Download PDF | Shannon Gayk - Image, Text, and Religious Reform in Fifteenth-Century England-Cambridge University Press (2010).
268 Pages
Focusing on the period between the Wycliffite critique of images and Reformation iconoclasm, Shannon Gayk investigates the sometimes complementary and sometimes fraught relationship between vernacular devotional writing and the religious image. #e study examines how a set of fifteenth-century writers, including Lollard authors, John Lydgate, #omas Hoccleve, John Capgrave, and Reginald Pecock, translated complex clerical debates about the pedagogical and spiritual efficacy of images and texts into vernacular settings and literary forms. #ese authors found vernacular discourse to be a powerful medium for explaining and reforming contemporary understandings of visual experience. In its survey of the function of literary images and imagination, the epistemology of vision, the semiotics of idols, and the authority of written texts, this study reveals a fifteenth century that was as much an age of religious and literary exploration, experimentation, and reform as it was an age of regulation.
Shannon Gayk is Assistant Professor of English at Indiana University
Introduction:
reformations of the image Images and books have long been considered parallel modes of representation. Etymologically, “iconography” is to write with images. Classical authors and Renaissance poets alike appealed to and contested the Horatian literary formulation of ut pictura poesis (as is painting so is poetry). "roughout the Middle Ages, clerics often justified images as libri laicorum, or books for the laity. Early modern writers spoke of the sisterhood of the arts. And today we speak of “reading” images and of “visual literacy”; we ask our students to consider the imagery of poems; we may even utter the cliché that “a picture paints a thousand words.”
Yet our muddled metaphors speak both to the surface sameness of and the underlying tension between these two modes of signification: even as we equate the two media, we know that images are not books, that seeing is quite different from hearing. Just as deeply held as our analogical association of image and word is our understanding that we must differentiate between the two types of signs. And indeed, attempts to understand the sometimes fraught sisterhood of visual and verbal signs have a long history. It is the purpose of this book to explore a set of English theorizations of this relationship in the fifteenth century. Although religious images have never been without their critics, the end of the fourteenth century marked a significant shift in the language and audience of these critiques in England: for the first time, arguments against images were being put forth by lay men and women in the vernacular.
"e Lollard support of vernacular religious texts and critique of images made what had hitherto been Latinate, academic debates accessible to lay audiences and recast the image/text relationship as one of competition rather than complement. Many of these writers suggested that if vernacular books were available to the increasingly literate laity, there would be little need for visual “books,” which could be easily misconstrued and improperly venerated. Moreover, growing lay literacy and a religious atmosphere grounded in affective and incarnational theologies exerted pressure on traditional justifications of images as libri laicorum. "e convergence of these cultural changes and new ideas raised a host of questions: How are images different from words? What role would the image play in a society in which the word was the preferred or dominant mode of religious teaching? Would images in this society merely be superfluous? Which sorts of signs are easiest for a layperson to interpret? Many clerics rushed to defend the use of images as substitutes for books, and a number of written apologetics for visual culture appeared in the opening decades of the fifteenth century in both Latin and English. One such defense is found in the early fifteenth-century catechetical dialogue, Dives and Pauper. When Dives inquires about the purposes of images, Pauper first answers: Þey seruyn of thre thyngys. For þey been ordeynyd to steryn manys mende to thynkyn of Cristys incarnacioun and of his passioun and of holye seyntys lyuys. Also þey been ordeynyd to steryn mannys affeccioun and his herte to deuocioun, for often man is more steryd be syghte þan be heryng or redyngge. Also þey been ordeynyd to been a tokene and a book to þe lewyd peple, þat þey moun redyn in ymagerye and peynture þat clerkys redyn in boke.
As we will see, Pauper is parroting the most commonplace argument for image use in the period. More remarkable is Dives’ subsequent question; he immediately asks about the last of these points: How do I read this book? "at he poses the question (and will do so multiple times) suggests that the centuries-old defense of images as libri laicorum was no longer as transparent as the medieval church had assumed. Dives was not alone in raising this question; writings about image use in the following century attempt to answer it again and again. "is book takes up the question as well, examining the collaboration and competition between visual and verbal signs in the century or so between the Lollard critiques of images and the Protestant destruction of them, and asking how fifteenth-century writers responded to Dives’ question. It is not my intent to chart a linear narrative from Lollard iconomachy to Protestant iconoclasm, nor from images to books as the preferred medium for lay education. "e story is, of course, rather more complex and circuitous than such an account would allow. "e multiplicity of voices and positions represented in the chapters that follow suggests that while many in the fifteenth-century church were committed to reforming the use of images, they do not speak in unison on this issue.
My discussion focuses on late medieval England where the issues were most hotly debated, but many contemporary continental theologians also expressed concern about the proliferation of cult images and their misuse by the laypeople, raising these issues at the Council of Constance in –. Indeed, most of the texts I consider are written by clerics and reflect the English church’s new commitment to the ecclesiastical reforms advocated by the Council and implemented in England under the archbishopric of Henry Chichele (–). &e texts herein suggest that the fifteenth century was as much an age of religious reform as it was an age of regulation and that the religious image was an important subject of reformist interest. &e reader will likely soon notice that this is a book about “the image” without any images. &is absence is quite intentional. First and foremost, this book examines ideas about the religious image – about its uses, abuses, potential, and problems – rather than images themselves. &e writers I consider theorize the image in all its forms (textual, mental, physical), though most begin with the material, devotional object.
&us, throughout the book, I use the word “image” as expansively as many of these authors do, to evoke first the material images called into question by many Lollard writers, but also to acknowledge the chameleon quality of the image. Second, the writers herein largely use words to frame, describe, and explain images – sometimes to the point of eliminating the need for the image at all. In other words, they translate, or re-form, visual libri laicorum into verbal ones. Although my discussion focuses on representations of the image, it is important that these re-presentations are also re-formations insofar as they first convert one form (the visual image) into another (the verbal image), and second, do so to reform (in the theological sense) perception of images with vernacular texts. In this book, I thus use the term quite literally: to reform is simply to form again. But it is also to renew, restore, or amend.
By modeling the appropriate uses of images in vernacular texts, the writers I consider seek to amend the image or at least its reception. &ey seek to reform both the image itself and the image’s audience. Reform is always both theological and aesthetic. If these fifteenth-century attempts to reform the image suggest renovation rather than demolition of the images they consider, the historical irony is that these texts are now largely imageless. Just as the walls of churches were whitewashed and covered over with verses of scripture in the sixteenth century, so too do many medieval images remain only in the words that circumscribe and describe them. And, in conveying clerical debates about the image in verbal books for the laity, these considerations of the visual image both embody and obscure the conflict over the status of the vernacular text. &ey speak to the close relationship between images and texts but also the growing distance between them as pedagogical media.
"e tension between religious images and texts, however, has been relatively neglected in scholarly discussion of late medieval piety, which has directed our attention largely to the essential parity or complementarities of visual and verbal signs. "us scholars often emphasize how late medieval image and text alike are characterized by what Gail Gibson has helpfully called the “incarnational aesthetic” of the period. Much recent work on the period’s vernacular theology has focused on the relationship between the vernacular and corporeal, radical, and affective forms of religious practice and understanding. It thus emphasizes “the image and/or relic’s power to move.” Because the heterodox critique of material signs and the privileging of the written word is frequently considered marginal to the general tenor of the period and therefore not a significant theological or aesthetic influence on late medieval religious writing, scholars have often approached late medieval vernacular texts and devotional images in this period as complementary forms, seeing both as indicative of the affectivity and corporeality of this governing aesthetic. "is book builds on but ultimately diverges from this recent work and suggests that much fifteenth-century writing in the vernacular is marked by a concern for the regulation and reformation of affective, visual experience.
To this end, I offer new readings of a set of some of the most important and prolific fifteenth-century theologians and poets whose work has previously been understood as dully orthodox, conservative, and even propagandistic. I argue that this writing is characterized by a reformist aesthetic that is in conversation with late medieval forms of visual piety and heterodox critiques of that piety and that is indebted to philosophical discourses, ecclesiastical hermeneutics, medieval historiography, and bureaucratic writ. "is book thus considers fifteenth-century writing as literature in its own right, measuring its value neither by its conformity to Chaucerian verse nor by its ability to foreshadow Renaissance humanism, but rather reading it as a considered (if often ambivalent) literary intervention in its own distinctive cultural situation. I argue that many fifteenth-century religious writers, while understanding the power and value of visual representation, also find in vernacular discourse a textual means of reforming the lay response to and use of devotional images.
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