This concluding post to our After Iconophobia Online Symposium comes from Jonathan Willis, monster-head and Senior Lecturer in Early Modern History in the Department of History at the University of Birmingham.  Jonathan is a reformation historian who has worked on the musical and material cultures of the English parish church, in his Church Music and Protestantism in Post-Reformation England and in his forthcoming book The Reformation of the Decalogue.  Here he reflects on Collinson’s article, its influence, its relevance, and some of the challenges it still presents.

Collinson’s original lecture, which posited a shift in Protestant attitudes to religious imagery, music and drama around the year c.1580 from creative engagement (his idiosyncratic definition of ‘iconoclasm’) to ideological disengagement (‘iconophobia’) presents three challenges to historians.  Well, it probably presents more than three, but there are three in particular that I want to focus on here…

The first challenge, and the one which has been taken up and answered with the most gusto, in the contributions to this symposium as well as in the scholarship more broadly, has been to disprove the notion of a shift to ‘iconophobia’ through the identification and presentation of concrete counter-examples.  Religious imagery, religious music and religious drama did not cease to exist c.1580.  It is worth pointing out at this juncture that Collinson’s article (perhaps unsurprisingly) stands up much better today upon re-reading than I had anticipated.  Much of what people have challenged him on, he doesn’t actually claim.  He doesn’t speak about religious music in general, for example; just godly ballads.  He doesn’t speak about pictorial art in general, and explicitly rules out domestic decoration from consideration.  His claims and evidence are much more limited than they are often taken to be, and therefore in a narrow sense they remain more or less correct. Continue reading →

This post in our After Iconophobia Online Symposium comes from Alec Ryrie, Professor in the Department of Theology and Religion at Durham University.  Alec has expertise and has published widely in a variety of areas pusuant to the history of the English reformation, including Being Protestant in Reformation Britain. Here he offers some historiographical reflections on Collinson’s Stenton lecture and the model of doing history which it offers.

The consensus view of the workshop was that significant parts of Collinson’s argument in this lecture were, simply, wrong; but also that they were fascinatingly, provocatively and fruitfully wrong. Pieces of this kind appear periodically in historical scholarship: powerful arguments which do not necessarily command any kind of assent, but which unsettle and stimulate a wide range of scholars and end up advancing an entire field. We can all come up with a short list of works of this kind. They are a very useful part of the scholarly ecosystem. My question is, how do we encourage this kind of work? And I ask not least because I fear that it is becoming less common than once it was.

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This post in our After Iconophobia Online Symposium comes from Ian Green, Honorary Professorial Fellow in the School for History, Classics and Archaeology at the University of Edinburgh.  Ian has expertise and has published widely in a variety of fields, including early modern print, education and domestic devotion.  Here he reflects upon some of the most fertile areas of future research in further refining our sense of the relationship between mature Protestantism and graphic depictions in visual and material cultures.

As Eamon Duffy and others have shown, the iconoclasts of the mid-16^th century destroyed much of the splendour and symbolism of the late medieval church, and as Patrick Collinson suggested, some of the leaders of the second phase of the Reformation in the late 16^th century wanted to narrow the range of religious imagery even further. But not only is it open to question whether these ‘iconophobes’ were sufficiently well-placed or organized to bring about the decisive further shift in English culture that Pat thought he could detect, but also it may be suggested that the impact of iconoclasm in mid-Tudor England had not been as severe as in Reformed churches abroad or in Scotland. This was partly because the English authorities deployed a narrower definition of idolatry, and partly because at all levels of clergy and laity there appears to have been a reluctance to go beyond the bare minimum of destruction authorized, especially if the offending objects were hard to reach or expensive to replace. As a result a significant proportion of fittings, decorations and monuments were left alone until the 1640s, or even the 19^th century and beyond, as in the ‘Shakespeare church’, Holy Trinity, Stratford-upon-Avon, which has two 15^th-century images of Christ, scores of angels, and symbols such as the three nails used to crucify Christ, and the five stigmata of the wounds he received. Continue reading →

This post in our After Iconophobia Online Symposium comes from Susan Orlik, a PhD student based in the University of Birmingham’s Department of History.  Susan is working with Tara Hamling and Jonathan Willis on the changing material culture of the English parish church, c.1560-1640.  Here she reflects upon the implications of a close case study of the Somerset parish of Somerton for Collinson’s ‘iconophobia’ thesis.

Over the last thirty years scholars have challenged Patrick Collinson’s generalised arguments on iconophobia, which he laid out in his famous 1985 Stenton lecture, and then developed in The Birthpangs of Protestant England in 1988. In the book he used the famous phrase ‘severe visual anorexia’ to describe the absence of the visual.[i] Recently the rich material evidence from local parish churches has been used to challenge his view and provide a more nuanced perspective about the visual.

Somerton in Somerset provides such rich material evidence. It has an inscribed and coloured pulpit of 1615 and a carved communion table of 1626 with some rare images on its bulbous legs. The material evidence is matched here by informative Churchwardens’ accounts: these tell of the Churchwardens raising an annual rate and also raising an additional rate for a specific purpose. In 1615 the additional rate was levied ‘for and towards the building of the new pulpit and repayeringe of defects about the church’. The octagonal pulpit has the date on it, as well as an elaborately decorated cornice with a frieze of flowers and leaves. Continue reading →

This post in our After Iconophobia Online Symposium comes from Malcolm Jones, former senior lecturer in the Department of English Language and Linguistics at the University of Sheffield, and author of The Print in Early Modern England.  Malcolm also has more than 70 Pinterest boards with examples of early modern visual culture.  Here he reflects upon the implications that surviving single-sheet prints in the period c.1580-c.1620 have for Collinson’s ‘iconoclasm to iconophobia’ thesis.

When first I came across Patrick Collinson’s statement in From Iconoclasm to Iconophobia, that by ‘iconophobia’, in the period c.1580-c.1620,[1] his ‘Second Reformation’, he intended, “the total repudiation of all images” (p.8), I was non-plussed, but I assume he meant “the total repudiation of all religious images”, or “of all overtly representational religious images”, or something along those lines, rather than a quasi-Islamic ban on all representational imagery in those decades, and I have proceeded on that understanding.

His meaning is perhaps clarified in the final section of his lecture which is devoted to “pictorial art and its creeping disappearance as a means of communicating religious knowledge and arousing moral virtue”, but even here he specifically excludes from consideration emblems, and “secular didactic, decorative, ceremonial and heraldic” art (p.22).  By apparently ruling out of consideration ‘decorative’ art, he thus glosses over the entire wealth of religious imagery which Tara Hamling has recently brought to our attention in “Decorating the ‘Godly’ Household”.

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