This book examines scriptural authority and its textual and visual instruments, asking how words and images interacted to represent and by representing to constitute authority, both sacred and secular, in Northern Europe between 1400 and 1700.

Celeste Brusati is Professor of the History of Art and Professor in the School of Art and Design at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. She has published on the relations between visual and literary discourses on art in the early modern Netherlands, particularly in still life, self-imagery, perspective, and trompe l'oeil, and on the artists Samuel van Hoogstraten, Pieter Saenredam, and Johannes Vermeer.
Karl Enenkel is Professor of Medieval and Neo-Latin Literature at the University of Münster, Germany, and member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW). He has published on international Humanism, the reception of Classical Antiquity, the history of ideas, literary genres and emblem studies.
Walter Melion is Asa Griggs Candler Professor of Art History at Emory University in Atlanta, where he has taught since 2004. He has published extensively on Dutch and Flemish art and art theory of the 16th and 17th centuries, on Jesuit image-theory, on the relation between theology and aesthetics in the early modern period, and on the artists Otto van Veen and Hendrick Goltzius.