Iconophages: A History of Ingesting Images

This groundbreaking study examines how people in the European and Mediterranean worlds have literally incorporated images into their bodies—swallowing frescoes, icons, engravings, eucharistic hosts, heraldic wafers, marzipan figures, and other visual artifacts as both sustenance and statement.

Art historian Jeremie Koering's sweeping historical frame reveals that eating images was never simply about nutrition or devotion. These acts carried profound implications of power: consuming something divine could be an act of reverence or blasphemy, while ingesting the profane might represent conquest or contamination.

Depending on who was eating and who was witnessing—or later describing—the consumption, iconophagy could reinforce religious authority or subvert political power, creating tensions that reverberated through communities and across centuries.

Drawing on art history, anthropology, philosophy, and the history of the body and senses, Koering's interdisciplinary approach illuminates the cultural investment in this paradoxical relationship with images and reveals new ways of understanding how we experience visual culture itself.

Ironically for a book concerned with visuals, this one has small, slender type

Hardcover. Black-and-white illustrations. 479 pages.