The circulation of European printed images across cultural boundaries in the East and South has been well-trodden territory since Aby Warburg's theorization on the transmission of classical traditions brought to light the importance of hybrid forms of migratory paths. Still, scholarship has not paid due attention to the multiplicity of appropriations working in multiple directions in the integration of European art in the East.

This change of perspective configures the main argumentative line in Heather Madar's collection of essays, expanding the premise of Elizabeth Eisenstein's revolution of printmaking to include visual materials arriving in Europe and those that did not necessarily travel to faraway lands for missionary purposes. The collection's premise that texts and prints were adapted and not simply adopted by recipients understands reception as being an ever-active form of cultural assimilation that resists rigidity. Madar proposes a “horizontal model of cross-cultural study, rather than a hierarchical, vertical one that prioritizes Europe” (20).

With these coordinates in mind, each of the nine chapters in the book looks either East or South in ways that reveal unpredictable forms of adaptation. Chapter 1, by Saleema Waraich, examines the recontextualization in Mughal environments of Western prints of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century that feature the female body. Waraich shows how early Mughal representations of European women, inspired mainly by European prints, entailed negotiations over the court own's image regarding the Western Other as represented in the female body. Chapter 2, by Heather Madar, explores a sixteenth-century printed series of Ottoman sultan portraits by European artists as well as those produced within an Ottoman context. These portraits contributed to a multilateral drive of visual exchanges between Renaissance Europe and the Ottoman Empire, beginning only a few decades after the invention of engravings.

This trend is explored further in chapter 3 by Kristel Smentek through the work of the eighteenth-century French collector Pierre-Jean Mariette (1694–1774), who, drawn by a Persian album or muraqqa he found in the royal library in Paris, recognized similarities between his own practice as a collector and those of the Persian compiler. A similar pattern is shown in chapter 4, by Sylvie L. Merian, in an analysis of Dutch prints used as models by Armenian artists in the Near East that attends to the heavily illustrated printed books reaching Armenia from Europe as well as to the first Bible printed in the Armenian language in Amsterdam in 1666. Chapter 5, by Yoshimi Orii, transports us to the wealth of adaptations by Japanese novices and believers of the Jesuit prints reaching early modern Japan, often surreptitiously and without ecclesiastical supervision, which favored some unique adaptations of lived spirituality in the period.

Raphaèle Preisinger, in chapter 6, rejects the notion that the iconography of the Virgin of Guadalupe in Mexico developed from European prints circulating in the New World. Instead, she traces visual traditions and discursive contexts from which Tepeyac painting emerged, pointing to an earlier Virginal cult. The portrayal of Indigenous culture in Catholic education materials is explored by Linda Báez and Emilie Carreón in chapter 7, as seen from the perspective of the humanist Diego de Valdés and his method of ars memorativa in the engravings he used for conversion. Alexandre Ragazzi delves into the actual plastic models and engraving practices of the Italian artist Matteo Pérez de Alecio, in the period before he moved to Lima. Chapter 9, by Corinna T. Gallori, closes the volume with a discussion on the role of prints in the crafting of Mexican feather mosaics, a cultural artifact in which Christian images combined with a native craft technique that modified the visual source through texture.

This thought-provoking collection, though sometimes too minute in unfamiliar details, is rich in illustrations and unexpected connections between printmaking techniques, historical opportunity, and ideology. The variety of case studies included reveal the undervalued role of visual printed matter in the reshuffling of cultural artifacts in ways that challenge our European-centered vision of the transmission and reception of ideas.