Picturing Yiddish: Gender, Identity, and Memory in Illustrated Yiddish Books of Renaissance Italy, by Diane Wolfthal. Brill Series in Jewish Studies, 36. Leiden: Brill, 2004. 283 pp. $146.00. The purpose of this important study is to question series of assumptions widespread particularly in field of art history: images of ritual in early Yiddish books are mirrors of reality; that their Christian counterparts are neutral and objective; that illustrations in secular Yiddish books are irrelevant to understanding of Jewish history; that art history should focus on beautiful images; and that Jews in past formed uniform group, who shared view that rabbis were central and women peripheral to their society (p. 203). The author attempts to refute these assumptions by means of analysis of five profusely illustrated volumes that were created in northern Italy during sixteenth century (p. xxv): three books of customs (a manuscript, Paris BN ms. heb. 586, and two printed books, Venice 1593 and 1600) and two secular books-the romance, Pariz un viene (1594), and collection of fables, Ki-bukh (1595). Since vague topics designated by book's subtitle never become focus of study, only principle that attempts to unify analysis of these diverse materials is fact that books are all illustrated and in Yiddish, which as principle of cohesion is sometimes too tenuous. The author's strength is in her expert analysis of images and their interrelation with surrounding texts and their connections with their original audiences. The volume's most important accomplishment is its reproduction in high-quality photographs of 188 illustrations from five focal books (about half of which are from Paris manuscript, which are then systematically described and catalogued, pp. 211-250). The volume concludes with very useful bibliography (pp. 251-74) and index. There are, however, several problematic assumptions that complicate analysis, including author's own unacknowledged anti-elitist project, which is manifested in her aggressive challenge to several theses proposed and accepted in still primarily male-dominated scholarly establishment and in her (inconsistent and contradictory) championing of work of non-professional artist of Paris manuscript. First, she sharply castigates several generations of apparently elitist scholars for their descriptions of images in Paris manuscript as coarse, comical and shabby, childish, naive, and caricature-like, primitive, and devoid of all artistic worth (pp. 5, 20), although she then herself consistently echoes those evaluations in her own description of drawings (pp. 15, 20, 21, 69). Secondly, she assumes that audience, patrons, and even authors of books of customs such as ones here analyzed belong to the middle or an intermediate sector of Jewish community, basing this assumption solely on fact that these books are not expensively produced (cf. pp. 14-15, 21, 76). It is thus particularly problematic when she designates scribe/artist of Paris manuscript as a member of middle ranks of Jewish society (p. 63), since he is obviously educated enough not merely to participate passively in textual culture of Judaism, but to synthesize broad range of texts from that learned tradition in order to produce accessible vernacular digest, illustrated by pertinent images that function, as Wolfthal aptly points out, almost as glosses on text (pp. …