Illustrated Religious Texts in the North of Europe, 1500-1800

Feike Dietz,Adam Morton,Lien Roggen, Els Stronks

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781351928939
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Publishing
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

In recent years many historians have argued that the Reformation did not - as previously thought - hamper the development of Northern European visual culture, but rather gave new impetus to the production, diffusion and reception of visual materials in both Catholic and Protestant milieus. This book investigates the crosscurrents of exchange in the realm of illustrated religious literature within and beyond confessional and national borders, and against the background of recent insights into the importance of, on the one hand material, as well as on the other hand, sensual and emotional aspects of early modern culture. Each chapter in the volume helps illuminate early modern religious culture from the perspective of the production of illustrated religious texts - to see the book as object, a point at which various vectors of early modern society met. Case studies, together with theoretical contributions, shed light on the ways in which illustrated religious books functioned in evolving societies, by analysing the use, re-use and sharing of illustrated religious texts in England, France, the Low Countries, the German States, and Switzerland. Interpretations based on points of material interaction show us how the most basic binaries of the early modern world - Catholic and Protestant, word and image, public and private - were disrupted and negotiated in the realm of the illustrated religious book. Through this approach, the volume expands the historical appreciation of the place of imagery in post-Reformation Europe.

PART I
Crosscurrents in Ideologies and Motives

Chapter 1
Idols in the Frontispiece? Illustrating Religious Books in the Age of Iconoclasm

Alexandra Walsham

In 1606, anthony Wootton published a dense and learned Defence of the puritan divine William perkins’s A Reformed Catholike (1598), in the wake of the violent assault recently launched against it by the Roman Catholic controversialist William Bishop. Wootton’s lengthy line-by-line refutation of Bishop’s book contains two intriguing illustrations. One (apparently from a fifteenth-century book of hours) shows the Virgin and child surrounded by angels and carries the imprimatur of the papal coat of arms. The text indicates that Sixtus IV had granted 11,000 years of pardon to those who recited a prayer before it. The second is a facsimile of the measure of Our Lady’s Foot with a Spanish inscription written across the middle (Figure 1.1 below). By order of a bull of John XXII, devout believers who kissed this pattern and said the Ave Maria three times earned 700 years of indulgence. In a context in which Church of England bishops and officials regarded items of this kind as incriminating marks of popish superstition and dissidence, and in which they were actively seizing, confiscating and burning them on bonfires of vanities, the reproduction of these indulgenced medieval images seems, at first sight, surprising and puzzling.¹ What exactly are these Catholic devotional pictures doing in a polemical tract vehemently denouncing the religious institution that engendered them? What do they reveal about the visual culture of post-Reformation England and about the illustration of European religious books in an age of iconoclasm?

The images in Wootton’s book are emblematic of the complex theological, social, political and international cross-currents that are the subject of this volume. This chapter provides a synoptic overview of current research on this topic, focusing largely upon sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England. It surveys the insights that have emerged from recent work and identifies interpretative trends that are reshaping our understanding of early modern iconography.

Figure 1.1 Spanish printed image of the Virgin’s foot, reproduced for refutation in Antony Wootton, A defence of M. Perkins booke, called A Reformed Catholike: against the cavils of a popish writer, one D.B.P., or WB. in his Deformed Reformation (London, 1606), p. 390

The Reformation and the History of Visual Culture

Until fairly recently historians regarded the very concept of a Protestant picture as something of an anomaly. It has long been a commonplace that Protestantism’s deep antipathy towards idolatry and far-reaching and literalist interpretation of the second commandment made it an implacable enemy of artistic representation. Ruthlessly purging parish churches and cathedrals of ‘superstitious’ and ‘popish’ images, the reformers are said to have nurtured an extreme allergy to images and created iconophobic societies – societies that suffered, in the memorable words of the late Patrick Collinson, from severe ‘visual anorexia’.² The Reformation has also been widely credited with facilitating a decisive shift from a religious culture reliant on affective images to a logocentric culture centred upon the bare letter of Scripture, and with effecting a transition from the eye to the ear as the primary medium of religious instruction and experience.³ calvinism in particular has been seen as a major catalyst of processes that drove an enduring wedge between religion and the visual arts. Keith Thomas has recently reiterated the argument that it was critical in demarcating art as an autonomous and essentially secular activity and in severing the connection between aesthetics and spirituality.⁴

The longstanding neglect of the iconography that emanated from Protestant Europe is partly a function of the assumption that pictures were a rare species in countries that embraced the theology of the Swiss Reformation. But it has been compounded by three other factors and tendencies. First, it is a function of the disciplinary conventions and priorities of an older generation of art historians, whose scholarly activity centred on a small canon of works by artists of acknowledged genius. constrained with a narrow paradigm of patron-client relations, scholars were often confined to tracing stylistic and technical developments and tracking delicate patterns of echo and influence. Such scholars were somewhat condescending towards the vast mass of early modern visual culture, which they regarded as naïve, unsophisticated and merely utilitarian. Perpetuating criteria for judging excellence that are themselves historically contingent, they devoted attention to paintings and engravings of ‘high quality’ at the expense of the ‘cruder’ woodcuts, mostly anonymous, which adorn the pages of many early modern books. The traditional preoccupation with originality and the denigration of imitation, copying and reuse as forms of ‘plagiarism’ has had no less distorting effects. In the case of England, these tendencies have been compounded by convictions about the inferiority of its craftsmen in comparison with their Continental counterparts, especially those from the Netherlands and the Germany of the Cranachs and Dürer, from whom they borrowed shamelessly and without acknowledgement. England has frequently been viewed as an artistic backwater, indebted to foreign and emigré woodblock makers and engravers, some of whom became key figures in the London print trade. The output of native producers, by contrast, was dismissed as second rate and disparaged with the adjective ‘vernacular’. The Reformation allegedly impoverished and stultified the development of indigenous book illustration yet further.⁵ The very tendency to blame reformed Protestantism for impeding the progress of ‘art’ is an index of modern sacralization of that category, as Philip Benedict has observed.⁶

The second factor is the reluctance of mainstream historians to employ images as sources for understanding the past. Internalizing the iconosceptic rhetoric of reformers themselves they have prioritized texts as evidence. They have seen visual material as the poor relation of written documents and trusted in the latter as the authentic record. As Roy Porter remarked, they have placed their ‘faith in the plain speaking literalness of the word’. In this sense, historians have been ‘latter-day iconoclasts’ and iconophobes, blind to the potential of images to illuminate early modern culture. Where they have used them, they have regarded them as secondary and subordinate to the text, as merely ornamental and referential. In this respect, modern academic history has replicated the prejudices of the era under consideration itself. Attitudes forged in the crucible of early modern debates about idolatry have proved remarkably resilient and linger in the modern disciplines of history and art history.⁷ Indeed, James Simpson has provocatively argued that the Enlightenment categories of art, taste and the aesthetic are themselves indebted to the Reformation discourse of iconoclasm: they neutralize the image, legitimize its contemplation, and provide a ‘place of asylum’.⁸

The third factor that has inhibited full investigation of images is their haphazard survival and uneven preservation. Many early modern pictures (especially those on ballads and catchpenny topical pamphlets) were highly ephemeral and ended up as waste paper, being redeployed for other purposes, or flushed down the privy. Finer etchings and engravings were more likely to be retained by purchasers and acquired by later collectors, whose values and preoccupations shaped what they kept for posterity. Modern print collections and picture libraries enshrine hierarchies of taste and skill in ways that make them unrepresentative of early modern visual culture in its entirety. Furthermore, the items that comprise them have often been detached and dislocated from the original contexts (and texts) within which they were devised, viewed and used.⁹

Over the last three decades, however, significant changes have occurred that have transformed the study of images in general, and book illustration in particular. Interdisciplinary tendencies in scholarship have brought the objectives of historians and art historians into closer harmony and proximity – they have become united by a fresh recognition that, far from an autonomous realm transcending time, art is a social and political construct and by shared interest in how pictures circulated and operated in the historical environments from which they emerged.¹⁰ Inspired by Michael Baxandall’s work on the ‘period eye’, they have become more sensitive to the cultural specificity of cognitive practices, moved beyond simple iconographical analysis, and focused growing attention on the ‘mental equipment’ by which contemporaries apprehended images – on the critical nexus between vision and knowledge.¹¹ Important interventions by Ulinka Rublack, Ludmilla Jordanova and others are challenging us to integrate visual evidence more systematically into the heart of historical analysis, and to display deeper sensitivity to ‘the look of the past’.¹² This has converged with the growing concern of literary critics and bibliographers with the ‘materiality’ of texts and with their significance as artefacts, as well as vessels of thought.¹³

Furthermore, recent research has significantly revised ingrained assumptions about the relationship between the Protestant Reformation and pictorial modes of representation and communication. The iconoclastic violence that accompanied the religious upheavals of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries fundamentally altered the climate in which image-making occurred, and it cannot be ignored; but it is increasingly clear that the impact of reformed theology in the sphere of art was...