On capitals, on church stalls, in prayer book illuminations, we can see many ‘pornographic’ representations which, though commonplace at the time of their execution, to us appear transgressive, not ‘standard’. But that is because those images are viewed today by people who assume that a standard exists, a limit between the licit and the illicit. In the Middle Ages (13th-16th Centuries) in the West, a time when the production of images was closely linked to the sacred, there were in fact few texts defining what was decent or indecent in the image, and free invention was encouraged. The authors explain how the statutes of the image were established and place them in perspective with today’s world. A superb study of the history and cultural anthro- pology of the artistic representation of the obscene in the late Middle Ages, before the (so paradoxal) moral polish of the Renaissance.