Few scholars are as adept or courageous in their broad, profound assertions about the restive period leading up to the Reformation, what Germans call the “outgoing” Middle Ages, than the great Thomas Lentes, theologian and historian, who passed away in 2020. Writing fluidly and without hesitation about salient methodological stakes on either side of the temporal divide, from the structures of early Christian monastic communities to sign theory in Martin Luther’s tracts on the liturgy, Lentes argued with increased insistence against a clear break between the medieval and early modern, routinely finding comfort in championing an understanding of the fifteenth century on its own terms rather than as a stepping stone to its successor or a vestigial organ of its ancestor. Over the course of his career, he would return to key themes driving the copious articles he published and the research clusters he directed, which occasioned a series of important volumes coedited with colleagues and scholarly assistants, many of whom are prominent leaders in medieval and early modern studies, such as David Ganz, Esther Meier, and Susanne Wegmann, the editors of the wonderful posthumous compilation presently under consideration.

In lieu of a festschrift, this trio of some of his most adoring adherents and colleagues—and there were many—honors Lentes’s legacy by republishing a selection of his most influential essays between two covers, bequeathing us with as close an approximation to the kind of monograph that Lentes himself strove for but never produced, due in large part to his steadfast dedication to collaborative research projects. This collection of essays is thus a testament to the ripple effects of his professional advisement as much as the brilliance of his own contributions to the field, even if at times the kernels of those contributions leave the reader wistful for book-length elaborations. The editors nimbly organized a sampling of twenty-one of his essays into roughly four sections, which, while discrete, only serve to demonstrate that, despite Lentes’s wide deployment of knowledge in theology, literature, and liturgical studies, it was visuality that formed the subtext of nearly all of his scholarly inquiries.

Rather than naming and summarizing the individual works, I would prefer to highlight some of the lasting impacts of Lentes’s scholarship. As an art historian, I continue to be moved by his ingenious solution to the problem of the ubiquity of the Gregory Mass motif, which emblazoned far more handheld pictures on panel and paper than it did altarpieces in the Host-obsessed late Middle Ages, underscoring real presence by virtue of the story it reproduces, ensconcing its viewers before their own private altars and into the driver’s seat, as it were. The Gregory Mass motif, just like the Virgin’s mantle, saintly floral wreathes, or even Saint Ursula’s ship, became part of the wider panoply of real, tangible things forging pathways to devotion that were becoming available to all manner of audiences in this period. For Lentes, though, we ought not to misattribute the laicization of the sacred—or what he called the “meandering” of liturgy into private devotion—to a vulgarization of it, a value judgment carrying the connotations of decadence and decline that plagued the reductive end-of-medieval histories written by Huizinga, Mayer, and Herwegen. An expanded repertoire of worldly springboards to meditation did not corrupt but rather fortified the central medieval devotional tenet that it was ultimately mental images that trumped all others. The late medieval was more medieval than any, at least by this measure.

Underestimating the continued precedence of internal images for choreographers and practitioners of devotion is also, per Lentes, what distracted art historians in particular from the heart of Protestant accusations of idolatry. Fetishizing the physical object and the semiotic grounds for its continued use or destruction, art historians too often overlooked the ones that remained but were secreted away, cultivated through Reformers’ techniques of the mind. Though they inherently cannot survive to be studied, Lentes argues, albeit latently, for a history of the recuperation of phantasmic art. Inbar Graiver and Jamie Kreiner have recently studied monks’ mental exercises and concentration strategies, but I would wager that Lentes, with his fixation on how inner and outer and physical and imaginary mutually reinforce and produce each other, will persist in unforeseen ways and unconventional fields, like media studies and cultural techniques, as far as the eye can see.