Medieval Death, by art historian Paul Binski, makes a creditable stab at being three different books at once. First and most appealingly, it is a coffee-table book of death for the general reader. It is a great book with which to alarm family and friends. Lavishly illustrated with a hundred images (including ten colour plates) of death and the macabre, its visual impact is consistently beautiful and frequently gruesome. We are in a world where monks can have Dali’s imagination and future saints can behave rather like him, albeit out of religious conviction.

Thus Hugh, Bishop of Lincoln, himself canonised in 1220, demonstrates the power of his belief in the beneficial effects of touching and possessing relics, in particular the arm of St Mary Magdalen in Normandy:

After reverently examining and kissing the much venerated bone, he tried unsuccessfully to break it with his fingers, and then bit it, first with his incisors, and finally with his molars.

A clear case, as Binski remarks, of saint eats saint. Laudably, I suppose, Binski does not succumb to the temptation merely to produce a series of blood-curdling illustrated anecdotes, although there are points in the denser theological passages when the general reader might wish he had done so. Instead, Medieval Death also largely succeeds in its second role as a book for students. It approaches the massive subject of death in the period from the perspective of images recorded in the arts, and demonstrates the complexity of the artistic response to death.

There is plenty of evidence here that many a medieval artist worked, as one medievalist was wont to say of Chaucer, ‘with his hand on his heart but his tongue in his cheek’. This is true of the raising of Lazarus, the witnesses to which are depicted by Giotto di Bondene caught between astonishment at the miracle and disgust at the smell. The main academic thrust of the book is to bring some original thoughts to the debate about the effect of the Black Death on the representation of death.

Binski’s thesis also supplies snippets of information which the general reader as well as the student might usefully retain. He suggests reasons why the Devil and Hell get many of the best religious pictures as well as the best tunes. An art history perspective often leads to a focused common-sense approach. The paucity of representations of purgatory may, Binski suggests, have as much to do with the fact that purgatory tends to look rather like the Resurrection of the Dead as with doctrinal vagaries about purgatory itself. Binski also presents an intriguing puzzle, the picture of the burial of Joseph in a Pharaonic mummy case, in the Anglo-Saxon Aelfric Hexateuch at Canterbury, long before the English had archaeological evidence of such practice. Perhaps properly but frustratingly, Binski does not attempt to solve the mystery.

Only when he loses sight of the visual aspect of the book and loses himself in the doctrinal complexities of death is Binski in danger of losing the general reader too. Medieval Death can be curiously unvisual and unnecessarily theoretical at times. In general, Binski balances historical background and what really interests the student reader pretty deftly, but there are lapses when the book betrays its third and unstated aim of upping the author’s academic kudos by borrowing a few big names and buzzwords from the trendy world of Lit Crit.

Suspicions are roused by the book’s subtitle (‘Representation’ is a bit passé among the real Leather Jackets) and we anticipate the worst when the Introduction begins with the mystifying pseudo-historicist statement, ‘The place is Padua in north Italy, the time is at once the first century of the Christian era, the fourteenth century and now’. Luckily, though disconcertingly, this line of argument is not sustained.

Foucault, Lacan, Freud and J K Galbraith all appear, but only in slightly embarrassed and half-hearted walk-on parts. The general reader may regret that there are not more anecdotes of the relic-gnawing variety, the student may regret that the thesis of the book and some basic definitions (such as what Binski means by ‘Image’) only occur two-thirds of the way through the book. There is little for the theorist, and a good thing too, when, for the most part, Binski can rely on his own thoughts and material to provide thoroughly informative and periodically entertaining read.