Abstract
Abstract: This article argues that, despite common assumptions, Protestants possess a unique aesthetic framework. Building on seventeenth‐century ideas of the ‘Protestant reader’, aesthetic attitudes in Dante's Divine Comedy are contrasted with those in Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress. Dante's emphasis on images which spark desire is contrasted with Bunyan's hermeneutic of suspicion; the role of seeing in one replaced by reading in the other. This leads to an aesthetic framework emphasizing the brokenness of the world and a distrust of earthly beauty; a preference for aesthetic forms whose ‘beauty’ is hidden or allusive; and a prophetic engagement and resistance against the world's brokenness.
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