Forging a Language of Lies: Truth, Falsehood and Making in Early Modern England

Summary

The English language contains a plethora of words denoting and connoting material production – designations of Man as maker: Making, creating, fashioning, forging, fabricating, producing, generating, manufacturing, and so on. This catalogue of relative synonyms has, however, radical historical and internal differences of valence and meaning and surrounds the Early Modern nomenclature of “making” with unstable and ambiguous significations. As a phenomenon too frequently taken for granted in narratives of material and visual culture, “making” makes up a nexus of multiple and polysemous tensions in Early Modern language and thought. I intend in this paper to engage with the construction of “making” as a category embedded within theological discourses of “real” and “fake”, “truth” and “falsehood”, in the Calvinist environment of Early Modern England. Using the Reformation disputes on religious imagery and representation, and how these make use of the Old Testament imagery of Creation as a case in question – personified in discourse by figures such as William Perkins and John Jewel which will be at centre of this paper – I will especially seek to elucidate how the religious visual topography became a space for contention and negotiation, of anxieties related to fact and fiction, truth and falsehood.

Introduction

Within the discourses of true and false, fact and fiction, original and copy, authenticity and forgery, the question of the sacred image remains a sine qua non.¹ Not simply a pendant to more significant concerns and anxieties regarding the relationships between material bodies and knowledge, the confessional and cultural clashes over the nature of images in general, and the making of images in particular, touch pivotal points of cultural contention in both Medieval and Early Modern art and intellectual history.

The subject of making images in general, and religious images specifically, and furthermore how conceptions of the creative act structure an early modern concept of originality and falsehood, make up the optic of this paper. The issues of iconoclasm,² theological aesthetics, image reform, and the contiguous concerns of the ‘making of meaning’³ have a long research history and catalogue of thorough scholarship. However, the meaning of making remains relatively underexplored. Questions of “making”, destroying, devotion, language and materiality, far from marking up epistemic divisions bleed into each other in multiple different patterns. Exploring a significance of ‘making’ then, the charged relationship between the image and artist’s hand, suggests another approach to the things themselves, and how they negotiate between objecthood and the historical world.

The Creationist motif and language of Genesis frame and introduce a context for discussing the making of the true and the false in Early Modern England.⁴ As a neglected aspect of a well-established tradition of scholarship into idolatry and iconoclasm, ‘making’ has to a lesser degree found a place in a conceptual history of the Reformation. The Old Testament subject-matter became a nexus both for iconographical as well as historical reasons. The Old Testament historically had key significance across the social and religious spectrum.⁵ The Commandments in particular came to constitute a new, universal ‘moral system of the west’, as John Bossy described it.⁶

Genesis became a concern for several post-Reformation figures in early modern England, and the reception and understanding of Genesis and Creation provides us with a framework for articulating perceptions of ‘making’ and ‘creativity’.⁷ For many, Creation was closely linked to the Creation of Man. The mirroring of God in his creature established a matrix for thinking about making of the image as well.⁸ For Calvin, Creation was the masterpiece of Christianity. The presence of God’s own hand and God’s own work, it was a divine rhetorical performance, and English Calvinism became the lens through which ‘making’ and ‘creation’ in an Old Testament context were understood in Post-Reformation England.⁹

Re-forming creation in the reformation: the image politics of Calvinist England

Luther, Calvin and Zwingli all diverged on the subject of the sacred image, yet their common willingness to reimagine, reshape – quite simply, to reform – enabled the development of new visual and theological conceptions regarding the visual. This, in turn, pushed devotional pictorial media into new intellectual territories, all of which came about “sans connaître ces nouvelles théories esthétiques et leurs répercussions dans la pratique,” as Jérome Cottin writes.¹⁰ What they did do was realize that any image conception cannot remain monosemous, or simply either truth or falsehood. Sergiusz Michaelski argues that Luther was almost singlehandedly in charge – despite never being an iconoclast proper¹¹ – of creating an “iconophobic dynamic” of religious changes during the sixteenth century, which would erupt in the increasingly pictorial paranoia of Calvinist and Zwinglian prose.¹² In particular when Luther went cold and even polemical on the Karlstadtian iconoclastic euphoria, he noticeably reverted to conciliatory, even pseudo-Catholic pedagogies.¹³ His notion of adiaphora, or “indifferent” things, were part of an intellectual system in which visual objects took on secondary status opposed to the written word in matters of religious truth. Lutheran image policies perpetuated the principle of tollatur abusus et maneat usus – remove the abuse but continue the use.¹⁴

That also Calvin preached a pictorial policy of absolute rejection is, similarly to Luther, a position now refuted. We can in his work clearly outline a presence of an appreciative image-framework, visual loci where representations serve a “contemplative” function, outside the risk of an idolatrous devotion and hermeneutic. Calvin writes how “I am not so superstitious that I thinke no images maye be suffred at al. But forasmuch as caruing and painting are the giftes of God, I require that they both be purely and lawfully vsed.”¹⁵ Calvin makes the same redemptive remark on the nature of craft and the arts in his Commentary on Genesis, saying how “the inuention of artes and such other like things, which serue for the common vse and benefite of life, is the gifte of God not to be despised, and a vertue worthie to be praised.” And in the English 1578 version there is added in the margin again “the inuetion of artes is the gift of God.”¹⁶

However, while there has been an ongoing tendency to attempt to relieve both Luther, but especially Calvin of their most vehemently iconoclastic reputations, Calvin’s objections to religious visualization and materialization – and more importantly the process whose end result is representation – are legion: In the 11th chapter of the Institutes called “That it is vnlawfull to attribute vnto God a visible forme, and that generally they forsake God, so many as do erect to them selues any images” Calvin wastes no time describing how “thys brutysh grossenesse hath possessed the whole world, to couet visible shapes of God, and so to forge themselues Gods of timber, stone, golde, siluer, and other dead and corruptible matter.” To maintain a healthy heart and inner vision of truth “we ought to holde thys prynciple, that wyth wycked falshode the glorye of God is corrupted so oft as any shape is fained to represent him.”¹⁷ Calvin effectively states that “God compareth not images one with an other, as though one wer more and an other lesse mete to be vsed, but withoute any exception he reiecteth all images, pictures and other signes, wherby the superstitious thought to haue God nere vnto them.” Calvin, and the conceptualization of Calvinist image-politics in the wake of the return of the Marian exiles return to Elizabethan England, became a premise for the development of iconoclastic attitudes in Post-Reformation England.

In the relationship between confessional notions of the real and the fake, material authenticity and rejections of the tangible, there exists a tension between authority and freedom or rather the logic of how and to what we ascribe authority. Questions of authority coalesced with developing notions of artistic autonomy and intention. Discourses on religious visual culture, to which charged and ambiguous attitudes adhered, intermingled with literary poetics and artistic theory that also invoked continental debates.¹⁸ A topography of thought belonging to what we could call a rising regime of aesthetic thinking avant la lettre.¹⁹ The nomenclature of creation, making and creativity in what we today call the “artistic” realm, which had developed in Italian criticism from the early fifteenth century, did not find an easy conceptual journey into the Early Modern English language of invention and craft.²⁰ Marr discusses in detail problems which had been prevalent from an early phase, such as when Richard Haydocke set out to translate Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo’s Trattato dell’arte de la pittura, scoltura, et architettura (1584–1585).²¹

Literary, visual and confessional poetics then, moved within and beside each other in Post-Reformation England and often defined each other mutually.²² The reason for an interest in this intermingling is the intensity of early modern analogical thought. An almost pathological tendency to think analogically and metaphorically, such as we can observe in William Scotts The Model of Poesy, Philip Sidney, or George Puttenham²³, helps to enrich our conception of Elizabethan poetics, in particular through its sustained dialogue with the visual arts.²⁴ Especially this pertains to the vocabulary of creation – words like “invention”, “wit”, “conceit” and “device” are deployed across the spectrum of verbal and visual imagery.²⁵ While outside the scope of this article, Philip Sidney’s work suggests aesthetic and poetic problematics which conjoin Latin creative discourse and a more intensely enforced framework for creative activity in the English Church.²⁶ Equally within the literary poetics of the period questions of authenticity and counterfeit, fake and original abide. Above all, taxonomies of self-restraint and liberty in the interactions with the tactile, sensuous environment, the world and language itself, are built into the conflict of legitimate and erroneous.

Calvinism in England was clearly the product of not simply the theological thought of John Calvin (1509–1564), but a plethora of Calvinist readers, theologians, churchmen and commentators. Consequently, the process of disentangling the original features of Calvinist culture on the British Isles – what stemmed from the French Reformed traditions and what was sieved through his main English proponents such as Henrich Bullinger (1504–1575) and Martin Bucer (1493–1551) – remains difficult.²⁷ This is particularly because of the dynamic quality of Calvinism itself, which saw many incarnations across the centuries. The Reformation as a fracturing force also contributed to unleashing and releasing new and less static branches of thought, paving the way for the richness and diversity of confessional developments.²⁸

Images entered into the same metaphysical economy as that pertaining to relics and miracles. Within this spectrum of material and immaterial correlations there reigned an ever-present possibility for forgery and counterfeit. The mere fact of the “madeness” of matter rendered a relative chance of it being compromised in some way or other. Archbishop Thomas Cranmer (1489–1556) used the phrase “to forge miracles” as one of the points of contention in his 1534 call for “unity and quietness” after the early tumults and upheavals of the Reform movement.²⁹ By inserting the category of ‘miracle’ into the discourses of deconstruction and disenchantment which run through Protestant polemics, Cranmer perpetuates a key strategy of subversion in the Reformation; that of separating magic and religion, the boundaries of which had been blurred in the practices and pieties of the medieval church.³⁰ This sentence is interesting as a lens into the language of Henrician anxieties regarding religious matter – and one overlooked to a surprising degree. Peter Marshall was the first, despite some briefer mentions in the seminal work of Margaret Aston, to thoroughly address the issue of “forgery” as “a thread which can be found running through the course of the Reformation in Henry VIII’s reign.”³¹ Marshall describes a period in English and European intellectual history where we may observe a “a persistent concern to identify and accentuate instances of the fraudulent and the counterfeit.”³²

Reception of Calvin’s thought in England possesses the same suspicious attitude to the dynamics of true and false representation. While research have frequently emphasized his ostensibly aniconic attitude and pro-iconoclastic policies, similarly to the revisionary treatment of Luther’s attitude to images, Calvin’s conception of and position on imagery and visuality is infinitely more subtle and layered than the typically antagonistic narratives of Reformation visual culture like to portray.³³ Despite his vocal resistance to material representations in devotional space, his stance on representation, nature, and material revelation remains partly welcoming,³⁴ something he intimately relates to Creation and the generational properties of God.³⁵

As we will see in the image-debates of the English Protestant environment, the Calvinist motif of the hands and their role in possible transgression and sin runs through Christian narratives of creation and imagery, and is embodied, in the early church, in the form of the acheiropoietai – literally signifying the icons made without the assistance of human hands.³⁶ Attached to the iconic tradition was the notion of representational serialization going back to Christ and the Virgin herself, as painted by St. Luke,³⁷ patron saint of artists. Within the icon then, there were residues of iconic concentration and prototypical essence. The serialization of iconic similarity and repetition were perceived as re-producing and maintaining a representational chain with apostolic origins in the saints themselves.³⁸ In this sense, as vehicles functioning as containers of a Christian divine past, they could even be regarded as contact relics in their own right.³⁹ This model of iconic serialization stand in conflict with the early modern origins of the artist signature, to so called “authorial” model – a response to a growing demand for individual authenticity and originality in visual culture.⁴⁰

Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528), whose engagement with this problematic has been thoroughly explored by Koerner, and arguably the primary association when discussing the rise of the “artist” as type in Northern Europe, conflates this tradition in his self-portraits.⁴¹ Dürer mines the tradition of the iconic Christ iconography and embeds his self-portrait into the same, merging the origins of Christian imagery, even the very idea of Man as the image of God, with early modern individual representation. Above all, it is through its mode of production, circumventing accusations of fake and falsehood by avoiding the tainting touch of human hands, that the iconic condition renders its own making pure, divine and real.⁴²

Dürer’s formal approach, consisting in minute, almost invisible brushwork, removes the presence of human manual activity and by presenting a “true” image of himself, he suggests the intrinsic relation between image and prototype inherent in the icon. The iconic allusions of Dürer’s self-portraiture aids the painter in bolstering his “claim to the legitimacy, sanctity and metaphysical originality of his art.”⁴³

As we will later see in William Perkins, the material causality of religious visual culture, objects made with hands, was a steady cause of concern. The question of and anxieties about making were not limited to the policed boundaries of Protestant visuality. Their un-madeness, the absence of the tainted touch of human action, became a criteria for authenticity and adoration.⁴⁴ Scripture refers to these images as “Gods”, argues Perkins, ‘because men, though not in opinion or iudgement, yet in truth made then their gods, in that they gaue religious worship vnto them.’⁴⁵ This remains, he adds, the essence of St. Paul’s refutation of Man-made material.⁴⁶

Creative activity then, which was not perceived as being essentially different to mechanical labour until the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries,⁴⁷ was exposed to the same general denigration which physical toil has been throughout human cultural history. “The curse of Adam”, as Camille calls it, “had its impact on how the work of art was viewed.”⁴⁸ Idols and hands were perceived to have some intrinsic connection to each other. There can be no idol where human hands have not been involved. “Simulacra gentium argentum et aurum, opera manum hominum”, Psalms 134:15 reads. The human hand itself, then, became an index of forgery and falsehood.

John Jewel and the poetics of falsehood

Within a regime of policed imagination, or rather a policing of the products of creative and imaginary enterprise, ‘making’ and the question of ‘making’ participated in both central doctrinal disputes as well as debates about the nature of material culture. In a Judeo-Christian context, the consequences of unhinged and disordered creativity threatened and subverted central nuclei of faith and religious practice. Innovation and invention were framed as negative qualities in the Christian tradition, tinged with the invisible wounds of sin and insubordination which challenged the order of God’s creation.⁴⁹

England’s Protestant intellectual climate gave a new rhetoric and form to these ideas, as they were filtered through conceptual incarnations of Catholicism, humanist literature, and various forms of Lutheran thought. Figures who would push English religious politics and practice in a Calvinist direction also widely diverged in backgrounds and emphases. Many, however, shared continental experiences of travel and exile, such as William Whittingham (1524–1579) and John Knox (c. 1514–1572) in Scotland, who spent time in Geneva, or the Archbishop of Canterbury in spe Edmund Grindal (1519–1583) and the bishop of Salisbury to-be John Jewel (1522–1571), who fled to Strasbourg and Zurich respectively.⁵⁰

The study of Jewel⁵¹ is the study of one the major polemics of the post-Reformation debate on the material and theological conditions of religious representation. Jewel was very much at the epicentre of the cross-confessional debate, coming to blows with Catholics Thomas Harding⁵² (1516–1572) and Nicholas Sander (1530–1581) notably in the 1560s, both of whom sought safety in the favoured spot of exiled English Catholics, Louvain.⁵³ His major contribution to the problematic of “making” in context of Christian visual culture is his contribution to The second tome of homilees of 1571, making up the second part the Certain Sermons or Homilies Appointed to Be Read in Churches whose first iteration⁵⁴ has been attributed to Cranmer, but likely reflects the presence of several authors.

Forming a still unresolved image-position in Protestantism into a decidedly pro-iconoclastic programme, Jewel engages in a penalizing, aggressive prose which displays a Calvinist affinity for material rejection, especially targeting the unholy alliance of making and materiality. Worship of a material object not only acknowledged the sensuousness of the object itself, but equally ascribed and imbued the same object with sensory properties. Should one fail to conform to laws and commandments proscribed by God one will not only risk “that ye shall quicklye peryshe out of the lande whiche you shall possesse, you shall not dwell in it anye long tyme, but the Lorde wyll destroye you”, but furthermore “shall you serue gods whiche are made with mans handes, of wood and stone, whiche see not, and heare not, neyther eate, nor smell, and so foorth.”⁵⁵

While there often seems to be a lack of procedural or medium-specific discrimination in the ecclesiastical discourses on the image, Jewel stresses: “Cursed be he that maketh a carued image, or a cast or moulten image” [my emph.], differentiating slightly in terms of image types and procedural origin. They all remain, however, “the worke of the artificers hand,” i.e. those that mock and challenge the miracle of Creation, indeed God himself.⁵⁶

The objecthood of potentially idolatrous imagery continued to transgress in the Puritan imagination into the Post-Reformation period. While neither Jewel or Perkins were likely to have been hands-on in their approach specific image-acts, be it breaking or re-fashioning, the advance of iconoclastic activity did by no means cease with the advent of the Elizabethan period. Contemporary injunctions attempted however to limit the destruction.⁵⁷ Jewel remained fairly transparent in his general position, stressing that “Neither doth God throughout all his holy scriptures any where condemn image-breakers; but expressly and every where he condemneth image-worshippers and image-makers.”⁵⁸ As there continued to be produced depictions of the Godhead in illustrated Bibles⁵⁹ into the 1560s and 70s, there was a pointed Puritan perception of dangerous concessions made in the Elizabethan reforms, as David Davis points out.⁶⁰

One mode of visual culture which avoided wholesale destruction was stained-glass windows, which enjoyed a reputation as less “dangerous” than other modes of imagery.⁶¹ Stained glass windows especially benefited from Elizabethan injunctions limiting iconoclasm. The decay in window imagery over the course of the reformation, then, could also at least partly be ascribed to negligence and disregard. Even John Jewel engaged in window repairs in Salisbury cathedral, however these were mostly clear and non-representational, as Marks points out.⁶² In Jacobean England there were also other Calvinist bishops, such as Robert Sanderson, who came to soften their stance on iconoclasm and imagery.⁶³

Jewel retained strong theological antipathies toward the image of the cross in particular, which he believed triggered too strong a link to the Catholic and popish past.⁶⁴ Tearing down of crosses, such as that of Coggeshall, had been a feature of Reform since the 1530s and among the instances of unauthorized destruction against which Elizabeth had protested significantly.⁶⁵ The Queen’s own Chapel Royale, retaining what many felt was vestiges of Catholic vestment and liturgy, had been a cause of great contemporary conflict.⁶⁶ Bishop Jewel was even the first to remark on the matter, as Davis points out, describing it as a “a hopeless case” in a letter to Peter Martyr Vermigli (1499–1562) in 1559.⁶⁷ The ambiguities of royal injunction on the matter compromised the religious authority of the Crown, who evidently both sanctioned the destruction and maintaining of the image of the cross. Charged to the point of being attacked by an iconoclast in 1562, this “brazen defiance of the Queen's authority … made a spectacle of iconoclasm” against Elizabeth’s will, as Davis writes, adding that “the message sent by the destruction was a political one: the Queen will be made to obey the laws of her kingdom.”⁶⁸ These high-temperature polemical strategies were considered in general more emblematic of Protestant rather than Roman discourse, an antagonistic and hostile trait frequently bestowed on them by Catholic writers.⁶⁹

For John Jewel, Creation, in its infinite richness and goodness, was the witness and final testimony to why no cheap pantomime of the same, be in the form of an image, a cross or an engraving, was warranted by human hands and invention. And it is of interest that he sustains this analogy by describing Creation as a “worke”. The incomprehensible hubris of anthropomorphising God betrays Man’s ignorant self-absorption: “Hath it not ben preached vnto you since the begynnyng, and so foorth, how by the creation of the worlde, and the greatnesse of the worke, they myght vnderstande the maiestie of God, the Creator and Maker of all, to be greater then that it shoulde be expressed, or set foorth in anye image or bodilye similitude?⁷⁰

In what also extends to a refutation of what Luther called “images of the heart” (bilder im Herzen) and Sander named “inward image”,⁷¹ Jewel put forth the basic, rationalist argument that the “the infinite maiestie & greatnes of god” can by no means be fathomable for “mans mynde”, not to mention “be compassed with the sense.” Protestant proclamations of the deadness, forgery and inanimation – even stupidity – of representations are conventionally opposed to the prospect of the “lyuyng God”. How can an object so devoid of agency and function, so incapable of defending itself and striking down its opponents, be considered powerful? “What can an image, which when it is fallen, can not ryse vp agayne, which can neyther help his freendes, nor hurte his enemies, expresse of the moste puissaunt and myghtie God, who alone is able to rewarde his freendes, and to destroy his enemies euerlastyngly?” Jewel’s literality of interpretation, his demand for physical, perceivable action and agency in the image do also contrast with his adherence to and penchant for metaphysical demonstrations, such as that of invisible “maiestie & greatnes”. In a certain sense, the distance between the unintelligible and the tangible, the absent and present, the immaterial and the material, corresponds, for Jewel, to the distance between truth and falsehood. He who then carves, paints, or moulds a likeness with the intention of glorifying the Godhead “haue therby dishonoured him most hyghly, diminished his maiestie, blemished his glorye, and falsified his trueth.” It is this highly charged binary logic of critique which runs through Jewel’s polemical regime; a conceptual landscape loaded with notions of right and wrong, absence and presence, true and false.

Jewel was critical in establishing the main thrust of a dominant Protestant narrative of Christian material practices between 1560 and 1600, especially as one who reconfigures Calvinist conceptions of materiality and sacramentality, as well as negotiating explicitly with contesting image-paradigms in contemporary England. Consequently, a close-reading of the Homilees can assist scholarship on early modern visual culture to open up the syntax of a Reformed language of “making”, craft, and Christian materiality.

“That which is meerely nothing”: William Perkins’ anatomy of idolatry

William Perkins (1558–1602) echoes and develops Jewel’s moralizing line of criticism. The place of William Perkins in English Reformation scholarship has been, though by no means neglected, tended to be relegated to a secondary level when discussing image theory and Protestant poetics. While his writings upon idolatry, and by extension, imagery and its functions in Christian life and devotion, are among the more noted, no specific studies aimed at dissecting and placing Perkins’ particular contribution to discourses of visual culture and art history exist. This is surprising, as we are dealing with a figure whose “literary and pastoral work constituted an immensely varied, biblically rooted, deeply humane, and socially responsible achievement.”⁷²

My main focus here will be to place Perkins’ discussion of “making” and the issue of “made” religious material culture in the context of notions of falsehood. Considered more widely the ambition overall is to map out the conceptual anatomy of the two Perkins texts which most directly engage with these acute concerns, A Reformed Catholicke (1598), and his more famous A Warning Against the dangers of idolatrie of 1601. The former was Perkins’ most expansive work, encompassing a plethora of subjects relating to the ecclesiastical and confessional split.

William Perkins has had an immeasurable influence on Anglo-American Puritanism and was especially known for a practicality of approach to devotion that enjoyed great subscription not just across the Atlantic but equally so the confessional divide. One of the advocates of “inwardness” in Reformed polemics, Perkins’ prose, just as much as his theological perspectives, shares a simplicity and plainness of presentation. Directness and restraint as major vehicles of elucidation, speaking and writing alike, ‘had its effects in simplifying the style of prose exposition,’ argues Louis Wright.⁷³ In relation to the English reception of Reformed theology, William Perkins, alongside his namesake and Cambridge student, William Ames (1576–1633), was among the most important disseminators of the Puritan codification of Calvinism.⁷⁴ Not everybody emphasizes the Puritan aspect however, and stresses Perkins’ more mainstream presence in Reformation politics.⁷⁵ Others again highlight his juste milieu ability to marry a staunch and pastoral commitment to the Elizabethan Church with the more distinguished demands of Calvinist exegesis.⁷⁶

Perkins’ Reformed Catholike is a powerful apologetic for the theological and spiritual discrepancies between Roman and Reformed Christianity – and in this sense a foil against French⁷⁷ arguments in favour of a feasible reconciliation.⁷⁸ In this work, he sets up a chronological discussion of key topics of reformed theology, which he discusses back and forth in scholastic fashion. Perkins begins his “Ninth” article on religious images on a conciliatory note, professing the Protestant position as one which “acknowledges the ciuill vse of images as freely and truly as the Church of Rome doth.” “Ciuill” in Perkins logically denotes the use of imagery “in the common societies of men”, outside of the sacred spaces of “solemne worshippe of God”.⁷⁹ This diplomatic and somewhat more placid line is considered viable as Perkins attributes the nature of painting and engraving as the “ordinance of God.” Not limited to the arts themselves, the arts as categories of human generative activity, the accumulation of proficiency and skill are similarly something bestowed on the maker by God; his gifts of making – albeit within civil contexts – are presided over and imbued by God’s own judgment.

The rise of civic or secular categories of art and image-making in this period, alluded to here in Perkins’ reference to “ciuill” representation, retain in Protestant culture an interesting, yet somewhat unresolved position. Perkins echoed Calvin’s diplomatic attitudes to secular representation, which were also reiterated in the homilies: “we are not so superstitious or scrupulous, that we do abhorre eyther flowres wrought in Carpettes, hangynges, and other arrasse, eyther the Images of Princes prynted or stamped in their Coynes … neyther do we condemne the artes of payntyng and image making, as wicked of them selues. But we would admit and graunt them, that images vsed for no religion, or superstition rather, we meane images of none worshipped, nor in daunger to be worshypped of any, may be suffred.”⁸⁰

Equivalent to the desire of capturing the true representations of the objects of nature, spurred on by the new field of natural history, Renaissance portraiture aimed for a true likeness of the viewer. As part of a process of simulation, animation and real presence, painting ad vivum, from life, quickly solidified as a procedural norm of portraiture.⁸¹ There is a correspondence here, it could be argued, between a subsiding belief in the immaterial represented presence in the image, and an increasing attention to capturing the presence of the material world.

Yet, there were tensions in Protestant context surrounding the idea that icons of saints and even Christ himself were converted and displaced by a new brand a sacred political representation, a process which royal imagery went through in different ways.⁸² Portraits of royalty – in particular those of Elizabeth I – verged on the cusp of veneration, being frequently treated as sacred icons in their own right. By the same token, albeit on lower transgressional temperature, images of the major reformers came often to symbolize “doctrinal allegiance” as Thomas points out, performing similar if not identical functions to that of saints and mystics in the Middle Ages.⁸³ Could we regard the framing of a new Protestant interest in civic portraiture as a way of deflecting engagement with the images of the saints?⁸⁴

This growth and demand for civic Protestant portraiture as instrument of displacement possessed a certain irony, not lost on Catholic commentators who sarcastically chastised Protestants for licensing “the picture of paramours in every house” yet refrained from including and prohibiting the image of Christ.⁸⁵ The memorial and commemorative imagery of Protestant portraiture also became embedded in discourses of patriotism and national remembrance, which ended up a source of suspicion and conflict in the later seventeenth century.⁸⁶

But Post-Reformation England, far from being a visually anorexic or impoverished culture, were surrounded by imagery also outside the ecclesiastical realm. While lacking a vernacular language, English visual culture in the later sixteenth and seventeenth century abounded in wall-painting, tapestry and lavish plasterwork (among the upper echelons) as well domestic house-painting and decorative patterning, ornamentation and carving in lower social contexts. A richness of visual stimuli abounded in the Post-Reformation and this class of objects and material affirmed and perpetuated it.⁸⁷

In terms of the conceptual dynamic of representation, what we are seeing in Perkins is the explicit integration of different categories and phenomena – material culture, theology, liturgy etc. – into the same conceptual orbit, which also outlines the way I believe these possess a shared intellectual and religious genetic. Idolatry – the apex of falsehood – is considered susceptible to a whole range of material expressions – the worship of images, statues, roods, windows, figurines, but also the Mass itself, the belief in transubstantiation and so on. What shared properties herd these together? We are dealing with, I believe, a notion of representation widely conceived. In other words, less to do with art, pictures, ornament, embellishment and so on, than matters of substitution,⁸⁸ transformation, metamorphosis, making, fabrication, generation, production. Cut short, we see a tableau of what Gombrich called norm and form⁸⁹ – how the logic and dynamics of making, shaping, and fashioning move and develop in a normative matrix.

As “idolatry” evidently proves a concept with considerable conceptual flexibility and elasticity, so does that of “idol”. While unquestionably, and primarily, associated mainly with material entities to which veneration of some kind is bestowed, or to whom a sense of real substitutional quality is conferred, in addition, “idol” partakes in the wider discourse of truth and falsehood, orthodoxy and heterodoxy. Perkins quotes Jerome as saying “Euen to this day an Idol is set up in the house of God, or in the hearts and soules of beleeuers when a newe doctrine is deuised. Again, a false opinion, is an idol of falshood.”⁹⁰ Anything, then, opposing the doxa of devotion, contrary to a conformed and normative hermeneutic, ends up a self-generated idol over its own error and misguidance. A memorial, as it were, to its own misdeeds and misjudgement.

Perkins locates the engendering of idols in the economy of gestures and rituals in which images and relics take part: “Images and Reliques are made Idols, when incense is offered to them, when tapers are lighted before them, when altars are erected and gifts offered to them, when men goe on pilgrimage to them.”⁹¹ Idolatry then, seems less to reside in the making of images and the material presence and persistence of relics, than the result of a wide range of social and liturgical activations and triggers surrounding the objects themselves. Idolatry pertains equally to performance as it does making; idolatry is not made, but performed.

However, the making of images, which is surprisingly absent from the earlier passages on idolatry in Perkins’ treatise, is taken up when he turns to the nature of an idol. In order to preserve one’s self from idols, Perkins erects a four-part recipe: “We must auoide the making of them, the hauing of them, the vsing of them, and vsers of them.” Not wasting any time in demolishing the act of making, Perkins immediately deploys the Decalogue argument, insisting that “the making of them [images] but be auoided by the expresse commandment of God.” Quoting the Second Commandment, he stresses how “In these wordes are forbidden images of all kindes, grauen or painted: and images of all things in heauen, earth, vunderneath the earth: & therefore of God, whose dwelling is in heauen.”⁹²

The inherent tensions in the very idea of Man as Maker – a privilege in principle only applying to God – is touched upon in due course in Perkins as an aspect of pride and hubris.⁹³ Within the realm of legitimate metaphors God may be compared to a craftsman, but a craftsman may not be compared to God; the act of making effectively threatens this balance of power.⁹⁴ “It is a falsehood,” writes Perkins, “for vs to thinke, that we may lawfully doe whatsoeuer God doth.”⁹⁵ Man cannot imagine his own inventions capable of reaching a divine level of communication, something capable of fashioning sacred spaces from his own hands. Only “God hath power to represent himselfe in what signes he will; and so hath not any creature, neither hath he giuen vs any power to represent him in this or that form.” This, from Perkins, is a repudiation of Man as Maker, at least within the material field pertaining to religion.

Furthermore, Perkins perpetuated the Puritan suspicions regarding imagination,⁹⁶ in many ways the true perpetrator of image-making, in that the idea and conceit of images moved from mind to hand. Idols, then, were not reduced to their materiality: “‘a thing feigned in the mind by imagination, is an idol,” Perkins insisted.⁹⁷ It is this figural anthropomorphizing of God in the Roman Church which Perkins has most immediately in mind: “So soone as the minde frames vnto it selfe any forme of God (as when he is popishly conceiued to be like an old man sitting in heauen on a throne with a scepter in his hand) an idol is set vp in the minde.” He adds finally: “God, who allowes internall images rightly conceiued, forbiddes the externall in vse of religion.”⁹⁸ “Idol” appears in Perkins’ not conditioned by material properties, and may qualify for the term by means of figural content. In addition, we are facing a design of “mind as maker”: Human imagination is susceptible to engage in behaviour where “the mind frames vnto it selfe” forms and figurations of various kinds. “Making”, then, seems akin to a process of figural development in which abstraction is shaped into referential representations. From the unintelligible to the intelligible.

Within his taxonomy of idols and idolatry, Perkins groups together the specifically material species of “images themselues, Reliques of Christ and Saints; Holy things, as Temples, altars, and such like”, all of which “are made Idols two waies: The first is, when they are adored & worshipped with religious worship; when the liuing Image of God; namely man, falls downe before a dead Image: for then indeed they are made false god.” Again, the emphasis upon the verb of “making” protrudes from Perkins’ prose as a main point of contention. Idols are first and foremost made, and so in a variety of ways, but it mainly concerns the complex of Man as Maker as the crucial point in question. There is a sense of Man as being primarily made, and to annex the faculty of making from God, almost as a mock re-staging of Creation, reverts and thereby subverts God’s act. “Againe, man is a liuing image of God,” says Perkins, “made by the very hand of God: and in this respect a thousand fold more excellent then all Images made by the hand of man.”⁹⁹ Homo creator then, is nothing but a pantomime of production, a caricature of creation.

Developing his political analogy, Perkins equates the making of images to counterfeiting civil seals and signatures; to produce a likeness of the Godhead or Christ directly contradicts the brief given. As the faker is guilty of treason, so the image-makers “commit treason against God himselfe.”¹⁰⁰ In making, there rests a certain implication of an imperfection in God: the idea that man can improve aspects of God’s worship, glory and nature by earthly, external inventions and gestures, “And therefore he takes no delight in any good thing that the creature can communicate to him.”¹⁰¹ By every measure “God needs nothing: and therefore he is not worshipped with any thing made by the handes of man.” As Paul says in Acts 17:24-25 “God that made the world and all things therein, seeing that he is Lord of heaven and earth, dwelleth not in temples made with hands. Neither is worshipped with men's hands, as though he needed any thing, seeing he giveth to all life, and breath, and all things.” Human works fail, then, to interact with the spiritual and theological dynamic, and the end result of futile fabrications, representations and generation is “despair”, though “not the despaire of the damned, but a good despaire, when we are vtterly out of all hope of saluation in respect of our own strength, vertues, works, or any thing that we can possibly doe.”¹⁰²

Concluding remarks

Assessing the art history and visual culture of early modernity warrants exploration of the blurred borders between theology, visuality and politics. Probing the theological language of Jewel, Perkins and the Calvinist climate of Post-Reformation England, in particular that pertaining to Christian material and visual cultures, reveals anxieties regarding the “making” of these cultures and the ‘materialization’ of logocentric piety. Detailed discrimination of these texts demonstrates the extent to which many of the main concerns of confessional disagreement and conflict in the art history of the Reformation and Post-Reformation stemmed from deep uncertainties and ambiguities related to human devotional and symbolic production and practice. Weaponizing categories of creation, making and representation, the discourses on the sacred image facilitated a process through which historical cultures negotiated and structured their conceptions of truth and falsehood, original and fake.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Cambridge Commonwealth, European and International Trust: [Aker Scholarship].

Notes

1 A summary of scholarship on the sacred can in no way be reflected here, but influential works include Sergiusz Michalski, The Reformation and the Visual Arts. The Protestant Image Question in Western and Eastern Europe, London/New York: Routledge, 1993; Hans Belting, Likeness and Presence. A History of the Image before the Era of Art, trans. Edmund Jephcott, Chicago/London: The University of Chicago Press, 1996; Giuseppe Scavizzi, The Controversy on Images from Calvin to Baronius, New York: Peter Lang, 1992; Carlos Eire, War Against the Idols – The Reformation of Worship from Erasmus to Calvin, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989; Joseph Leo Koerner, The Reformation of the Image, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2009; Marcia B. Hall, The Sacred Image in the Age of Art, New Haven, CON: Yale University Press, 2011. Els Stronk explores the beeldenstorm of the Low Countries in Negotiating Differences. Word, Image and Religion in the Dutch Republic, Leiden: Brill, 2011.

2 Iconoclasm is germane to the question and perception of fake and falsehood in Reformation Europe and while not the protagonist of this article it runs through the debates invoked here. On the English context especially see Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, 1400–1580, 2nd ed., New Haven, CON: Yale University Press, 2005; David J. Davis, Seeing Faith, Printing Pictures: Religious Identity during the English Reformation, Leiden: Brill, 2013; David J. Davis, From Icons to Idols: Documents on the Image Debate in Reformation England, Cambridge: James Clark & Co, 2017; Margaret Aston, Broken Idols of the English Reformation, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016; Margaret Aston, England’s Iconoclasts : Volume 1: Laws Against Images, Oxford: Oxford University Press/Clarendon, 1988; C. Pamela Graves, “From an Archaeology of Iconoclasm to an Anthropology of the Body: Images, Punishment, and Personhood in England, 1500–1660”, Current Anthropology, Vol. 49, No. 1, 2008, pp. 35–60.

3 Pamela Smith, “In the Workshop of History: Making, Writing, Meaning”, West 86th: A Journal for Decorative Arts, Design History, and Material Culture, Vol. 19, No. 1, 2012. Pamela H. Smith, “Art, Science, and Visual Culture in Early Modern Europe,” Isis, Vol. 97, No. 1, 2006, pp. 83–100. Also ibidem., The Body of the Artisan: Art and Experience in the Scientific Revolution, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2006.

4 For a comprehensive discussion of Genesis more widely, see Craig A. Evans, Joel N. Lohr, David L. Petersen (eds.), The Book of Genesis: Composition, Reception, and Interpretation, Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2012.

5 Ian Green, “‘Hearing’ and ‘Reading’: Disseminating Bible Knowledge and Fostering Bible Understanding in Early Modern England”, in Kevin Killeen, Helen Smith, and Rachel Willie (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of the Bible in Early Modern England, c. 1530–1700, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015, pp. 272–285. Also Klauck, Hans-Josef Klauck, et al. (eds.), Encyclopedia of the Bible and its Reception, Berlin: De Gruyter, 2009. Extensive overview provided in Magne Sæbø et al. (eds.), Hebrew Bible/Old Testament: The History of Its Interpretation, 5 vols., Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1996–2015.

6 John Bossy, “Moral arithmetic: Seven Sins into Ten Commandments”, in Edmund Leites (ed.), Conscience and Casuistry in Early Modern Europe, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988.

7 As we will see, Creation became a reference for Post-Reformation writers discussing the limits of making. See for instance John Jewel, The second tome of homilees of such matters as were promised, and intituled in the former part of homilees. Set out by the aucthoritie of the Queenes Maiestie: and to be read in euery parishe church agreeably, London: In Poules Churchyarde, by Richarde Iugge, and Iohn Cawood, printers to the Queenes Maiestie, 1571, for instance 31ff and 85; Gervase Babington, Certaine plaine, briefe, and comfortable notes vpon euerie chapter of Genesis Gathered and laid downe for the good of them that are not able to vse better helpes, and yet carefull to read the worde, and right heartilie desirous to taste the sweete of it. By the Reuerend Father Geruase Babington, Bishop of Landaph, 1592; William Perkins engages with Genesis in his discussion of imagination, see William Perkins, A treatise of mans imaginations Shewing his naturall euill thoughts: His want of good thoughts: The way to reforme them. Framed and preached by M. Wil. Perkins, Printed by Iohn Legat, Printer to the Vniuersitie of Cambridge, 1607; Peter White, A godlye and fruitefull sermon against idolatrie vvherein the foolishe distinctions and false interpretations of the seconde commandement, and other scriptures pretended by the Papists, are plainly and fully confuted: preached the .xv. daye of Ianuarie. 1581, London: Francis Coldocke, 1581; William Whately, A pithie, short, and methodicall opening of the Ten commandements, 1622; Also, Trevor Hart, Making Good: Creation, Creativity, and Artistry, Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2014, also Frank Burch Brown, Religious Aesthetics: A Theological Study of Making and Meaning, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989. See also Sigrid Müller and Cornelia Schweiger, “Introduction”, in ibidem (eds.), Between Creativity and Norm-Making – Tensions in the Early Modern Era, Boston/Leiden: Brill, 2012, p. 2f., as well as Hans Schelkshorn, Entgrenzungen: ein europäischer Beitrag zum philosophischen Diskurs über die Moderne, Velbrück Wissenschaft: Weilerswist, 2009, p. 163. Rebecca Herrisone, Alan Howard (eds.), Concepts of Creativity in Seventeenth-Century England, Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2013, p. 2.

8 Walter S. Melion and Lee Palmer Wandel, Image and Incarnation: The Early Modern Doctrine of the Pictorial Image, Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2015, p. 8.

9 William Bouwsma, John Calvin, New York: Oxford University Press, 1988, p. 116.

10 Jérome Cottin, “Métaphores du beau et signes visuels dans la pensée de Calvin”, Chrétiens et sociétés, No. spécial I, 2011, http://journals.openedition.org/chretienssocietes/2724; https://doi.org/10.4000/chretienssocietes.2724: “without knowing these new aesthetic theories and their practical repercussions.” My trans.

11 See Sergiusz Michaelski, The Reformation and the Visual Arts – The Protestant Image Question in Western and Eastern Europe, 1. Also Rosemarie Bergmann, “A ‘tröstlich picture’: Luther’s Attitude in the Question of Images”, Renaissance and Reformation, New Series, Vol. 5, No. 1, 1981, pp. 15–25.

12 Michaelski, p. 9.

13 Luther’s brand of visual theology rested on nominalist conditions which permitted an image policy of ‘indifferent’, pedagogical purposes. See Thomas Osborne, “Faith, Philosophy, and the Nominalist Background to Luther’s Defense of the Real Presence”, Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. 63, No. 1, 2002, pp. 67–68. For further reading on the nominalist attitude to images, see Erwin Iserloh, “Bildfeindlichkeit des Nominalismus und Bildersturm im 16. Jh.”, in W. Heinen (ed.), Bild-Wor-Symbol in der Theologie, Würzburg, 1969, pp. 119–139.

14 Bengt Arvidsson, Bildstrid, Bildbruk, Bildlära. En idéhistorisk undersökning av bildfrågan inom den begynnande lutherska traditionen under 1500-talet, Lund: Lund University Press/Kulturteologiskt Förlag, 1987, p. 10.

15 John Calvin, The institution of Christian religion, vvrytten in Latine by maister Ihon Caluin, and translated into Englysh according to the authors last edition. Seen and allowed according to the order appointed in the Quenes maiesties iniunctions, London: Reinolde Wolfe & Richarde Harison, 1561, p. 26.

16 John Calvin., A commentarie of Iohn Caluine, vpon the first booke of Moses called Genesis, [London: By Henry Middleton] for Iohn Harison and George Bishop, 1578, p. 151.

17 John Calvin, The institution of Christian religion, p. 23.

18 The field of sacramental poetics reflect this intellectual hybridity. See for instance, Regina Schwartz, Sacramental Poetics at the Dawn of Secularism: When God Left the World. Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008; Kimberly Johnson, Made Flesh: Sacrament and Poetics in Post-Reformation England, Pennsylvania: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014; Robert Whalen, The Poetry of Immanence: Sacrament in Donne and Herbert, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002.

19 See Clark Hulse, “Tudor Aesthetics”, in Arthur F. Kinney (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to English Literature, 1500–1600, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999, pp. 29–63. Also Jason Crawford, Allegory and Enchantment – An Early Modern Poetics, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017.

20 See Michael Baxandall, “English Disegno”, in Edward Chaney and Peter Mack (eds.), England and the Continental Renaissance: Essays in Honour of J. B. Trapp, Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 1990, pp. 203–214.

21 Alexander Marr, “Pregnant Wit: ingegno in Renaissance England”, British Art Studies, issue 1: https://doi.org/10.17658/issn.2058-5462/issue-01/amarr. See Richard Haydocke trans. A tracte containing the artes of curious paintinge caruinge building written first in Italian by Io: Paul Lomatius painter of Milan and Englished by R.H student in physic, Oxford: By Ioseph Barnes for R[ichard] H[aydock], 1598. Lucy Gent also touches upon the issues of transplanting the language of art criticism from the southern to the northern European climate. Gent, Picture and Poetry, 1560–1620: Relations between Literature and the Visual Arts in the English Renaissance, Leamington Spa: J. Hall, 1981.

22 See Barbara Lewalski, Protestant Poetics and the Seventeenth-Century Religious Lyric, Princeton University Press, 1979; Malcolm Mackenzie Ross, Poetry and Dogma: The Transfiguration of Eucharistic Symbols in Seventeenth Century English Poetry, New Brunswick/New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1954.

23 William Scott, The Model of Poesy, Gavin Alexander (ed.), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013 [1599]; Philip Sidney, The defence of poesie. by sir phillip sidney, knight, London: Printed by Thomas Creede for William Ponsonby, 1595; And George Puttenham, The arte of English poesie Contriued into three bookes: the first of poets and poesie, the second of proportion, the third of ornament, London: Printed by Richard Field, 1589.

24 See Gent, Picture and Poetry, 1560–1620; Also, Frederick Hard, “Some Interrelations between the Literary and the Plastic Arts in 16th and 17th Century England”, College Art Journal, Vol. 10, No. 3, 1951, pp. 233–243. On the relationship between poetic and visual thought in Scott especially, see Sarah Howe, “‘Our Speaking Picture’: William Scott’s Model of Poesy and the Visual Imagination”, Sidney Journal, Vol. 33, No. 1, 2015, pp. 16–38.

25 John Florio, A worlde of wordes, London: Arnold Hatfield for Edward Blount, 1598, describes this network of procedural designations in the period.

26 Michael Mack, Sidney’s Poetics: Imitating Creation, Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 2005.

27 See Andrew Pettegree, The French Book and the European Book World, Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2007, esp. ch. 12; Also Patrick Collinson, “England and International Calvinism, 1558–1640”, in Menna Prestwich (ed.), International Calvinism 1541–1715, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985; Mack P. Holt, “International Calvinism”, in R. Ward Holder (ed.), John Calvin in Context, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019, pp. 375–382; Crawford Gribben, “Calvin and Calvinism in Early Modern England, Scotland and Ireland”, in R. Ward Holder, John Calvin in Context, pp. 393–400.

28 David Steinmetz, Calvin in Context, 2nd ed., New York: Oxford University Press, 2010, p. 3.

29 Thomas Cranmer, Miscellaneous Writings and Letters, John Edmund Cox (ed.), Cambridge: Parker Society, 1846, p. 460f.

30 See Robert W. Scribner, “The Reformation, Popular Magic, and the ‘Disenchantment of the World’”, The Journal of Interdisciplinary History, Vol. 23, No. 3, 1993, p. 475. The major theseis Keith Thomas addressed this question specifically in Religion and the Decline of Magic, Harmondsworth, 1971.

31 Peter Marshall, “Forgery and Miracles in the Reign of Henry VIII”, Past & Present, No. 178, 2003, p. 39. See Marshall for an excellent discussion of the theological and social tensions and anxieties surrounding the question of forgery in Henrician England. For Margaret Aston, see fn. 2.

32 Peter Marshall, Religious Identities in Henry VIII’s England, Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006, p. 125. Ch. 7 esp.

33 I will not have the space to discuss the revision of Calvinist poetics, but this has been addressed in particular by William Dyrness, The Origins of Protestant Aesthetics in Early Modern Europe: Calvin’s Reformation Poetics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019, pp. 53–83 esp; Christopher Richard Joby, Calvinism and the Arts: A Re-assessment, Leuven: Peeters, 2007, esp. 1–29; Philip Benedict, “Calvinism as Culture? Preliminary Remarks on Calvinism and the Visual Arts”, in Paul Corby Finney (ed.), Seeing Beyond the Word: Visual Arts and the Calvinist Tradition, Grand Rapids, MH: William B. Eerdmans Publishing, 1999, pp. 19–48; on England especially see, Christopher Stell, “Puritan and Nonconformist: Meetinghouses in England”, in Finney (ed.), Seeing Beyond the Word: Visual Arts and the Calvinist Tradition, pp. 49–82.

34 Beyond the scholarship of Dyrness, Joby and Finney, the work of Randall Zachmann has challenged many preconceived notions about Calvinist rigour on topic of sacred images specifically. Zachmann in particular engages with a key distinction in Calvin between dead and living images, invoking the dichotomy between fake and original imagery, and that living images were bound to words and the Word. See Randall Zachman, Image and Word in the Theology of John Calvin. This distinction is vital when reading Calvin’s commentaries and sermons, especially his Commentaries to Genesis and lectures on Jeremiah, where the issue of God as Maker and which implications this brings to bear upon artisans and image-makers are especially urgent. Calvin, A commentarie of Iohn Caluine, vpon the first booke of Moses called Genesis, translated out of Latine into English, by Thomas Tymme, London: Henry Middleton, 1578. And Calvin, Tvvo and tvventie lectures vpon the fiue first chapters of Ieremiah With prayers annexed, at the end of euery lecture, London: Felix Kyngston, 1620.

35 Jérome Cottin, “Métaphores du beau et signes visuels dans la pensée de Calvin”, p. 17.

36 The classical study is still Ernest Kitzinger, “The Cult of Images in the Age Before Iconoclasm”, Dumbarton Oaks Papers, Vol. 8, pp. 112 –115. See also E. Bevan, Holy Images: An Inquiry into Idolatry and Image-worship in Ancient Paganism and Christianity, London, 1940, p. 79.

37 On the relationships between the acheiropoietoi and St. Luke, see for instance Steven F. Ostrow, Art and Spirituality in Counter-Reformation Rome. The Sistine and Pauline Chapels in S. Maria Maggiore, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996, p. 122.

38 Dyrness, The Origins of Protestant Aesthetics in Early Modern Europe: Calvin’s Reformation Poetics, 9. Also Leonid Ouspensky and Vladimir Lossky, The Meaning of Icons, trans. G. E. H. Palmer and E. Kabloubovsky, Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Press, 1982.

39 Joseph Leo Koerner, The Moment of Self-Portraiture in German Renaissance Art¸ Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press, 1993, p. 83.

40 Alexander Nagel and Christopher S. Wood, Anachronic Renaissance, New York: Zone Books, 2010, p. 14f.

41 Joseph Leo Koerner, The Moment of Self-Portraiture in German Renaissance Art¸ p. 84.

42 Ibid., 85. Also Koerner, The Reformation of the Image, pp. 13–14.

43 Koerner, The Moment of Self-Portraiture in German Renaissance Art, pp. 85, 140f.

44 Ralph Dekoninck, “De la Violence de L’Image a L’Image Violentee: L’iconoclasme protestant comme rupture fondatrice de notre conception moderne de l’image et de l’art”, in J. Boulogne (ed.), Questionnements de la violence, Lille: Presses de l’Université Charles-de-Gaulle-Lille 3, 2001, p. 65. Also E. Thunø and G. Wolf (eds.), The Miraculous Image in the Late Middle Ages and Renaissance, Analecta Romana, Supplement, 35, Rome, 2004, and Hans Belting, Likeness and Presence, pp. 62–69.

45 William Perkins, A Warning on the idolatrie of the last times. And an instruction touching Religious, or Divine Worship, Cambridge, 1601, p. 24.

46 The historical idolatrous component in Christian piety ends up something close to a “Pauline prohibition” in the sense that St. Paul becomes, so to speak, the prophet of devotional corruption in the Church. “For there is no question,” writes Perkins, “but he did foresee that the Apostolicall religion should be corrupted by idolatrie”, hence his titular Pauline quote: “Babes keepe your selues from idols.” William Perkins, A Warning, dedication.

47 See Larry Shiner, The Invention of Art: A Cultural History, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001, and Hans Belting, Likeness and Presence.

48 Michael Camille, The Gothic Idol: Ideology and Image-Making in Medieval Art, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989, p. 30. Tatarkiewicz, A History, pp. 244–266. Rob Pope, Creativity – History, Theory and Practice, London: Taylor & Francis, 2005.

49 Rebecca Herrisone, Alan Howard (eds.), Concepts of Creativity in Seventeenth-Century England, Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2013, p. 2; John Hope Mason, The Value of Creativity: The Origins and Emergence of a Modern Belief, London: Routledge, 2003, p. 27f.

50 David Steinmetz, Calvin in Context, p. 4.

51 See Gary Jenkins, John Jewel and the English National Church. The Dilemmas of an Erastian Reformer, Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006; Angela Ranson, André Gazal and Sarah Bastow (eds.), Defending the Faith: John Jewel and the Elizabethan Church, University Park, PEN: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2017; Michael Pasquello, “John Jewel: Preaching Prelate”, Anglican and Episcopal History, Vol. 69, No. 3, 2000, pp. 276–294; Angela May Ranson, “‘Because Thy God Loves England’: Bishop John Jewel and the Catholicity of the Church of England”, PhD diss., University of York, 2013; Wyndham Mason Southgate, John Jewel and the Problem of Doctrinal Authority, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1962.

52 See John Jewel, A replie vnto M. Hardinges ansvveare by perusinge whereof the discrete, and diligent reader may easily see, the weake, and vnstable groundes of the Romaine religion, whiche of late hath beene accompted Catholique, London: In Fleetestreate, by Henry VVykes, 1565.

53 Gary Jenkins, John Jewel and the English National Church, p. 118. Angela Ranson, “The Jewel-Harding Controversy: Defending the Champion”, in Angela Ranson, André Gazal and Sarah Bastow (eds.), Defending the Faith: John Jewel and the Elizabethan Church, p. 123.

54 See J. Barrett Miller, “The First Book of Homilies and the Doctrine of Holy Scripture”, Anglican and Episcopal History, Vol. 66, No. 4, 1997, pp. 435–470.

55 John Jewel, The second tome of homilees of such matters as were promised, and intituled in the former part of homilees. Set out by the aucthoritie of the Queenes Maiestie: and to be read in euery parishe church agreeably, p. 31f.

56 Jewel, Ibid., p. 32.

57 Aston, England’s Iconoclasts, p. 316. Julie Spraggon, Puritan Iconoclasm during the English Civil War, Woodbridge, Boydell & Brewer, 2003, p. 19.

58 John Jewel, An Apology of the Church of England, J. E. Booty (ed.), Ithaca, NY: 1963, p. 115. Quoted in Margaret Aston, “Puritans and Iconoclasm, 1560–1660”, in Christopher Durston and Jacqueline Eales (eds.), The Culture of English Puritanism, 1560–1700, London: Palgrave, 2006, p. 102.

59 See Ian Green, Print and Protestantism in Early Modern England, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Michael Gadio, The Bible and the Printed Image in Early Modern England: Little Gidding and the Pursuit of Scriptural Harmony, London: Routledge, 2017.

60 Davis, Seeing Faith, Printing Pictures: Religious Identity During the English Reformation, p. 143.

61 Julie Spraggon, Puritan Iconoclasm during the English Civil War, p. 18.

62 Richard Marks, Stained Glass in England During the Middle Ages, Toronto/Buffalo: University of Toronto Press, 1993, p. 232.

63 Julie Spraggon, Puritan Iconoclasm during the English Civil War, p. 21.

64 See John Jewel, A replie vnto M. Hardinges, 500f. Also, Aston, Broken Idols, ch. 8, p. 707.

65 David J. Davis, “Destructive Defiance: Catholic and Protestant Iconoclasm in England, 1550–1585”, in M. Caricchio, G. Tarantino (eds.), Cromohs Virtual Seminars. Recent historiographical trends of the British Studies (17th–18th Centuries), 2006–2007, p. 3.

66 Aston, England’s Iconoclasts, pp. 62–85. Jacqueline Eales, “Iconoclasm, Iconography and the Altar in the English Civil War”, in Diana Wood (ed.), The Church and the Arts, Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1995, p. 316.

67 “Jewel to Martyr, Nov. 16, 1559”, in Hastings Robinson (ed.), Zurich Letters: comprising the correspondence of several English bishops and others, Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 1842, p. 55. Quoted in Davis, “Destructive Defiance”, p. 3.

68 Davis, “Destructive Defiance”, p. 3.

69 Lucy E. C. Wooding, Rethinking Catholicism in Reformation England, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000, p. 193.

70 Jewel, A replie vnto M. Hardinges, p. 35.

71 The mental image, the Lutheran “bilde im herzen”, may be said to function as way of displacing accusation of iconic conflation and veneration, disarming the sacred image as substitutional agent, while avoiding the all-out rupture of iconoclasm. In other words, the mental image as a syncretic and hybrid concept employed as a way of negotiating the extremes of visual theology. See Martin Luther, Wider die himmlischen Propheten, von dern Bildern und Sakrament, 1525, WA, Vol. 18, p. 67; also LW, Vol. 40, p. 84. See also Tarald Rasmussen, “Iconoclasm and Religious Images in the Early Lutheran Tradition”, in Kristine Kolrud and Marina Prusac, (eds.). Iconoclasm from Antiquity to Modernity, Farnham: Ashgate, 2014, 108ff. Nicholas Sander, A treatise of the images of Christ and of his saints: and that it is vnlawfull to breake them, and lawfull to honour them. With a confutation of such false doctrine, as M. Iewel hath vitered in his replie, concerning that matter, Apud Ioannem Foulerum, 1567, p. 115.

72 W. B. Patterson, William Perkins and the Making of a Protestant England, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014, p. 1.

73 Louis Wright, “William Perkins: Elizabethan Apostle of ‘Practical Divinity’”, Huntington Library Quarterly, Vol. 3, No. 2, 1940, p. 171. This is rather old and superseded by more recent work.

74 Dewey D. Wallace Jr., Shapers of English Calvinism, 1660–1714 – Variety, Persistence, and Transformation, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011, p. 16. W. B. Patterson, William Perkins and the Making of a Protestant England, 4. For a more thorough discussion of Perkins’ theological circle see William Haller, Rise of Puritanism, New York: Colombia University Press, 1938, pp. 48–82 esp. With regards to how their different theologies shaped the Protestant climate, see Peter Kaufman, “‘Much in Prayer’: The Inward Researches of Elizabethan Protestants”, The Journal of Religion, Vol. 73, No. 2, 1993, pp. 163–182. Patterson however eases the staunch Puritan impression of Perkins and identifies him also to a large extent as part of a mainstream middle-of-the-road Anglicanism with strong popular and practical influence. See Patterson, William Perkins and the Making of a Protestant England, p. 215.

75 W. B. Patterson, William Perkins and the Making of a Protestant England, pp. 216–217.

76 Leif Dixon, “William Perkins, ‘Atheisme’, and the Crises of England’s Long Reformation”, Journal of British Studies, Vol. 50, No. 4, 2011, p. 790.

77 To what Perkins refers in his introductory monologue is unclear, but he may have in mind the, by then, three decades old Colloquy of Poissy in 1561. For a historical and ecumenical portrait of the Colloquy specifically, see Donald Nugent, Ecumenism in the Age of the Reformation: The Colloquy of Poissy, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1974.

78 William Perkins, A reformed Catholicke; or, A declaration shewing how neere we may come to the present Church of Rome in sundrie points of religion: and vvherein we must for euer depart from them with an advertisment to all fauourers of the Romane religion, shewing that the said religion is against the Catholike principles and grounds of the catechisme, John Legat, Printer to the Vniuersitie of Cambridge, Cambridge, 1598.

79 William Perkins, A reformed Catholike, p. 91.

80 The second tome of homilees, p. 94. Keith Thomas, “Art and Iconoclasm in Early Modern England”, in Kenneth Fincham, Religious Politics in Post-Reformation England, Woodbridge, Suffolk/Rochester, NY: Boydell & Brewer, 2006, p. 32. On Calvin, see William Bouwsma, John Calvin, p. 135.

81 William Dyrness, The Origins of Protestant Aesthetics in Early Modern Europe: Calvin’s Reformation Poetics, p. 20.

82 Dyrness, Ibid., p. 26. Keith Thomas, “Art and Iconoclasm in Early Modern England”, pp. 32–33. Keith Moxey, “Mimesis and Iconoclasm”, Art History, Vol. 32, No. 1, 2009, p. 58ff.

83 See note to Thomas above. On Elizabeth’s portrait especially, see R.C. Strong, Portraits of Queen Elizabeth I, Oxford, 1963.

84 Jeffrey Hamburger, “The Place of Theology in Medieval Art History: Positions, Problems, Possibilities”, in J. Hamburger and Anne Marie Bouché (eds.), The Mind’s Eye: Art as Theological Argument in the Middle Ages, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006, p. 17.

85 Abraham Woodhead, Concerning Images and Idolatry, Oxford, 1689, p. 62; [John Leslie], A Treatise of Treasons, n.p. [Louvain], 1572, fo. 145v. Quoted in Thomas, p. 33.

86 On this see Alexandra Walsham, “Impolitic pictures: providence, history, and the iconography of Protestant nationhood in early Stuart England”, Studies in Church History, Vol. 33, 1997, pp. 307–328.

87 A. Wells-Cole, Art and Decoration in Elizabethan and Jacobean England, New Haven, CT, 1997. On the relationship between Protestantism and domestic visual culture especially, see Tara Hamling, Decorating the godly household: religious art in Protestant Britain, c.1560-c.1660, New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2010. Also, Tessa Watt, Cheap Print and Popular Piety, 1550–1640, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991.

88 See Alexander Nagel and Christopher S. Wood, Anachronic Renaissance, n. 34 on the relationship between substitutional and authorial functions of early modern imagery.

89 Ernest Hans Gombrich, Norm and Form: Studies in the Art of the Renaissance, Phaidon: London, 1966.

90 William Perkins, A Warning on the idolatrie of the last times, p. 15.

91 William Perkins, A Warning, p. 100.

92 Ibid., p. 104.

93 Ibid., p. 22.

94 Robert Hanning, “‘Ut enim faber … sic creator’: Divine Creation as Context for Human Creativity in the Twelfth Century”, in Clifford Davidson (ed.), Word, Picture, and Spectacle, Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications/Western Michigan University, 1984, pp. 95–149.

95 Perkins, op cit., p. 22.

96 This was furthermore associated with the function of memory, against which Perkins also engaged in polemic. See Alex Fogleman, “Iconoclasts of the Imagination? Image and Memory in Sixteenth-Century English Catechesis”, Church History and Religious Culture, Vol. 99, 2019, pp. 1–20.

97 William Perkins, Works, London, 1603, p. 841.

98 Perkins, A Warning, p. 107.

99 Ibid., p. 62f.

100 Ibid., p. 67.

101 Ibid., p. 205.

102 Ibid., p. 215.