The Sunday Christ

This study takes as its subject a striking image found in fifteenth-century churches, paintings whose purpose is to warn the faithful of the consequences of working on Sundays. This detailed study of pictures of Christ, surrounded and wounded by the tools of everyday trades used on holy days, offers an in-depth exploration of a theologically complex subject. It illuminates many aspects of the functioning of late medieval devotion and the active role imagery could play in the formation and practice of devotional morality and communal identity. The medium of wall painting receives overdue attention as an arena of medieval artistic production and is shown to be the site of pictorial innovation and parochial expression.