Visual Anorexia in Early Modern British Print Culture

Abstract

From the 1580s on, Patrick Collinson argued in 1988, Britain was ‘a society suffering from severe visual anorexia’.1 Reformation iconoclasm, rooted in the commandment against graven images,2 turned in the 1580s into iconophobia. The theologically based resistance to religious images grew into a distaste for images altogether. Protestants believed that the representation of the sacred, invisible world was ungodly. Churchgoers risked worshipping images rather than invisible realities.3 This aversion was felt intensively in Britain, where the visual culture – dependent on religious environments and patronage – remained underdeveloped, not only in sacred but also in secular contexts. Churches, domestic interiors, and books lacked decorative representational images. This view of a visually anorexic Britain has been challenged in recent years. In her influential Cheap Print and Popular Piety, 1550–1640 (1991), Tessa Watt explored the diverse territory of cheap print and discerned a protestant accommodation of images. Cheap print...