The Gospels ofMatilda, Countess ofTuscany, is a manuscript written and illuminated in Northern Italy toward the end ofthe eleventh century. A credible fourteenth century document states that it was presented by the Countess to the Benedictine monastery of Polirone, near Mantua. In the manuscript's pictorial cycle, the Cleansing of the Temple and the scenes related to it are iconographically extra- ordinary. An understanding of them must begin with a study of their ideological sources, closely related historicfigures, Medieval writers who employed the figure ofthe Cleansing ofthe Temple, and...