there is a certain timelessness to their deployment. Even so, historical circumstances surely played a role in specific instances of their creation and use. Eliška Kubartová shows that vernacular texts, more than their Latin counterparts, encouraged a posture of female submission in the face of Hussite threats in 14th-century Bohemia. The manuscript miscellany penned by Márta Sövényházi and studied by Ágnes Korondi, was intended as a portable library for Dominican nuns in case they needed to flee the Ottomans. This vulnerability may have added to their capacity for devotional compassion. More frequent insights along these lines would have been welcome as devotion to the Passion flourished in the tumult of the later Middle Ages.

Overall, this is an excellent collaborative volume, illuminating a pervasive theme in late medieval religious culture. I recommend it for students as well as established scholars.

Anne Thayer