William Perkins, the imagination in Calvinist theology and “inner iconoclasm” after Frances Yates

ABSTRACT

This article considers Frances Yates’s famous attribution of “inner iconoclasm” to the rhetorical and logical innovations of Petrus Ramus (1515–1572), particularly as exemplified in the theological writings of the Elizabethan preacher William Perkins (1558–1602). According to Yates, the rejection, by Ramists such as Perkins, of the imagistic art of memory practised by Raymond Lull (c.1232–c.1315) and Giordano Bruno (1548–1600) was tied directly to Ramists’s commitment to the Calvinist rejection of religious images. For Yates, the rejection of images in religious contexts motivated Ramists, including Perkins, to reject all images, both physical and imaginary. Contra Yates, this article suggests that there is little warrant to connect the rejections of mnemonic and religious imagery. Furthermore, Yates’s implicit suggestion that both Ramism and Calvinism constitute rejections of the human imagination tout court is contested through a detailed engagement with the philosophical theories of the imagination articulated by Ramists, Calvinists and proponents of the art of memory. The article concludes with an exposition of Perkins’s account of imagination, and its connection to his treatment of religious images, arguing that Perkins retained an important place for the imagination even within his theology.

KEYWORDS:

• Imagination
• iconoclasm
• William Perkins
• Calvinism
• Ramism
• Frances Yates

At the outset of her study of iconoclasm in England, Margaret Aston argues that iconoclasts sought “to erase not simply the idols defiling God’s churches, but also the idols infecting people’s thoughts.”¹ Later in the work she elaborates, arguing that “those who discussed idolatry were concerned with inner as well as outer idols.”² Luther, Tyndale, Cranmer, Bullinger and, most centrally, the preacher and theologian William Perkins (1558–1602) are all described as having advocated “an inner kind of iconoclasm.”³ Aston singles out Perkins’s explicit rejection of the “conventional methods of memory,” which he declares are “impious” and “kindle the most corrupt affections of the flesh.”⁴ Instead of the mental pictures employed in the art of memory, the preacher, Aston writes, interpreting Perkins, ought to utilise “verbal axioms and syllogisms.”⁵ Sergiusz Michalski provides an almost-identical description, suggesting that “opponents (such as […] William Perkins) of the old, traditional art of memory […], which had made use of images and figurative ideas, were also vehement enemies of religious art.”⁶ More recently, Arnold Hunt, in an uncited remark, writes, without qualification, that “Protestants banished visual images and symbolic ceremonies from their churches, and tried to purge mental images and visual memory-systems from their imagination.”⁷ Even Charles Schmitt and Brian Copenhaver, in Renaissance Philosophy, refer to Perkins’s inner iconoclasm, albeit with more hesitancy than Aston, Michalski or Hunt.⁸ More far-reaching than these, however, are William Dyrness’s Reformed Theology and Visual Culture and Ioan Couliano’s Eros and Magic in the Renaissance. Dyrness proposes that, “at the Reformation a major shift in the use of the imagination took place.”⁹ Central to his argument is the Reformed, or Calvinist, rejection of religious imagery, to which, like Aston, he suggests an adjoining change in mentalité; one which defines the subsequent aesthetic output of writers, artists, architects and even town planners within the Reformed tradition. For Dyrness, Perkins’s rejection of the imagistic art of memory constitutes a major example of the ways iconoclasm structured Reformed thought.¹⁰ Similarly, Couliano announces that “the spirit of the Reformation produces a substantial modification of the human imagination.”¹¹ Couliano, too, suggests “one of the most important goals of the Reformation is to root out the cult of idols from the Church.” Referring to an earlier discussion of Perkins, he also connects iconoclasm and the art of memory, writing: “The results of this iconoclasm are tremendous if we consider the controversies about the Art of Memory […] in England.” Such controversy reveals, Couliano argues, that, “ultimately, the Reformation leads to a total censorship of the imaginary, since phantasms are none other than idols conceived by the inner sense.”¹²

All these accounts propose a connection between the rejection of the art of memory and the advocacy of iconoclasm. The former is taken as in some way indicative of the latter, and as a concrete representation of the way in which the Reformed rejection of religious imagery affected the conceptualisation, and use, of the imagination. In every case, except that of Hunt, the authors refer to the case of Perkins as particularly instructive, and explicitly cite the prior discussion of Frances Yates.¹³ It is Yates who first introduced the notion of “inner iconoclasm,” tying it particularly to the philosophy of Petrus Ramus (1515–1572), of whom Perkins was a devotee. In her influential work, The Art of Memory (1966), Yates, drawing on the historiographical contributions of Walter Ong, situates Ramus within a humanist context wherein the influence of Quintilian had motivated a distaste for an art of memory which utilised images and imaginary locales to memorise information.¹⁴ For Yates, citing Ong, Ramus’s whole philosophical system can be interpreted as a kind of system of memorisation, wherein his simplified, bifurcating charts serve to replace the complex, imagistic systems upon which an earlier system of memorisation had been reliant.¹⁵ From this presentation, Yates then slides directly into her characterisation of Ramism as internally iconoclastic in a rhetorical feat worth quoting in full. Beginning with a statement of the traditional art of memory, she writes:

we are to remember Grammar with an image –the ugly old woman Grammatica– and on her stimulating-to-memory form we visualize the arguments about her parts […] Under Ramism, we smash the inner image of old Grammatica, and teach little boys to do so, substituting for her the imageless Ramist epitome of Grammar memorized from the printed page. / The extraordinary success of Ramism […] in Protestant countries like England may perhaps be partly accounted for by the fact that it provided a kind of inner iconoclasm, corresponding to the outer iconoclasm. Old Grammatica on the portal of some churches sculpted with the series of the liberal arts would get the same kind of outer treatment in a rampantly Protestant country as she gets inwardly in Ramism. She would be smashed.¹⁶

Citing his theological work, Commentariorum de religione christiana (1576), Yates emphasises Ramus’s approving citation of the Old Testament prohibition on image-making, which, she suggests, “places Ramus as sympathetic to the iconoclastic movements which raged during his lifetime.”¹⁷ Yates takes both Ramism and the Calvinist rejection of religious images to constitute a dismissal of the imagination; a dismissal she finds to be particularly exemplified within the writings of Perkins. Perkins, to whom Yates attributes two pseudonymously authored attacks on the imagistic art of memory, also opposed the practice in his own guide to preaching, The Arte of Prophecying (1592). While Yates’s overall historiographical contributions have been subject to serious examination, her assertions about the imagination and, in particular, the link between the imagination, the art of memory and iconoclasm have been virtually unchallenged.¹⁸ Yates insists that iconoclasm necessitates the rejection of all mental imagery; mental images of God as much as images in memory.

In this article, I want to contest this claim. I argue that Ramus’s and Perkins’s rejection of the art of memory is a bad hook to hang the term “inner iconoclasm” upon. In the first section, I summarise the results of recent research into the legacy of Ramism. Not only did Calvinists not perceive a necessary congruence between their faith and Ramus’s method, but some Calvinists even accepted both an imagistic art of memory and Ramist method. In the second section, I consider the imagination. I argue that there is little warrant for distinguishing the imagination in Ramism, Calvinism or Perkins from that dominant within European culture at the time. Finally, I turn to theology. Here, I show how Yates, and those that follow her, are right to point out the connection between idolatry and the imagination. However, I argue that Reformed theologians by no means sought to excise the imagination from religion, or from life, entirely, as Yates and others have contended. This reveals important consequences for the relationship of Reformed theology to visual culture, and for the history of the imagination more generally.

The art of memory

Central to Yates’s story, both in the history of the art of memory and of the imagination in particular, is Giordano Bruno (1548–1600). It is Bruno’s influence, especially his follower Alexander Dicson (1558–c.1604), which is opposed in two pamphlets by an author who identifies themselves as G. P. Cantabrigiensis; claimed by Yates to be William Perkins.¹⁹ Perkins, in the guise of Cantabrigiensis, opposes Bruno with Ramus; something Yates takes to be virtually required by his religious commitment to iconoclastic Calvinism.²⁰ In his guide to preaching, Perkins characterises “The animation of the images, which is the key to memory” as “impious; because it requireth absurd, insolent and prodigious cogitations, and those especially, which set an edge upon and kindle the most corrupt affections of the flesh.”²¹ In this section, drawing on recent research on the reception of Ramism, I show how, despite this protestation against the piety of an imagistic art of memory, Ramism was by no means universally accepted within the Reformed community. Indeed, Ramism was not even necessarily taken to preclude an art of memory, whether in the imagistic form promoted by Bruno, the earlier Raymond Lull (c.1232–c.1315) or in other forms.²²

As is clear from Ong’s work, the significant influence of Ramus and Ramism among Calvinists has never been in doubt.²³ For Ong, Ramism constitutes the triumph of spatial and textual modes of organisation over the oral and auditory systems of the Middle Ages.²⁴ Yet, as scholars like Hunt have shown, the importance of orality was never in question for preaching-preoccupied Protestants like Perkins.²⁵ Nevertheless, the Ramism of most Protestants who have been so identified, including Perkins, has been generally accepted.²⁶ It is the precise reason why Protestants endorsed Ramist principles that has thus far eluded scholarly consensus.²⁷ In the case of England, Seth Long argues that Yates is right to suggest iconoclasm as the logical connection between the two movements.²⁸ In defence of this suggestion, Long turns to bibliographic evidence, citing an evident decline in works devoted to the mnemonic arts in England after the ascension of Elizabeth I. Along with a quantitative decline in mnemonic works, Long also cites a qualitative decline, attributing to English examples of the genre “a dry and unimaginative quality that stands in sharp contrast to continental memory treatises.”²⁹

Long’s defence of Yates, however, has three problems: one of history, one of genre and one of geography. On the historical front, Long perpetuates a central feature of Yates’s narrative which more recent historiographical contributions have revised: her narrow definition of the art of memory. As Mary Carruthers has shown, Yates overwhelmingly focusses on only one strand of the larger tradition of mnemonics.³⁰ For Quintilian and early proto-scholastics like Hugh of St Victor, memorisation is predicated on more than the use of images to stimulate the memory; for these authors, textual organisation plays a more central role in memorisation. Alex Fogleman has emphasised this tradition in his rebuttal of Long’s thesis.³¹ Ramists, and Protestants more generally, Fogleman argues, did not repudiate the art of memory tout court; rather, they repudiated a certain kind of mnemonic practice.³² Fogleman expands this argument, pointing out that, if one considers theological texts, especially works of catechesis, it is only certain images which are repudiated, whether for mnemonic purposes or anything else. Fogleman here points us towards an argument to which I want to return below, viz., the theological relationship between iconoclasm and the imagination. For now, I want to return to the geographic limitations of Long’s argument.

As Long recognises, and as Ong’s comprehensive bibliography revealed, Ramism had a wide diffusion across Protestant Europe.³³ As both Joseph S. Freedman and Howard Hotson have argued, it is within the Reformed centres of German-speaking Europe that Ramism proved most influential and here, they argue, its success was decidedly mixed.³⁴ In the intellectual heart of the Reformed world, the University of Heidelberg, Ramism was effectively banned; while in Beza’s Geneva, Ramus’s religious writings were considered theologically suspect. These reactions hardly bespeak the reputation of a scholarly martyr-for-the-faith or indicate any kind of underlying coherence between Ramism and Calvinist theology. Indeed, as Hotson has pointed out, from Beza’s perspective, Ramists were united above all by their heretical orientation vis-à-vis Calvinist orthodoxy.³⁵ When properly contextualised, it appears that Ramism was only particularly successful in second-tier Calvinist institutions which had a vested interest in pushing their students through the curriculum in record speed; precisely the sort of practical aims which Ramist pedagogy aimed for.³⁶

As Freedman and Hotson have shown, German-speaking Ramist Calvinists display enormous intellectual heterogeneity. Despite the hostility Ramus himself displayed towards Aristotelianism of a traditional, scholastic variety, many of his disciples nonetheless continued to teach both Ramist methodology and Aristotelian philosophy; whether in Ramus’s favoured discipline of logic or in the areas he himself did not significantly develop, such as physics or ethics.³⁷ Some of these writers, including the Bremen theologian Conradius Bergius (1592–1642), offered explicitly multi-partisan works, such as his Artificum Aristotelico-Lullio-Rameum in quo per artem intelligendi (1615), a logic textbook claiming to treat its subject according to Aristotelian, Lullian and Ramist methods.³⁸ Johann Heinrich Alsted (1588–1638), whose encyclopaedia Ong describes as the “ultimate elaboration of Ramist arguments,” is perhaps the best example of this multi-partisan tendency within Reformed philosophy, as Hotson has scrupulously demonstrated.³⁹ Not only was Alsted the author of the Physica harmonica (1616), a work which harmonises the physical accounts of the Bible, Jewish Kabbalah, Aristotelianism and Lullian alchemy, but he also edited a previously unpublished work by Bruno which explicitly discusses elements used in the art of memory.⁴⁰ While Yates was aware of the influence of Bruno on Alsted, she neglects to mention that, as Hotson has shown, he was nonetheless a committed and active member of the Reformed faith, even participating in the Synod of Dort and later teaching Calvinist theology.⁴¹ Like Ramus and Perkins, Alsted, in his Methodus theologiae (1634), explicitly condemns “idolatry,” which he characterises as a “proper iniquity” punishable by God.⁴² Far from seeing his Ramist and theological commitments as proscribing mnemonic practices, Alsted seems to have actively attempted to integrate them into a unified whole, particularly evident in his enormous encyclopaedia.⁴³ In England, too, as Stephen Clucas has shown, Bruno’s followers Nicholas Hill (1570–c.1610) and Walter Warner (1563–1643) combined insights from Bruno and from Ramism; a clear rebuttal to Long’s insistence that “there is no English equivalent of a scholar who found value in both Ramus and Bruno.”⁴⁴

Though many of those who endorsed Ramism did consider it to constitute an art of memory in itself – a position explicitly articulated in a thesis by Perkins’s follower William Ames (1576–1633)⁴⁵ – those who did so evidently saw it within the alternative tradition of the mnemonic arts not discussed by Yates. Moreover, as the cases of Alsted, Bergius and many others not mentioned here illustrate, Calvinists perceived no immediate contradiction between Ramist methodology and the art of memory, even in the imagistic form promoted by Bruno and Lull. They also do not connect their adherence to aniconism to any position, positive or negative, on the art of memory. Indeed, Alsted went so far as to argue for the existence of a “Mnemonica Sacra” in his Triumphus Bibliorum sacrorum (1625).⁴⁶ While it is clear that Perkins objected to the art of memory on grounds of religious piety, it is equally obvious from Alsted’s case that there was no general consensus on the issue among the larger Reformed community. Yates’s characterisation, then, of the debate between Ramists and Brunians as “at bottom a religious controversy,” is thoroughly falsified as a general theory of the relationship between the two intellectual movements.⁴⁷ However, before we fully repudiate Yates’s account of inner iconoclasm, it is worth considering one final element: namely, her suggestion that “the debate within the art of memory hinged on the imagination.”⁴⁸ I want to take this up in the next section.

The imagination

Within the academic natural philosophy with which Calvinists, both Ramist or otherwise, Catholics and Bruno would have been most familiar, psychological issues and the nature of the imagination were considered within the tradition of commentary on Aristotle’s De anima.⁴⁹ Early modern natural philosophers inherited a schematic account of psychology from this tradition; one which departed significantly from the text of Aristotle’s work. By the sixteenth century, commentators had begun re-organising this material according to subject, rather than following the order of Aristotle’s exposition, as had been traditional. This process was especially intensified within Protestant contexts, in which the psychological and biological issues dealt with in the De anima were eventually joined to the accounts of form, cause and motion examined in the Physics, forming a complete body of scientific knowledge.⁵⁰ While recent research has explored the various ways in which this material was deployed to confessionally specific ends, I argue that there is little evidence to support a confessionally differentiated philosophical account of the imagination.⁵¹ I shall consider the case for theological differentiation in the next section.

In both Protestant and Catholic psychologies, the imagination was understood as one of a number of “internal senses.”⁵² In scholastic physics, all existing material reality is conceptualised as substance: objects composed of matter, the actual material by which they are constituted, and form, the underlying structure by which that matter is shaped into however it exists. These latter forms are transmitted, without their accompanying matter, though the air as “sensible species,” which the perceiving subject receives via their “external senses,” consisting of the usual five (seeing, touching, tasting, smelling and hearing).⁵³ Once received by the external senses, the sensible species travel via nerves into the brain, where the internal senses are located. Authors held a variety of opinions regarding the precise enumeration and localisation of the internal senses but a common model, inherited from Aquinas, defended four distinct internal senses: common sense, imagination, cogitation or estimation – which rules the senses in animals who possess the internal senses but lack intellect – and memory.⁵⁴ While not discussed extensively by him, Aquinas followed Avicenna in locating these faculties within the brain, specifying that estimation was housed in the central part of the brain.⁵⁵ Avicenna, and Albert the Great, would have added that common sense and imagination are in the front, with memory in the rear.⁵⁶

Scholastic authors conceptualised these internal senses as material powers; that is, as parts of the body rather than parts of the immaterial mind. Their role is to mediate between sense-perception and intellection. In Aquinas’s account, the role of the common sense is to receive the various sensible species perceived by each individual sense and then to recombine these disparate sense-experiences into a single, coherent entity. Thereafter, imagination, or phantasia, retains these fully formed sensations as phantasms. These phantasms are acted upon by the immaterial agent intellect, rendering them intelligible to the passive intellect, wherein the process of intellection takes place.⁵⁷ The important role of the imagination in mediating between sense and intellect informed the scholastic commonplace that “the soul never thinks without an image.”⁵⁸ Despite Yates’s claims about inner iconoclasm, Calvinists, as much as Catholics, accepted the necessity of internal images to inform intellection. Indeed, Calvin himself refers to the theory of the internal senses, writing, “al objectes are powred into Common sense, as into a place of receit: then followeth Phantasie, which judgeth of those thinges one from other that Common sense hath conceiued.”⁵⁹ Perkins, too, mentions “the outward senses […] of sight, hearing, tasting, touching, smelling […] also […] the inward […] imagination, memorie, etc. […] done by the braine, and the parts of the braine.”⁶⁰

Whatever their differences from scholastic Aristotelianism in the realm of logic, Ramists also accepted this general psychological framework. In England, Alexander Richardson (d.∼1621), in a commentary on Ramus’s logic, posthumously published as The Logician’s School-master (1629), refers to “internall senses, fancie, cogitation, and memory” which “serve reason.”⁶¹ While Ramus himself did not discuss the internal senses, he does refer to “phantasia” in his Scholarum metaphysicarum (1566) among a list of grades of knowledge.⁶² Richardson’s own invocation of the imagination emphasises its role in “invention,” the first part of Ramist dialectic which seeks out the middle term in syllogistic reasoning.⁶³ Although such invention seems far removed from the contemporary connection of imagination and creativity, this aspect, too, was comprehended by the scholastic conception of imagination, often captured by the twin terms of composition and division. As the Dutch Calvinist philosopher Franco Burgersdijk (1590–1635) puts it, the imagination “composes and divides sensible species in various ways.”⁶⁴ Aquinas elaborates with an oft-repeated example, writing that imagination “composes and divides imaginary forms, as when from the image of gold and the image of a mountain we compose the single form of a golden mountain which we have never seen.”⁶⁵ Ramists, too, identified the imagination with this more creative function. Johannes Thomas Freigius (1543–1583), Ramus’s biographer, describes, in his Quaestiones physicae (1579), a Latinate-sounding division of the internal senses into “Discretio, Fictio, [and] Memoria.”⁶⁶ Despite these names, Freigius not only gives them the traditional functions of common sense, imagination and memory, but he explicitly identifies them as such. Discretio distinguishes among the simple and individual likenesses perceived by each individual sense, while memoria “embraces and contains what has been taken up from the senses.” Fictio, on the other hand, engages the likenesses distinguished by Discretio and also, from these likenesses, it “fashions new forms, which the nature of things and the universal order would not admit.”⁶⁷ Freigius’s innovative names for the conventional internal senses did not catch on among other Ramists: Rudolph Snellius (1546–1613), for instance, in his Partitiones Physicae, Methodi Rameae legibus informatae (1594), refers to common sense, phantasia and memory.⁶⁸ William Scribonius (c.1550–1600), author of the Triumphus logicae Rameae (1583), likewise enumerates common sense, phantasia and memory as internal senses, and it is precisely these which are referred to as held by “almost all” of “the philosophers” in G. P. Cantabrigiensis’s Libellus de memoria (1584), the second of the author’s two published attacks on the Brunian art of memory.⁶⁹

Despite a brief discussion of the physiology of memory and the imagination, to which we shall return momentarily, Cantabrigiensis’s two pamphlets do not, as might be expected from Yates’s argument, object to the Brunian art of memory for its account of the imagination; neither are iconoclasm or religious issues of any kind mentioned. Instead, the pamphlets are concerned far more with a fiercely polemical insistence on Ramist method; the art of memory, as Bruno’s follower Dicson employs it, Cantabrigiensis argues, improperly mixes disciplines which ought to be kept separate. In particular, Cantabrigiensis is often concerned with Dicson’s employment of astrological information, a discipline to which Perkins objected at many points elsewhere.⁷⁰ Curiously, however, Cantabrigiensis does not articulate his problems with astrology in religious terms; instead, he is content to cite methodological proscriptions. There is one religiously coded objection articulated in the pamphlets explicitly mentioned by Yates: Cantabrigiensis objects to images on the basis of impiety, an objection also mentioned in Perkins’s work on preaching.⁷¹ Cantabrigiensis, however, objects only to particular kinds of images which stimulate problematic emotions, such as “anger, hatred, fear, and lust.”⁷² This objection is hardly iconoclastic; indeed, it follows exactly Fogleman’s analysis of mnemonics in English catechetical texts, which we considered above, and has a clear parallel in Perkins’s discussion of religious images, to which we shall turn below.

Stephen Clucas has drawn attention to an interesting feature of Cantabrigiensis’s discussion of the physiological details of the internal senses.⁷³ Instead of accepting the mediaeval attribution of the various internal senses to particular ventricular locations within the brain, a view which we have seen Perkins accepting without comment in later works, Cantabrigiensis suggests that memory extends across all of the brain’s ventricles, citing Galen as well as the recent anatomical discoveries of Andreas Vesalius (1514–1564) and Realdo Colombo (c.1515–1559).⁷⁴ Cantabrigiensis’s use of contemporary anatomy echoes earlier Ramist precedent, especially the work of Snellius, but it also reaches further back in the Protestant philosophical tradition to Philip Melanchthon (1497–1560), who revised his earlier contribution to scholastic psychology in light of the anatomical innovations of Vesalius.⁷⁵ While there is certainly something noteworthy in this philosophical rejection of classical models in favour of contemporary ones, anticipating the reception by later Ramists of the work of Bacon and Descartes, ultimately these anatomical innovations do little to materially affect the theorisation of the operation of the imagination.⁷⁶ That is, although Cantabrigiensis claims that, “in the human being the intellect,” rather than the material brain, “embraces in itself common sense and imagination,” he does not thereby claim that this intellective imagination performs different tasks than those assigned it in the traditional scholastic account.⁷⁷

Already within the scholastic tradition the distinctively human operations of the imagination had been assumed near-universally by philosophers to be performed by the material brain only in cooperation with immaterial reason, thus making its precise localisation irrelevant. Aquinas, for example, had rejected Avicenna’s and Albert the Great’s distinction between an imaginatio, which retains sense impressions, and a phantasia, which could combine and divide them, instead arguing that the operations of the latter could only be performed by human beings.⁷⁸ The implication here, made explicit by later scholastics, is that distinctively human imaginative acts require the addition of something beyond the material brain. Thus, Cantabrigiensis’s physiological revision of the traditional theory of the internal senses merely highlights a cognitive asymmetry between humans and non-rational animals that had always been assumed by scholastic philosophers. Any operation of the imagination, on this account, which a non-rational animal is assumed incapable of, such as the formation of fictions, has to be re-attributed to the immaterial mind, or, at least, to reason acting in cooperation with the material imagination.⁷⁹ While there was no unanimous consensus on the cognitive abilities of non-human animals within scholastic philosophy, that there was an asymmetry with respect to animals’ imaginative capacities is clearly accepted by Aquinas, suggesting it would hardly be worthwhile to characterise Cantabrigiensis’s theory as anything other than scholastic merely on these grounds.

What then serves to differentiate this conventional scholastic psychology, embraced by Catholics, Calvinists and Ramists alike, from the “manifesto of the primacy of the imagination,” which Yates associates with Bruno?⁸⁰ Yates’s own account of Bruno, as the title of her Giordano and the Hermetic Tradition (1964) suggests, centres the hermetic dimension of Bruno’s thought. Subsequent scholarship has done much to re-frame our understanding of Bruno, particularly by locating him against a more broadly Neoplatonic background.⁸¹ Neoplatonism, represented in the Renaissance, especially by Marsilio Ficino (1433–1499), an acknowledged influence on Bruno, has generally been distinguished from the scholastic Aristotelian tradition discussed above.⁸² For Ficino and the Neoplatonist tradition, the imagination is typically understood in both physiological and non-physiological terms and, perhaps most importantly, is thought capable of receiving information from both material and non-material sources.⁸³ Nevertheless, as John Cocking argues, this did not keep Ficino from articulating a theory of internal senses in his Platonic Theology (1482).⁸⁴ Moreover, as we have seen, for scholastics, the human imagination was always assumed to have a non-physiological component, and there was a long tradition within Peripatetic philosophy of conceptualising prophecy in terms of the imagination’s reception of images from a non-terrestrial source (whether God or cosmos), suggesting that the difference between Neoplatonic and Aristotelian theories of the imagination is not so clear-cut.⁸⁵ In any case, Bruno hardly offers a straightforwardly Neoplatonic theory of the imagination.⁸⁶ Indeed, as Hilary Gatti, Leen Spruit and Manuel Mertens have argued, Bruno’s philosophy owes as much to scholasticism as it does to Neoplatonism or to Hermeticism.⁸⁷ While Bruno’s theory of intellect may derive from Ficino, as well as Muslim philosophers al-Fârâbi, Avicenna and Averroes, he also explicitly criticises Ficino’s psychological doctrines.⁸⁸ As Mertens has shown, for Bruno, the connection of the imagination to the cosmos is through its physiological basis in the brain.⁸⁹ In Bruno’s theory, the imagination is a mediating force between a realm of immaterial forms from which our ideas about things are derived, as “shadows” of these forms, and our bodily, sense-impressions. As Spruit has suggested, within Bruno’s magical works a concrete relationship is posited between sensible reality and the intellect, through the imagination.⁹⁰ In a work translated as “On magic,” Bruno writes that the “role of the imagination is to receive images derived from the senses and to preserve, combine and divide them.”⁹¹ Insofar as the imagination remains conceived of in a position between sense and intellect here, Bruno’s account hardly offers the reader a magnified notion of imagination vis-à-vis his scholastic contemporaries; indeed, Yates herself acknowledges that in this text: “Bruno relates his magical psychology of the imagination to the terminology of normal faculty [i.e. scholastic] psychology.”⁹² Even Bruno’s reference to the imagination’s ability to “combine and divide” the “images received from the senses” parallels the creative function attributed to it in scholasticism, and Bruno explicitly connects it to “poets, painters, story writers and all who combine images in some organized way.”⁹³

In his account of the interrelationship of magic and the imagination, however, Bruno attributes to the imagination certain powers explicitly denied it in the mainstream scholastic tradition.⁹⁴ Like his conception of the intellect, this notion of a magical imagination derives from a host of mediaeval sources, especially al-Fârâbi and al-Kindî; in early modern Europe, it received new support, first from Ficino, and then from the medical innovations of Paracelsus (1493/4–1541). Simply put, Ficino, Bruno and Paracelsus held that the heavenly bodies emitted astral rays which the imagination could refract into everyday life using elaborate ceremonies, charms and sigils.⁹⁵ The imagination, these thinkers suggested, could affect the bodies of other people. Perkins denies this. In his Discourse of the Damned Art of Witchcraft (1610), Perkins explicitly rejects the assertion that “the bare conceit and imagination of man, is of great force to doe strange things.” Nevertheless, Perkins admits that, “by reason of the communion that is between the bodie and soule,” the imagination can “cause alteration in himselfe, which may tend either to the hurt or to the good of his owne bodie.”⁹⁶ That is, although the imagination cannot inflict physical injury upon another, it can cause great injury to the imaginer themselves. Far from being particularly iconoclastic, or particularly Calvinist, Perkins’s position here is held virtually without alteration by nearly all orthodox philosophers and theologians of any denomination.⁹⁷ Indeed, the distinction between the power the imagination has over the imaginer’s own body and the power it has over others goes at least as far back as Aquinas.⁹⁸ Thus, it is clear that, rather than for iconoclastic reasons, it is most likely that, as Copenhaver and Schmitt suggest, Perkins’s rejection of Bruno likely had to do with Bruno’s explicit endorsement of non-Christian practices like magic.⁹⁹ Whatever the underlying physics of the magical imagination, whether scholastic, Platonic or hermetic, the debate between Perkins and Bruno on the powers of the imagination can best be conceptualised as a debate within broadly shared parameters. Indeed, as we shall see below, the same can be said with respect to the Catholic–Protestant debate on religious images. This was a debate within a shared commitment to religious orthodoxy about how, precisely, the imagination could be operationalised in the human pursuit of the divine.

Inner iconoclasm

Thus far, we have primarily confined ourselves to the philosophical realm. But iconoclasm was above all a theological proposition. While Calvinists do not refer to inner iconoclasm, they do refer to internal idols, suggesting that Aston is correct to infer that Protestant preachers were concerned with the mental or imaginary content of their parishioners. Calvin, for instance, articulated the notion of an internal source for idolatry, writing, “the minde […] begetteth the idol, and the hand bringeth it foorth.”¹⁰⁰ Idolatry was directly linked to the operation of the imagination in the influential theological treatise De theologia vera (1594) by Franciscus Junius (1545–1602).¹⁰¹ Employing Ramist-influenced bifurcation throughout the work, one of Junius’s opening moves is to distinguish between his subject, “true” theology, and “false” theology, which is “subject to opinion.”¹⁰² For Junius, false theology is that “which we have arrived at by our debased and bewildered judgment”; in particular, it is the work of the “imagination” which engages in the “fashioning [of] unalloyed dreams and games in place of the truth, and idols and tragelaphs in place of the true God.”¹⁰³ The inclusion, alongside idols, of tragelaphs, the half-goat, half-stag of artistic invention in Plato’s Republic (488a), serves to clearly implicate the combining and dividing function traditionally ascribed to the imagination.¹⁰⁴ As I have indicated, for Yates, this notion of an internal source for idolatry manifested itself in a proscription of mental images as such. To support this interpretation, she quotes William Perkins: “A thing faigned in the mind by imagination is an idol.”¹⁰⁵ Perkins, like Junius, did connect idolatry to the imagination. However, as I want to now highlight, Perkins’s inner iconoclasm is meant to proscribe only certain kinds of mental images: those which offend against scripture. Just as Perkins’s position on the imagination in philosophy hardly differs from mainstream scholasticism, so, too, I shall argue, did his position on the use of the imagination in religion have clear precedents within scholastic theology. Perkins, as we shall see, not only accepts a moderated use of the imagination, and of imagery, in the secular world, but also defends what later English Calvinists will call “a holy use of imagination.”¹⁰⁶ Let us first consider his position on idolatry.

Perkins offers substantial consideration of idolatry in two works: A Reformed Catholike (1598) and A Warning Against the Idolatrie of the Last Times (1601). In the former work, Perkins juxtaposes Reformed and Catholic doctrines on various issues, including images; first setting out their points of agreement before proceeding to highlight their differences.¹⁰⁷ On images, Perkins emphasises the shared commitment of Catholics and the Reformed to what he calls “the civill use of images.”¹⁰⁸ He writes: “By civill use I understand that use which is made of them in the common societies of men, out of the appointed places of the solemne worshippe of God.” Rather than suggest that artistry might be sinful, Perkins explicitly argues that “painting and graving are the ordinance of God; and to be skilfull in them is the gift of God.” He lists three examples of the civil use of images: the adornment of buildings, the images of rulers on coins and, finally, images which “serve to keepe in memorie friends decesed.”¹⁰⁹ In addition to civil use, Perkins also acknowledges “the historicall use of images to be good and lawfull,” including images of both secular and sacred history, which, he argues “may be painted in private places.”¹¹⁰ Perkins also allows any image which is made “to testifie the presence or the effects of the majestie of God […] when God himselfe gives any speciall commandement so to doe,” and, finally, he allows the “right images of the new testament,” which are, in fact, not really images at all but “are the doctrine and preaching of the gospell.”¹¹¹ These two latter points anticipate the doctrinal differences Perkins subsequently describes.

Perkins attributes three positions to Catholics which he rejects: the possibility of representing God in an image, the worship of saints and the worship of God within images. On the first point, Perkins clarifies: Catholics do not believe in the possibility of representing God’s nature, but only “in respect of some properties and actions.” Perkins rejects this distinction, and, citing the second commandment, argues that the prohibition extends to true and false gods, and pertains to God’s “nature, properties or works, or to […] any resemblance of him.” Perkins walks through standard Catholic objections to the Reformed doctrine, including the biblical example of the images of the Cherubim on the tabernacle, God’s appearance to Daniel as the Ancient of Days and the possibility of representing other humans who are themselves images of God. He rejects all of these arguments, suggesting that the Cherubim were not worshipped or the tabernacle displayed in the house of worship, and argues that the Ancient of Days merely illustrates that “God may appeare in whatsoever forme it pleaseth his majestie,” but that “it doth not followe, that man should therefore resemeble God in those formes: man having no libertie to resemble him in any forme at all: unles he be commanded so to doe.” On the third example, Perkins argues, straightforwardly enough, that it is not as the image of God that human beings are depicted in images.¹¹² The two earlier counter-arguments inform the entirety of Perkins’s position on external images: those images utilised in religious contexts which are explicitly defended in the Bible are authorised by God; to draw any comparison with contemporary practice is the peak of Catholic arrogance, for no Catholic practice not explicitly delineated in the Bible has such clear divine sanction. Thus, the worship of images and the worship of God within images are fully ruled out. Similarly, the worship of saints, Perkins argues, is not authorised by biblical edict.

Perkins’s argument also hinges in part on the nature of worship itself. Like his discussion of images, Perkins wants to distinguish a realm of “civil worship” which can be lawfully accorded to the non-divine.¹¹³ One can do honour to a monarch by kneeling before them, or acknowledging their authority by honouring their image or some representation of them, such as their footstool. However, the civil worshipper is not, in this situation, worshipping the object or monarch as God, whereas when images serve to represent God, they are worshipped or honoured precisely because of their relationship to God. Perkins brings out this internal dimension with even more force later in the work as well as in the later A Warning against the Idolatrie of the Last Times. In this work, and at the conclusion of A Reformed Catholike, Perkins emphasises that, through its non-biblical, non-authorised liturgical and ecclesiastical practices, the Catholic Church actually does not worship God at all. As he argues in A Warning: “So soone as God is represented in an image, he is deprived of his glorie, and changed into a bodily, visible, circumscribed, and finite Majestie.” As God himself has not explicitly tied himself to any particular image, Perkins argues, when people worship God before images, they are worshipping either the images themselves or a god which they themselves have feigned in their own mind. When such a feigned god is worshipped, Perkins argues, “God is not conceived but a fiction or idol of the braine.”¹¹⁴ Likewise, of the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation, he writes, “though in words they honour Christ, yet in deede they turne him into a Pseudo-Christ and an Idol of their owne braine.”¹¹⁵

At times, Perkins seems to want to attribute the entirety of idolatrous practice to such flawed conceptions of God, and thus to an internal rather than external process. In particular, Perkins often describes the production of mental idols as a specifically imaginative process. He refers to the improperly conceptualised god worshipped by idolaters as being but “a phantasie of their own.”¹¹⁶ A link between the sense-dependent imagination and the improper conceptualisation of God had already been articulated within the scholastic tradition. Aquinas, for instance, had suggested that excessive reliance on imagination could lead one to take sense-experience as the paradigm for God and, thus, lead one into imagining the Triune God as three individuated human persons.¹¹⁷ The link was reinforced by English translations of scripture, in which, in the Epistle to the Romans, Paul writes of how idolaters became “vain in their imaginations” and “turned the glory of the incorruptible God to the similitude of the image of a corruptible man” (Rom. 1:21–3). While this phrase itself was endlessly echoed throughout subsequent English writing, Perkins considers the precise nature of the imagination and its relationship to improper conceptualisations of God in his posthumously published A Treatise of Mans Imagination (1607). In this work, Perkins takes a broader view of what constitutes “an idol of mans braine,” linking it to the Reformed perspective on original sin.¹¹⁸

In A Reformed Catholike, Perkins highlights the differences between the Catholic and the Reformed teachings on original sin, suggesting that, for both Catholics and the Reformed, original sin leaves the human race a prisoner in need of the saving power of grace. However, for the Reformed, Perkins argues, the prisoner is also dead, completely dependent on grace to even move and walk once the chains have been removed. For the Reformed, Perkins argues, citing Gen. 8:21, the frame-text for A Treatise of Mans Imagination, original sin means that human nature is irrevocably prone to do evil.¹¹⁹ In A Treatise, he argues that original sin has resulted in a kind of engrafting of heresy and atheism into human nature, ensuring that vain and idolatrous thoughts arise where righteousness and piety ought properly to exist. Thus, he argues, “The minde and understanding part of man is naturally so corrupt, that so soone as he can use reason: he doth nothing but imagine that which is wicked, and against the lawe of God.”¹²⁰ This natural corruption of the imagination, and displacement of God from his proper role as the end and goal of human existence, ensures that humanity is completely dependent on sense-perceptions and, thus, that, for our knowledge of God, we are wholly dependent upon scripture, and not on reason. Human beings simply cannot be trusted to adequately comprehend, conceptualise or form images of God; in fact, they are positively unable to do so. The only right way to form an image of God in the imagination is, Perkins argues, “not to conceive any forme: but to conceive […] his properties and effects.”¹²¹

It is this insistence, that God cannot be imagined, and that only those images which God himself has authorised be allowable in religion, which informs Stuart Clark’s interpretation that “Mental imaging –and the phantasia in general– had to be relied on in every other context but not in religious worship.”¹²² As I want to suggest, however, Perkins does defend a positive use for the imagination within religious settings, albeit one grounded in his own distinctively Reformed account of scripture. As the reference to Aquinas above indicates, the Reformed were hardly original in characterising the imagination as the origin for idolatry. The difference lies rather in which images ought to be permitted. On the purely visual elements, Perkins’s strong commitment to only that which is explicitly authorised by scripture limits him to the preaching of the word and the administration of the sacraments; although even such textual commitments need not preclude church decoration, as Mia Mochizuki has shown in the context of Dutch Calvinism.¹²³ Catholics, on the contrary, allowed any image insofar as it was authorised by the Church. However, Perkins’s position on the imagination, in particular, I argue, parallels their own. For, ultimately, both Catholics and the Reformed explicitly limit the use of the imagination within religion; one by the Church, the other by scripture. Perkins argues, therefore, that if it is the incorrect mental visualisation of God which culminates in sin and idolatry, then the correct mental visualisation of God will necessarily lead to the good and godly life. But how can one correctly envision an unimaginable God? When one imagines, Perkins writes, “that wheresoever he is, he stands before God, and that all his thoughts, wordes, and deedes are naked in Gods sight,” this, Perkins implores, “is the most notable meanes, to cleanse the heart from evill thoughts, to restraine the will and affections from wicked delights, and to keepe in order the whole man.”¹²⁴ This same practice clearly informs the use of the imagination among Catholics. For example, in St Ignatius’s Spiritual Exercises (pub. 1548), the participant is instructed to imagine before themselves the terrors of Hell, and thereafter be directed towards God.¹²⁵ Thus, rather than advocate the “total censorship of the imaginary,” as Couliano describes his position, Perkins, just as Couliano describes Ignatius, “placed [the imagination] at the service of faith.”¹²⁶ Nowhere is this clearer than in Perkins’s treatment of preaching, in which the Reformed preacher must be possessed of a “sensus interior doctrinae tradendae,” an internal sense of the doctrine to be delivered. Only then will they be capable of stirring up “godly affections in other men,” for, he writes elsewhere, “affection […] is answerable to imagination.” ¹²⁷

*****

Yates’s account of “inner iconoclasm” as a plausible explanation for the popularity of Ramism among Reformed theologians like Perkins falls short for a number of reasons. On the most fundamental level, even those who, like Perkins, wrote specifically against both religious images and the imagistic art of memory drew no explicit connection between the two. Other writers within the Reformed tradition drew on both Ramism and an imagistic art of memory, despite their endorsement of Calvinist orthodoxy on religious images. Likewise, there appears to have been no orthodox consensus on the use of either Ramism or an imagistic art of memory, and no explicit connection was articulated between religious doctrine and either one or the other. Individual philosophers and theologians, as well as particular institutions, decided for themselves whether Ramism or the memory arts would suit their own practical concerns. Finally, it seems the only significant disparity between the conception of the imagination defended by Bruno and that accepted by philosophers in the Reformed or Catholic denominations was its connection to magic. While Perkins denied this connection, he did not do so because of his iconoclasm;, he did so because, like Aquinas, as well as the Counter-Reformation Catholic Church, he was an orthodox Christian. Yates’s distinctive positioning of Perkins as iconoclast vis-à-vis Bruno, rather than an orthodox Catholic figure, points to a larger problem related to the so-called “Yates thesis,” well-beyond the confines of this paper.¹²⁸ Whatever the merits of that thesis, the answer to the question of the iconoclasm of Perkins’s account of the imagination ought to be sought elsewhere. While it is true that Perkins drew a connection between the imagination and idolatry, he was particularly concerned only with theologically proscribed images. Images were a concern for him only insofar as they could be occasions for worship, hence his worry about the location of images and his acceptance of images in private.¹²⁹ Ultimately, for Perkins, it was the moral orientation of imagery which concerned him. This did not necessarily lead to a broad Calvinist culture of “iconophobia,” and recent research on English Protestant material culture has borne this out.¹³⁰ The connection which Dyrness and Michalski, among others, have tried to draw between Perkins’s adoption of Ramism and examples of material culture is insufficiently grounded.¹³¹ Reformed philosophers clearly articulated a view of the imagination not dissimilar to their Catholic peers, and thus any assessment of a particularly Calvinist aesthetic ought to take this continuity into consideration. Inner iconoclasm, therefore, is an objection, not against the imagination per se, but only against the mis-directed imagination. If re-directed, and guided by the truths disclosed in scripture, the imagination can play a positive role in secular and sacred life.

Acknowledgements

I am particularly indebted to the organisers of the “Mnemonic Waves” postgraduate symposium at the Warburg Institute, for which this piece was first written. I am grateful as well to Annabel Brett and Angus Gowland, who read earlier versions of this article. I would also like to thank the judges of the Charles B. Schmitt Essay Prize for selecting this essay, and for the valuable feedback I received through the reviewing process.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Barret Reiter

Barret Reiter is currently completing a PhD at the University of Cambridge. His work considers the philosophical, theological and political dimensions of the imagination, especially in England, between 1550 and 1650.

Notes

1 Aston, England’s Iconoclasts, 2. More recently, Hallett, “Pictures of Print,” announces his explicit intention to follow Aston, n1, 209.

2 Aston, England’s Iconoclasts, 452.

3 Yates, The Art of Memory, 231. Aston follows Yates’s account closely.

4 Quoted in Aston, England’s Iconoclasts, 457.

5 Ibid.

6 Michalski, The Reformation and the Visual Arts, 182.

7 Hunt, The Art of Hearing, 20.

8 Copenhaver and Schmitt, Renaissance Philosophy, 291.

9 Dyrness, Reformed Theology and Visual Culture, 6.

10 Ibid., 137.

11 Couliano, Eros and Magic in the Renaissance, 197.

12 Ibid., 193. Emphasis in original.

13 Ibid., 63; Aston, England’s Iconoclasts, 457; Dyrness, Reformed Theology and Visual Culture, 137; Copenhaver and Schmitt, Renaissance Philosophy, 291; Michalski, The Reformation and the Visual Arts, 182; see also Harrison, The Bible, Protestantism, and the Rise, 119; Worthen and Hunt, Mnemonology, 5–6. Hunt discusses Perkins extensively elsewhere; see The Art of Hearing, 131–3.

14 Yates, The Art of Memory, 228. Ong reciprocated Yates’s appreciation for his scholarship in his review of the book: Ong, “Reviewed Work(s),” 258.

15 Yates, The Art of Memory, 229.

16 Ibid., 231. Emphasis added.

17 Ibid., 233.

18 On Yates’s broader legacy, see Gatti, “Frances Yates’s Hermetic Renaissance,” 193–210; Hanegraaff, “Beyond the Yates Paradigm,” 5–37; Engel, Loughnane, and Williams, “Introduction,” The Memory Arts in Renaissance England, 1–32.

19 Yates’s attribution to Perkins of these pamphlets is widely accepted and they appear, in an English translation by David C. Noe, in the newest edition of Perkins’s works: Beeke and Salazar, The Works of William Perkins, 475–558. For further discussion of the controversy which accepts Perkins’s authorship and relies extensively on the work of Yates and Ong, see McKim, Ramism in William Perkins’ Theology, 132–40.

20 Yates, The Art of Memory, 269.

21 Perkins, The Arte of Prophecying, 130; quoted in Yates, The Art of Memory, 269.

22 On Lull’s art, see Yates, The Art of Memory, 175–96; Traninger, “The Secret of Success,” 113–31.

23 See esp. Ong, The Ramus and Talon Inventory; cf. Ong, Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue, 295ff; Freedman, “The Diffusion of the Writings,” 98–152.

24 Ong’s thesis is defended by Rechtien, “Logic in Puritan Sermons,” 237–58; and, more recently, in moderated form, by Hallett, “Ramus, Printed loci,” 89–112; Hallett, “Space, Text and Creativity,” 107–29.

25 For his criticisms of Ong, see Hunt, The Art of Hearing, 56–7.

26 On Perkins’s Ramism, see Kneidel, “Ars Prædicandi,” 17; Hunt, The Art of Hearing, 95–6, 99–100; McKim, “The Function of Ramism in William Perkins’ Theology,” 503–17; Rechtien, “John Foxe’s Comprehensive Collection of Commonplaces,” 89; Howell, Logic and Rhetoric in England, 1500-1700, 206–10; Miller, The New England Mind, 313, 335–62.

27 A number of theories linking Ramism and Protestantism are discussed in Hotson, Commonplace Learning, 17.

28 Long, “Excavating the Memory Palace,” 122–38; see also McKim, Ramism in William Perkins’ Theology, 41–58; Rechtien, “The Visual Memory of William Perkins,” 69–99.

29 Long, “Excavating the Memory Palace,” 131.

30 See Carruthers, The Book of Memory, esp. 154–5, and, on Lull, 331–2.

31 Fogleman, “Iconoclasts of the Imagination?,” 1–20.

32 Ibid.

33 For recent (and, vis-à-vis Ong, deflationary) discussion of this diffusion, see the essays in Feingold et al., The Influence of Petrus Ramus.

34 See Hotson, Commonplace Learning, 18ff; Freedman, “The Diffusion,” passim.

35 Hotson, Commonplace Learning, 18–19.

36 Freedman, “The Diffusion,” 137; Hotson, Commonplace Learning, 36; cf. the account of Ramus himself in Skalnik, Ramus and Reform.

37 See the extensive bibliography compiled by Freedman, “The Diffusion.”

38 Ibid., 118, 120.

39 Ong, Ramus, Method, 183; Hotson, Johann Heinrich Alsted 1588-1638.

40 Hotson, Alsted, 50.

41 Ibid., 12. For his participation in the Synod, see Hotson, Alsted, 113–21; Yates, The Art of Memory, 362. Hotson does suggest elsewhere that “the hermetic component” of Alsted’s work “played the leading role” in some of his theological commitments, particularly his millenarian eschatology, but I would suggest that this need not necessarily compromise his orthodoxy, as Hotson seems to insist; see Hotson, Paradise Postponed, 174.

42 Alsted, Methodus SS. theologiae, 140; cf. Alsted, Triumphus Bibliorum sacrorum seu Encyclopaedia biblica, 398.

43 On Alsted’s relationship to the “inner iconoclasm” thesis, see Hotson, Alsted, 43ff.

44 Long, “Excavating the Memory Palace,” 136, n3; Clucas, “In campo fantastico,” 42, 51, 57; on occult themes in English university science, see Feingold, “Occult Tradition at English Universities,” 73–94.

45 Ames, “Theses logicae,” 189 (Th. 351).

46 Alsted, Triumphus, 266.

47 Yates, The Art of Memory, 261.

48 Ibid., 278.

49 For the early modern commentary tradition more broadly, see Chene, Life’s Form.

50 See Edwards, “The Fate of Commentary,” 519–36; Schmitt, “The Rise of the Philosophic Textbook,” 792–804; Reif, “Natural Philosophy”; for scholastic philosophy in Protestant jurisdictions, see Omodeo and Wels, Natural Knowledge and Aristotelianism.

51 On confessionally specific philosophy, see Leijenhorst and Lüthy, “The Erosion of Aristotelianism,” 375–411; Gellera, “Calvinist Metaphysics and the Eucharist,” 1091–110; Cellamare, “Confessional Science and Organisation of Disciplines,” 461–80.

52 On the internal senses in an early modern Catholic context, see Heider, “The Internal Sense(s) in Early Jesuit Scholasticism,” 79–94; among Protestants, see Freedman, “The Soul (anima) According to Clemens Timpler (1563/4-1624),” 814; La Shell, “Imagination and Idol,” 306–8.

53 On species, see Spruit, “Species, Sensible and Intelligible,” 1211–5.

54 Aquinas, Summa theologiae, 140/1 (1a78.4, resp.).

55 See Pasnau, Thomas Aquinas on Human Nature, 191.

56 Ibid.; cf. Steneck, “Albert the Great,” 193–211.

57 See Spruit, Species Intelligibilis, vol. 1, 157–73; cf. Pasnau, Theories of Cognition in the Later Middle Ages.

58 Aristotle, De anima, 63 (431a17).

59 Calvin, The Institution of the Christian Religion, fo. 44^r (I.XV.6). Hereafter Institutes.

60 Perkins, The Whole Treatise, 189.

61 Richardson, The Logicians School-Master, 239; on Richardson’s commentary, see Howell, Logic and Rhetoric in England, 209–10.

62 Ramus, Scholarum Metaphysicarum, fo. 9^v.

63 On invention, see Ong, Ramus, Method, 182–3; the Catholic commentators of the University of Coimbra mention that “many think” that “propositions are fashioned (fiant) […] in the imagination (phantasia).” The Conimbricenses, Some Questions on Signs, 107 (Q. 3, Art. 3).

64 Burgersdicius, Idea Philosophiae Naturalis, 73.

65 Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, 140/1 (1a78.4, resp.).

66 Freigius, Quaestiones physicae, 766; on his biography of Ramus, see Ong, Ramus, Method, 17, 37–8; on Lull’s characterisation of “Discretio” as part of memory, see Yates, The Art of Memory, 193.

67 Freigius, Quaestiones physicae, 766.

68 Snellius, Partitiones Physicae, 180.

69 Scribonius, Rerum Physicarum, 99; Cantabrigiensis, Libellus de memoria, sig. A5r–A5v; Beeke and Salazar, The Works of William Perkins, see n19, 527.

70 Perkins offers detailed consideration of astrology in two works: A Fruitfull Dialogue Concerning the End of the World and A Resolution to the Countrey-man; both were published in The Workes of that Famous and Worthy Minister of Christ in the Universitie of Cambridge, M. William Perkins, 3 volumes (London, 1631), vol. 3, 465–77, 653–67.

71 See n21 above.

72 Beeke and Salazar, The Works of William Perkins, 517.

73 Clucas, “In campo fantastico,” 38.

74 Cantabrigiensis, Libellus de memoria, sig. A6^r; see n60 above. Perkins cites Colombo’s anatomical work in his theology; see A Golden Chaine, sig. E1^r.

75 See Kusukawa, The Transformation of Natural Philosophy; on Snellius, “Anatomy and the Body in Renaissance Protestant Psychology,” 353f; on anatomy and scholastic psychology generally, see Edwards, “Body, Soul and Anatomy,” 33–75.

76 On the later Ramist tradition, see Hotson, The Reformation of Common Learning.

77 Cantabrigiensis, Libellus de memoria, sig. A5^v. I have modified slightly the translation found in Beeke and Salazar, The Works of William Perkins, 527.

78 Aquinas, Summa theologiae, vol. 11, 140/1 (1a78.4, resp.).

79 The early modern scholastic philosopher Francisco Suárez claimed that the imagination could form impossible fictitious entities, such as chimeras and tragelaphs, “perhaps never […] without the cooperation of reason”: On Beings of Reason (De Entibus Rationis), Metaphysical Disputation LIV, 79 (§II, ¶18). For discussion, see Doyle, “Beings of Reason and Imagination,” 159ff.

80 Yates, The Art of Memory, 278.

81 Stephen Clucas discusses the evolving historiographical assessment of Bruno in “Simulacra et Signacula,” 251–72.

82 Epistemological differences are summarised in Hatfield, “The Cognitive Faculties,” 954–7.

83 For Ficino’s account of the imagination, see Giglioni, “Coping with Inner and Outer Demons,” 19–51; Cocking, Imagination, 168–94.

84 Cocking, Imagination, 174.

85 For brief discussion, see Hasse, “The Soul’s Faculties,” 317–18.

86 On Bruno’s conception of the imagination, see Mertens, Magic and Memory in Giordano Bruno, 150–217; Storch, “Applied Imagination”; Tirinnanzi, Umbra naturae; Klein, “L’imagination comme vêtement de l’âme chez Marsile Ficin et Giordano Bruno,” 18–39; see also Kearney, The Wake of Imagination, 159–60.

87 Spruit, Il problema della conoscenza in Giordano Bruno, he responds to Yates, 40–54; Gatti, “Bruno’s Natural Philosophy,” 252–3.

88 For Bruno’s theory of intellect, see Spruit, Species Intelligiblis, vol. 2, 205–10; on the intellect(s) in the Islamic tradition, see Marenbon, Medieval Philosophy, 96–7, 111–13, 184–7.

89 See Mertens, Magic and Memory, 174.

90 Spruit, Species Intelligiblis, vol. 2, 210.

91 Bruno, “On Magic,” 138.

92 Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition, 266.

93 Bruno, “On Magic,” 138.

94 On magic and scholasticism more generally, see Copenhaver, Magic in Western Culture, 102–26.

95 See Walker, Spiritual and Demonic Magic, esp. 75–82; Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition, 265–6; Cocking, Imagination, 178–88.

96 Perkins, A Discourse of the Damned Art, 139.

97 E.g. the Jesuit Del Rio, Investigations Into Magic, 38–51.

98 Aquinas, Summa theologiae, vol. 49, 164/5 (3a13.3, ad 3).

99 Copenhaver and Schmitt, Renaissance Philosophy, 295; for Perkins’s inclusion of magic as an idolatrous sin, see A Golden Chaine, sig. G3^v–G5^v.

100 Calvin, Institutes, fo. 20^v (I.XI.8).

101 On Junius, see Muller, Post-Reformation Reformed Dogmatics, 113–15.

102 On the popularity of Ramist method in Reformed theology more generally, see ibid., esp. 62.

103 Junius, De theologia vera, 22 (Ch. 1, Th. 3); cf. Noe, A Treatise on True Theology, 95.

104 Plato, The Republic, 168 (Book VI).

105 Perkins, A Warning Against the Idolatrie of the Last Times, 94 [recto 95].

106 Sibbes, The Soules Conflict with It Selfe, 200.

107 On anti-Catholic polemics more broadly, see, inter alia, Milton, Catholic and Reformed; Lake, “Anti-Popery,” 72–106.

108 Perkins, A Reformed Catholike, 170; cf. Perkins, A Warning, 55.

109 Perkins, Reformed Catholike, 170–2; this last clearly informs graves and memorials along with the visual elements of printed funeral sermons, for which see Yip, “‘The Text and the Occasion Mingled’,” 157–82.

110 Perkins, Reformed Catholike, 172; that Protestants in England did adorn their private homes with religious images is shown by Hamling, Decorating the Godly Household.

111 Perkins, Reformed Catholike, 172, 173; for a similar position in Calvin, see Zachman, Image and Word, 289ff.

112 Perkins, Reformed Catholike, 174–5, 178–9.

113 Ibid., 182–3; Perkins, A Warning, 46.

114 Perkins, A Warning, 18, 4.

115 Perkins, Reformed Catholike, sig. ¶2^v.

116 Ibid., 342.

117 See Aquinas, The De Malo of Thomas Aquinas, 508 (7.3 ad 6); cf. Pasnau, Aquinas, 282.

118 Perkins, A Treatise of Mans Imagination, 34.

119 Perkins, Reformed Catholike, 18–19.

120 Perkins, A Treatise, 21.

121 Perkins, A Warning, 58.

122 Clark, Vanities of the Eye, 168.

123 Mochizuki, The Netherlandish Image after Iconoclasm, 1566-1672.

124 Perkins, A Treatise, 195.

125 See Onofre, “Word and Image in Saint Ignatius of Loyola,” 332–48.

126 Couliano, Eros and Magic, 193, 195.

127 Perkins, Prophetica, sig. G4^r; Perkins, The Whole Treatise, 194.

128 On the thesis, see n18 above; for a positive assessment, see Giglioni, “Who is Afraid of Frances Yates?,” 421–32.

129 For Calvin’s agreement, see Benedict, “Calvinism as a Culture?,” 32.

130 See Collinson, From Iconoclasm to Iconophobia; and the refutation, Watts, Cheap Print and Popular Piety, 1550-1640, 136–9; see also Morton, “Images and the Senses in Post-Reformation England,” 77–100.

131 Similarly, Miller’s insistence that “The Puritan Aesthetic […] begins with the Ramist assumption of a natural order” (The New England Mind, 340); it is unclear whether this, likewise, mars Catherine Randall’s work, which mentions Ramus only twice; Building Codes, 96, 98. Randal Carter Working’s account of Reformed aesthetics makes no reference to Ramism, yet it, too, perpetuates the unspecified notion “of Calvin’s antipathy even for mental images,” (The Visual Theology of the Huguenots, 4).