Broken Idols of the English Reformation is the much anticipated companion volume to the late Margaret Aston’s England’s Iconoclasts (1988). Decades in the writing, and weighing in at more than a thousand pages, it is a suitably magisterial culmination of the work of a scholar who has done much to illuminate the complex, fascinating history of early English Protestantism’s obsession with idolatry and its eradication. It charts the principles behind, the implementation of, and in part the resistance to iconoclasm in all its forms through what Aston terms England’s “long Reformation”, stretching from the late 14th century to the English Civil War.
One might, perhaps, object that the notion of a “long Reformation” suggests too great a degree of continuity to a period characterised more by contingency, diversity and startling shifts in religious policy than steady development or patient, incremental change. But what Aston charts with forensic skill is just how central was the urge to destroy the “idols” of traditional Catholicism to the agendas of diverse groups and administrations through this extended period of time.
The zeal to purify belief through the eradication of imagery rests, of course, on biblical injunctions to destroy false idols, not only in the Second Commandment, but also in texts such as Deuteronomy 7:15 (“Ye shall destroy their altars, and break down their images, and cut down their groves, and burn their graven images with fire”) and Exodus 32:30 (“and he [Moses] took the calf which they had made and burnt it in the fire, and ground it into powder, and strawed it upon the water, and made the children of Israel drink of it”). But what looks at first a simple injunction to purge and purify gave rise to infinite anxieties, ambiguities and debate.
What exactly counted as an idol, ripe for destruction? Most (but significantly not all) advanced reformers agreed that the great roods in the east ends of churches with their figures of the Virgin and St John counted, as did the painted and carved images of saints in side chapels and on rood screens. But what about the rood lofts and the chancels that separated the altar from the congregation, the vestments worn by the clergy or the very church building itself? Reformers disputed over how far the injunction to cleanse the church might go, and successive royal administrations, with greater or lesser enthusiasm for the fight, struggled to give structure to the process and keep order in the parishes.
Aston tells the story of successive waves of official, semi-official and decidedly unofficial destruction with verve, and an impressive command of the details of both central politics and local responses, charting, for example, how “in 1547 and again in 1549, immeasurable swathes of church images were swept away out of churches in the course of Edward VI and Elizabeth’s royal visitations, leaving behind, in the royal arms set over the entrance to the chancel, in place of the image of Christ and the rood, demonstrative evidence of the royal authority behind this transformed ecclesiastical world”. More fortunate than those images carved from portable wooden or readily defaceable stone, at least in the first waves of destruction, were the images in stained-glass windows.
As Aston shows in one of her central chapters, it was in great part practical considerations that meant the destruction of windows was never undertaken with the same conviction or official sanction. So they survived long enough to come back into ecclesiastical fashion in the early 17th century, when Laudianism, with its renewed attention to the beauty of holiness found them once more useful as biblia pauporum, books in which the poor and illiterate might read the truths of their faith.
The idea that, during the reformations of the Tudor century, the Word forcibly replaced the Image as the central vehicle for truth, and the ear replaced the eye as the principle organ of religious engagement, is a scholarly commonplace. But Aston demonstrates things were never quite that simple.
The Elizabethan reforms envisaged a reformation of both eye and ear, replacing colour and image with whitewashed walls and the printed text, but also redirecting ears and mouths from organ music and plainsong to psalm-singing and sermons. And even the plain interiors of the reformed churches were not without their sensual pleasures. Later generations were to discover that “the beauty of bareness, of white walls flooded by bright light streaming in through clear glass, [could]… come to seem inspiring as well as homely”.
Aston is particularly good on what seems to have been a peculiarly English preoccupation with destruction by fire, “designed to cauterise on hearts and minds the incapacity of revered material objects to save either themselves or their votaries”. And she draws out elegantly the potentially disabling paradox at the heart of the iconoclastic impulse itself.
Its ambitious objective was not simply to disable previous practice, but to obliterate all recollection of the old ways from the hearts and minds of believers. Hence Henry VIII demanded that the Pope’s name was to be “utterly abolished, eradicated and erased out” of service books and prayers, so that his “name and memory for evermore…may be extinct, suppressed and obscured”, and images, where possible, were not simply to be defaced, but pulled down, smashed, and (in explicit imitation of Moses) ground to powder. And yet, also crucial to the reformers’ project and self-image was their status as the destroyers of these idols, the zealous successors of Moses, Josiah, and Asa, and the need to maintain the impetus for further, deeper purification of the church. Hence they had continually to revisit the seminal acts of destruction in sermons, tracts and speeches. The feckless people could not be allowed entirely to forget their former follies, lest they lapsed back into idolatry once more.
Like Banquo’s ghost, idolatry could never be entirely banished from the cultural memory. Half-smashed images like those in the Lady Chapel of Ely Cathedral were thus able to do double work, symbolising for reformers both victories won and struggles still ahead, but offering for more conservative souls plaintive reminders of the world they had lost, “bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang”.
What were the longer-term implications of this early modern war on images? Did the banishing of art from churches lead to a greater willingness to read the divine in that other great text, the book of the natural world, paving the way for Romanticism with its sense of the sublime in mountains and monuments, rivers and ruins? Did it reduce the tendency to seek truth in the mystical in favour of rational and scientific routes to wisdom? Aston raises these possibilities, but is wisely tentative in her conclusions. But the fine detail as well as the magisterial breadth of this study more than sufficiently chart the cultural energies that were both invested in and released by the iconoclasms of England’s centuries of confessional struggle.
• Greg Walker is the Regius professor of rhetoric and English literature at the University of Edinburgh
Broken Idols of the English Reformation
Margaret Aston
Cambridge University Press, 1,109pp, £120 (hb)