Serendipity, as the author of this remarkable book on a remarkable subject, observes, can be a powerful research tool. In 2009, Fernández had a revelatory experience at the Almagro Festival, witnessing a puppet production by La máquina real Company of Antonio Mira de Amescua’s El esclavo del demonio directed by Jesús Caballero. As a result, she first decided to build upon John E. Varey’s historical overview of puppetry in Spain by honing in on the early-modern period. A chance sighting of a marionette in the window of a shop in New York, where this Spanish-born scholar was then based, led her to re-frame and expand the central research question. Instead of restricting her inquiry to early-modern Spain, she sought instead to explore how and why Golden Age puppetry might illuminate our ongoing fascination with marionettes from an aesthetic, technological, and epistemic perspective.In the 1580s, Naples and Venice developed specialized centers of puppet theatre. Unlike in most of the rest of Europe, specific performance spaces specializing in marionette theatre did not take off in Spain. This is not evidence of a lack of interest in puppet theatre—quite the contrary. The ubiquity of puppets across a broad range of cultural phenomenon arguably did away with the need for site-specific spaces: “puppet theater in Spain was more of an itinerant attraction easily adaptable to any context and preserving its affinity with popular culture” (pp. 58–59). Prior to the appearance of his book, the hard labor of preserving and reviving this cultural patrimony fell to practitioners more than to scholars. Since 2002, La máquina real (after the name given to religious puppet plays performed by royal license in commercial playhouses) based in Cuenca has acted as an art laboratory that tests performance history through rigorous interpretation, material reconstruction, and performance. In 2010, for example, they staged a well-received production of Lope de Vega’s Lo fingido verdadero with automatons. Since 2007, Ana Zamora’s Misterio del Cristo de los Gascones featuring a jointed Christ has toured globally. Fernández notes that it captivated an audience in Chamizal Festival to an unprecedented degree. At a round-table discussion with the public in the U.S.-Mexican border town, one female spectator emotively related the experience of watching the spectacle of grief, martyrdom, and sacrifice to the ongoing femicides in nearby Ciudad Juárez.If we return to the first half of the twentieth century, the 1923 premiere of Manuel de Falla’s El retablo de Maese Pedro, an opera with puppets, imbued with iconic status the scenes from the Quixote, which illustrated Cervantes’s familiarity with puppetry traditions. Falla (who also considered composing an opera based on Calderón’s La devoción de la cruz) became reacquainted with Spanish balladry and the traditional marionette theatre so central to Maese Pedro through his friendship with Federico García Lorca. As Fernández explains, their correspondence reveals plans to collaborate on an itinerant theatre that would travel to the villages of the Alpujarra to perform Moorish ballads and folk tales with puppets. After Lorca’s assassination in the opening days of the Civil War, Falla became increasingly inflexible as regards the staging of his puppet opera, de-authorising, for example, a 1942 production in Buenos Aires in which the marionettes would be substituted by children (p. 97).More generally, the view of puppetry as lowbrow art and children’s entertainment has done much to relegate its status in both the popular imagination and academic scholarship. Fernández also charts the loss of a hagiographical tradition with, for example, the prohibition in the nineteenth century of puppet depictions of Christ’s descent from the cross and the burial designed to represent the unity of Jesus’ divine and human essence. Whilst existing at the margins of mainstream popular culture, this book could act as a guide book for anyone seeking to discover remnants and re-enactments of such long-standing traditions in twenty-first-century Spain. Mention is made, for example, of Seville archaeological museum’s collection, which contains the “oldest animated sculpture extant in Spain” (p. 2), as well as to the Christ of Burgos (still housed in the city cathedral), an early example of the articulated religious figure. In a small town close to Alicante airport, annual performances in old Valencian and Latin on 14 and 15 August of the Misteri d’Elx re-create religious animated experience. The popularity of Baby Jesus dolls amongst nuns in the Middle Ages is cited as evidence of a growing desire for communion with a physical holy being. As Fernández notes, automated three-dimensional figures heightened “conceptual complexity through a sensorial experience” (p. 20). It is surprising, perhaps, that no mention is made of the 2009 Sacred Made Real Exhibition. The religious objects it exhibited constituted beautiful three-dimensional testament to Fernández’s conviction that “technology permeated sacred animated objects as a way to encourage the faithful to visualize the concept and then to look beyond the artificiality of illusions, exercising an interactive piety vis-à-vis the mysteries of faith” (p. 15).Religion brought to life through three-dimensional theatrical(ised) objects pre-dates the Baroque, but reaches its apogee in the sixteenth- and seventeenth- centuries for reasons that are both material and metaphysical. As Fernández notes, between the 1400s and 1500s only two saints were canonized in Spain; however, in the 1600s, 23 individuals were beatified and 20 canonized (p. 62). Depictions of figures and rituals became increasingly ostentatious, a manifestation of what we might term proto-bling, whilst there was also a desire to make religious experience more accessible. Fernández entertains the compensatory notion of “baroque visual saturation” (p. 27), but also makes the case that signs and symbols of wonder also invited rational inquiry: “In seventeenth-century Spain, illusion, figuratively and literally helped people to effectively navigate social instability and the crisis of values that emerged with the onset of modernity” (p. 2). The heuristics of “desengaño”, “ser”, y “parecer” underpinned “the interplay of the factual and metaphoric meanings of animation becomes a cultural agent in close dialogue with the broader narratives of modernity in religious theatrical experiences, social entertainment, fiction writing, and performance practices” (p. 4). A technology and aesthetic imported from court performances, the aforementioned “máquina real”, ‘a totalizing, defamiliarizing kinetic spectacle’ (p. 74), resulted in a hagiographical tradition unique not only in Spain, but also in the history of Western theatre. Staged in commercial theatres to diverse audiences, the use of puppets came with several advantages. First, they could withstand high doses of pain and violence, mirroring the saint’s victimhood and martyrdom. Second, these plays could be performed during Lent when actors were prohibited from treading the boards. And, thirdly, the use of marionettes reduced the possibilities for theatre practitioners to stand accused of idolatry.An enhanced understanding of such traditions also has the potential to revolutionise our approach to Golden Age cultural production more broadly. They are central, Fernández avers, to the distancing effects of the Maese Pedro vignette, helping to explain how and why Brecht drew inspiration from Cervantes and other Spanish authors from the period. I initially found the characterisation of the machines taking over in Cervantes as proto-science fiction to be guilty of anachronism, but became increasingly convinced by a line of connection with Early Modern religiosity on investigating further the oeuvre of artist Michael Landy (whose work is discussed in this book, which also includes a respectably high-definition image of the British sculptor’s depiction of Saint Jerome). Appreciating the sometimes unsettling split between life and the machine would also, Fernández argues, deepen our understanding of Calderón’s La dama duende and El galán fantasma, whose complexity she suggests have been reduced through the dominant tradition of performing them as almost vaudeville comedies. Given that reference is made to the Estudios San Miguel offering Falla the chance for Maese Pedro to be given the cinematic makeover, it is a wasted opportunity that no mention is made of the Argentinian film company’s uncanny adaptation of La dama duende (Luis Saslvasky, 1945) whose mode of address is as indebted to German Expressionism as it is averse to traditional religious authority. The discussion of El galán fantasma would clearly have benefitted from the inclusion of more than one passing reference to Noelia Iglesias Iglesias’s groundbreaking work on the reception of this non-canonical comedia. It might have saved the author from making the erroneous claim that Jose Luis Alonso’s 1981 staging to coincide with the fourth centenary of Calderón´s death was the first twentieth-century Spanish production (p. 151).That my few criticisms loiter on the precipice of pedantry can be attributed to the significance and quality of a book that is rendered in engaging prose. It is to the credit of both the author and the field of comedia performance that we code-switch between different languages with natural ease. As a research community, we do perhaps need to ruminate more on the challenges across languages when copy-editors and publishers in the humanities no longer provide the services they once did. Reviewers identified errors and typos that creeped into a book-length compendium of my work on Golden Age Spanish drama, which I would likely have identified in the proofs had I been operating in my first language. It is, of course, always easier to spot mistakes in others. Fernández’s enviable command of the English language notwithstanding, a good editor would have corrected the occasional awkward and incorrect turn of phrase (e.g., “I could not remain nonplussed, and these beings upended not just my response to Caballero’s artistry but also my research agenda” [p. xvi]), and infelicitous translation—I remain unconvinced by A good judge, best witness for A buen juez, mejor testigo (p. 19). There are also distracting inconsistencies in the use of U.K. and U.S. spelling convections as well as with the use of italics and capitalizations. In the grand scheme of things, such quibbles are incidental, but they did on occasion distract me from the pleasure of reading this erudite text destined to become a classic within and beyond comedia studies.