Lollards and Images: The Defense of Religious Art in Later Medieval England

Abstract

England during the late fourteenth and the fifteenth centuries provided the scene for a debate over the religious uses of art, which, in its literary productiveness if not in its actual results, recalls the great Byzantine Iconoclast Controversy. Not since the Carolingian era, when Christian Europe had been obliged to reconsider its views in response to the challenge posed by Greek Iconoclasts, had the theological, moral, and historical rationale for venerating images been examined with such attention and anxiety. At the earlier time Charlemagne's court theologians, outraged by what they thought was a recrudescence of idolatry among Byzantine iconodules, had condemned the actual worship of images, although they accepted the veneration of the cross and the commemorative and decorative uses of images of the saints.1 Subsequently, the subject did not evoke much concern in the West, which tended to forget the suspicions and hesitations concerning images held by the Carolingian theologians. Between the ninth and the fourteenth centuries European Christian art had developed freely and with the general approval of the Church, which showed little inclination to revise arguments concerning the proper use of images worked out centuries before. Those scholars, who occasionally took up the question in the course of discussing other, more pressing matters, were prepared to accept the veneration of images; and they reassured themselves by quoting such hallowed iconodule arguments as Gregory I's characterization of images as the bible of the unlearned. Until the fourteenth century the criticism of images was occasional and limited in scope.la Purists like the early Cistercians and Franciscans questioned the wisdom of ornamenting Christian shrines with the conspicuous symbols of worldly success. After the conversion of the West to Christianity, idolatry of a pagan kind was not a serious nor general problem, although the crudities of folk religion sometimes troubled sophisticated observers. The extreme views of notorious heretics like the Waldensians and Cathars, who rejected the veneration even of the