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5th Biennial Conference of the Swiss Association of Medieval and Early Modern English Studies

Plenaries

Head

 

Prof. Brian Cummings (University of York):

The Cult of Images & the Cult of Books

Iconoclasm and idolatry are often discussed in isolation as a phenomenon within the visual culture of images. However, both an attack on images and their vindication occur in relation to the parallel status of the verbal culture of books. The critique of the cult of images, before and after the Reformation, decreed that the image is to be beheld ‘as one looketh upon a book’. This phrase suggest a clear division between books and images. This is repeated by modern historians of the Reformation, who sometimes write as if the Reformers straightforwardly succeeded in replacing images with books. This has also been evident, paradoxically, on the other side, with Catholic revisionism reclaiming the world of images and decrying the dogmatic literalism of the Protestants. In this paper I will attempt to refute this. Not because the division is of no significance: rather, because iconophobes and bibliophiles, iconophiles and bibliophobes, together found it difficult either to recognise or to negotiate the material and semiotic boundaries between image and book.

 

Prof. Andrew Morrall (Bard Graduate Center, New York):

'On the Picture of King Charles I…written in Psalms.' Devotion, Memory and the Micrographic Portrait

The focus of this talk is a portrait drawing of King Charles I that has been in the possession of St. John’s College, Oxford, the college of Archbishop Laud, since at least 1664, the date of the first surviving reference to it. The drawing is unusual in that the lines of the face, hair, beard, and details of clothing are made up of minutely written words. Today all but illegible, they were reported by early commentators to contain, variously, the Book of Psalms, or the Penitential Psalms.

Though the maker and the circumstances of the drawing’s acquisition are unknown, its character as a micrographic portrait that associates Charles I with the Psalms of King David relates it to the often “curious” nature of many memorials to the king associated with his posthumous cult, as well as to that most popular of all commemorative items, the literary “self portrait” of the martyred king, the Eikon Basilike. The Poutraicture of His Sacred Maiestie in His Solitudes and Sufferings.

Using the evidence of a poem, written as a response to the portrait in 1665, the talk will consider how the portrait functioned as an object of explicitly Protestant devotion and commemoration. It will set the work within a broad tradition of micrography in Protestant visual imagery, a kind of art that could sanction, without fear of idolatry, a form of quasi-devotional contemplation of an image, by the fact that it was formed from words.

The last part of the talk will follow a chain of responses to the drawing under different viewing conditions and altered cultural circumstances between the 1660s and the early eighteenth century, to demonstrate an inherent instability and contingency of meaning that attached to the image in the half-century after Charles ‘s execution.

 

Prof. Alexandra Walsham (University of Cambridge):

‘Down with Dagon: The Art of Iconoclasm and the Afterlife of the English Reformation’

This paper will investigate a category of Protestant art that appears to be inherently paradoxical: graphic images of acts of iconoclasm. It will focus attention on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century depictions of the destruction of idols and analyse their significance for our understanding of reformed visual culture – a culture that it is increasingly apparent can no longer be characterised as intrinsically allergic to iconography of any kind. Exploiting the insights of sophisticated recent work on symbolic violence across early modern Europe, it will examine a selection of engravings, prints and paintings of both biblical and contemporary iconoclasm; ask why Protestants might wish to depict these rites of oblivion; and consider the purposes such pictures served in a post-Reformation society that remained fraught with anxiety about the dangers of sight as a stimulus to spiritual fornication. In particular, it will situate these images in a context in which people were torn between a desire to extinguish all memory of medieval ‘monuments of superstition and idolatry’ and an impulse to preserve mutilated traces of them as a memorial and trophy of their defeat and eradication. It will juxtapose them with defaced images and broken objects that survived the Reformation and trace how these gradually changed their meaning over time. Approaching image-making and image-breaking as intrinsically linked cultural practices, the paper will consider the iconoclasm of art alongside the art of iconoclasm. It will also suggest that they illuminate the evolution of a distinctively Protestant commemorative culture and the process by which England and Europe’s prolonged, tangled and complex Reformations came to be remembered as an historic event.

 

Prof. Nicolette Zeeman (University of Cambridge):

Theory Transposed: Chivalric Images and Idols

This paper is part of a larger project reflecting on how the very sophisticated theories about image use and abuse that were developed within the medieval church might have been appropriated and reworked in secular culture as a way of thinking about selfhood, embodiment and interiority. The larger claim of the project is that the notion of the idol is deeply imbricated not just within the religious but also the secular culture of the Middle Ages.

Drawing on the very rich body of Judaic and Christian thought and iconography associated with the pagan idol I propose to explore the figure of the medieval knight, as portrayed in contemporary images, artefacts and texts – focusing in particular on French Arthurian prose romance and Malory’s Morte Darthur.  I will be interested in the ‘unreadable’ image of the visored and faceless knight, but also the strangely idol-like iconography of much medieval heraldry, a visual sign system that claimed to be readable but which was also in many respects highly opaque. This will lead to some claims about the underlying ethos of Arthurian romance and the way that it explores questions of embodied identity via the figure of the armoured knight and his insignia; these will be illustrated with readings of the mechanics of recognition and ‘going unknown’ in the Morte Darthur.