This post in our After Iconophobia Online Symposium comes from Laura Sangha, fellow monster-head and Lecturer in the Department of History at the University of Exeter. Laura’s first monograph was on Angels and Belief in England 1480-1700, and she is currently working on the pious Leeds antiquarian and diarist Ralph Thoresby. Here she reflects upon the relationship between Protestants and Images in the latter part of the seventeeth century.
In this blog post I draw on Patrick Collinson’s article to reflect on my own research into the life and times of the devout antiquarian, Ralph Thoresby (1658-1725), posing a series of questions for readers. In particular the post considers what happens after iconophobia, in the context of the ‘long Reformation’, and it reconsiders the functions of images in post-Reformation England.
1) The Second English Reformation/ and the rest
In ‘iconoclasm’, Patrick Collinson made the continuing development of religious cultures and the aging of the evangelical movement a headline. Continue reading
I began my undergraduate career convinced that I wanted to be a historian, but entirely unsure which bit of the past I should dedicate my life to unlocking. Patrick Collinson’s Birthpangs of Protestant England (1988) – of which a revised version of his Stenton Lecture From Iconoclasm to Iconophobia (1986) formed a part – was one of four books (the others being John Bossy’s Christianity in the West (1985), Robert Scribner’s For the Sake of Simple Folk (1981) and Alexandra Walsham’s Providence in Early Modern England (1999)) which convinced me that the Reformation was the thing for me. In each case I became so absorbed in reading them that all sense of time lapsed. I emerged from their pages to discover that day had become night and in one instance a grumpy porter had to inform me rather briskly that the library was now closing. Such was their power that over a decade later I can still remember exactly where in the Morrell Library at the University of York I was sitting when I first encountered each author: remarkable experiences in an otherwise unremarkable building.
In 1985, Patrick Collinson delivered Reading University’s Stenton lecture on the topic ‘From Iconoclasm to Iconophobia: the Cultural Impact of the Second English Reformation.’ More than thiry years on, this essay (published in pamphlet form in 1986 and in revised form as Chapter 4 of The Birthpangs of Protestant England) has gone on to shape a generation of scholarly enquiry into the impact of religion on culture, and of culture on religion, in post-reformation England. Scholars have accepted, rejected, and modified Collinson’s arguments, but one way or another they continue to exert a powerful influence over reformation studies today.
the many-headed monster 