Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- List of abbreviations
- Introduction: reformations of the image
- 1 Lollard iconographies
- 2 Thomas Hoccleve's spectacles
- 3 John Lydgate's refigurations of the image
- 4 John Capgrave's material memorials
- 5 Reginald Pecock's libri laicorum
- Epilogue: words for images
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
- CAMBRIDGE STUDIES IN MEDIEVAL LITERATURE
Epilogue: words for images
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 17 November 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- List of abbreviations
- Introduction: reformations of the image
- 1 Lollard iconographies
- 2 Thomas Hoccleve's spectacles
- 3 John Lydgate's refigurations of the image
- 4 John Capgrave's material memorials
- 5 Reginald Pecock's libri laicorum
- Epilogue: words for images
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
- CAMBRIDGE STUDIES IN MEDIEVAL LITERATURE
Summary
Although Pecock's defenses of images in the 1450s represent the last extended discussion of image use in English before the Protestant Reformation, the issue continued to be a contested one in the final years of the fifteenth century. Heresy trials from this period provide an especially rich source of evidence for the continued debate. When Richard Heghan was questioned about his beliefs in a heresy trial in Coventry in March of 1486, he explained that it is better to give money to the poor than to images of Christ and the saints, which he describes as nothing more than lifeless wood and stones. To emphasize the sheer materiality of a local cult image of Mary, he added that if it “were set alight, it would make a good fire.” Robert Falks, another suspect at Coventry, stressed the absurdity of venerating the image of Mary by boasting that “If it cothe speke to me, I wolde gyfe hit an halpeni worth of ale.” And yet another heretic on trial that day, John Blumston, argued that veneration of the Virgin Mary may occur just as appropriately in the kitchen as in shrines, and people might venerate her “as well through seeing their mother or sister as through visiting images [which are only] dead sticks and stones.” But despite the evidence of continued heresy trials, as Margaret Aston has shown, “Lollard iconomachy neither caused nor enabled Reformation iconomachy.
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- Image, Text, and Religious Reform in Fifteenth-Century England , pp. 189 - 191Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2010