This volume presents nine essays on late medieval religious culture, which are academically rigorous and provocatively theoretical in their recalibrated assessment of devotional mechanisms. The essays lavish focus on medieval Scandinavia, a relatively understudied area.

Pablo Acosto-García's introduction articulates dilemmas in devotional studies. Among other problems, scholarship has relied on male-authored texts to recreate an ephemeral experience of devotion, even though such texts represent a minority of worshipers. Acosto-García also notes that analyses of a votary's journey from the material to the immaterial tend to be ocular centric. By contrast, the essays in the volume exemplify different spiritual itineraries and voices in the medieval apprehension of the divine.

The essays are grouped in three parts. Part 1 introduces haptic experience, opening with Barbara Zimbalist's discussion of Netherlandish manuscripts that contain sermons that were received by and for women, written in the vernacular, and even copied by women. They circulated in devotio moderna houses, which were often objects of unfavorable clerical scrutiny. Touch rather than sight is imagined, anticipated, and denied in the verbal imagery of ball games and bleeding hands and physically witnessed by the many pastings and underlinings.

Olivia Robinson and Elisabeth Dutton's essay on monastic theater details ways in which female haptic experience prompted imagination and memory. Donning costumes and wearing false beards, the nuns “touched,” rather than “became,” the characters they portrayed and thus maintained agency in directing personal spiritual experience through the performance. The friction of a false beard, for instance, or the weight of the abbess's hands as she costumed the sisters may have given tactile form to the “friction” of gender-bending and memories of sacred clothing rites.

Part 2 of the volume explores haptic paths to mystical union, beginning with Mads Vedel Heilskov's essay on Danish rosary devotion. This study is uniquely grounded in tactile movement from bead to bead, the circular transit of rosary cycles, and the feel of wood or stone. In the rosary sensorium of sight, smell, taste, and touch, Heilskov characterizes the beads as “cognitive anchors” (78) that mediate between the corporeal and the spiritual. Their materiality enables divine union and imbues the natural world with the wonders of heaven.

Laura Katrine Skinnebach sources more Danish material to elucidate haptic prayer, displacing sight with touch as the preeminent faculty. Certain rubrics stipulated that prayers be carried (probably against the skin) rather than pronounced. Other prayers were activated under the skin through ingested liquids that had been imbued with words. Tears were construed as fluid prayers, and the body enacted prayer through posture and gesture. Of particular note is Skinnebach's paradigm of “contraction and expansion” (113), whereby prayer is distilled, excerpted, and condensed in order to then expand, multiply, and spread. As with much of the methodology in this volume, Skinnebach's paradigm has wide-ranging potential for other branches of devotional studies.

Hans Henrik Lohfert Jørgensen's analysis of the “skin Christ” of Burgos demonstrates another far-reaching theoretical framework. A “soft sculpture,” this miraculous crucifix replicates the bleeding and scourged body of Jesus in grisly detail. Jørgensen advances “dermatology” as a method of inquiry, privileging skin as the Ur-medium and touch as the parent of all senses. His eloquent prose brings the tactility of medieval spirituality to life and illuminates the viscerally haptic roots of legend, liturgy, healing, and relics at Burgos.

Part 3 is dedicated to the visionary, a topic which David Carrillo-Rangel redefines as “seeing beyond the surface of materialities and ideologies that dominate the world” (175). To this end, his essay bucks the chrononormative view of history, which functions linearly and in isolation from the present. Here, and in his preface to the volume, Carrillo-Rangel “dig[s] holes” (xvii) in history and links past and present through common issues. By reading the fourteenth-century Revelations of Saint Birgitta of Sweden alongside works by the contemporary artist Erinç Seymen, he expands terms like affect and queer to encompass broader manifestations of performativity, transmission, and discourse.

The expansive queer recurs in Laura Saetveit Miles's analysis of a visit between Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe, which she explains through the prism of Visitation imagery and close readings of the Book of Margery Kempe and Saint Birgitta of Sweden's visions. Miles highlights “heteronormative disruptions” not only in Julian and Margery's relationship but in medieval patterns of patriarchal culture and gender roles. Her discussion of “queer touch” is literal, abstract, unexpected, and potent in knocking cultural norms awry.

Victoria Cirlot and Blanca Garí conclude the volume with the “secondary senses” of smell, taste, and touch as a “life-oriented female horizontality” undergirding topics such as healing, the iconography of God, affective piety, and mysticism. In the latter category, visionaries like Hadewijch, Mechthild of Magdeburg, and Beatrice of Nazareth describe their relationship with God through bridal imagery redolent with haptic analogies.

This book is adept at advancing understudied facets of medieval spirituality against a backdrop of traditional scholarly biases. Readers will doubtlessly adopt new analytic tools from its broad range of methodological possibilities.