1. Joannis Calvini, Institutio Christianae religionis, in Opera Selecta, eds. Petrus Barth and Guilelmus Niesel, 2nd rev. ed. (Munich: Chr. Kaiser, 1957), vol. 3, 96 (book 1, ch. 11, para. 8): “Unde colligere licet, hominis ingenium perpetuam, ut ita loquar, esse idolorum fabricam.” (Thus we may infer that human ingenuity is, so to speak, a perpetual forge of idols.)
2. For an intellectual history of this critique of vision see Martin Jay, Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-century French Thought (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993). For a series of critical reflections on visual culture as an all-encompassing membrane of insubstantial imagery, see “Visual Culture Questionnaire,” October 77 (Summer 1996): 25–70. I have discussed the embodiment of vision at greater length in The Embodied Eye: Religion, Visual Culture, and the Social Life of Feeling (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), esp. 3–28.
3. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Edwin Curley (Indianapolis and Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company, 1994), part 1, ch. 4, para. 6.
4. Francis Bacon, Novum Organum, in The Physical and Metaphysical Works of Lord Bacon, ed. Joseph Devey (London: George Bell and Sons, 1904), book 1, aphorism 10, p. 384.
5. Bacon, Novum Organum, book 1, aphorism 49, p. 393–94.
6. Bacon, Novum Organum, book 1, aphorism 23, p. 387.
7. David Hume, The Natural History of Religion, in Principal Writings on Religion, ed. J.C.A Gaskin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 159.
8. Hume, Natural History of Religion, 160.
9. Hume, Natural History of Religion, 137.
10. Aristotle, De Anima, in The Basic Works of Aristotle, ed. Richard McKeon (New York: Random House, 1941), 595 (432a, 9).
11. Martin Luther, Against the Heavenly Prophets in the Matter of Images and Sacraments, in Luther’s Works, ed. Conrad Bergendoff, vol. 40 (Saint Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 1958), 99.
12. Frances A. Yates, The Art of Memory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966), 229; on Ficino’s conception of talismanic images and the Corpus Hermeticum see Yates, 154–56.
13. Saint Augustine, Confessions, trans. Henry Chadwick (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 190 (book 10, xii, 19).
14. Augustine, Confessions, 201 (book 10, xxxiv, 53). Compare to Plato, Republic, trans. G.M.A, Grube, rev. C.D.C. Reeve (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co., 1992), 272–73 (book 10, 602); and to Plotinus, The Enneads, trans. Stephen MacKenna (London: Penguin, 1991), 410–11 (book 5, 8.1).
15. Anthony Ashley Cooper, Third Earl of Shaftesbury, Characteristics, treatise five, part 3, section 1, excerpted in Andrew Ashfield and Peter de Bolla, eds., The Sublime: A Reader in British Eighteenth-Century Aesthetic Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 72–73.
16. Michel Foucault, “About the Beginning of the Hermeneutics of the Self,” in Religion and Culture, ed. Jeremy R. Carrette (New York: Routledge, 1999), 158–81.
17. The origin of the claim remains debatable, but an early instance is a sermon by John Tillotson (1630–94), “A Discourse Against Transubstantiation,” in The Works of the Most Reverend Dr. John Tillotson, Lord Archbishop of Canterbury, 3 vols. (London: Printed for J. and R. Tonson, 1752), vol. 1, p. 242: “And in all probability those common juggling words of hocus-pocus, are nothing else but a corruption of hoc est corpus, by way of ridiculous imitation of the priests of the church of Rome and their trick of transubstantiation.” Emphasis in original.
1. See for instance John Plummer and John Mabry, Who Are the Independent Catholics? An Introduction to the Independent and Old Catholic Churches (Berkeley: Apocryphile Press, 2006); and Robert Trisco, “The Holy See and the First ‘Independent Catholic Church’ in the United States,” in Studies in Catholic History in Honor of John Tracy Ellis, eds. Nelson Minnich, Robert B. Eno, and Robert Trisco (Wilmington: Michael Glazier, 1985), 175–238. My thanks for Julie Byrne for her assistance with this bibliography.
2. The Sources of Catholic Dogma, trans. Roy J. Deferrari, from Henry Denzinger’s Enchiridion Symbolorum, 30th ed. (Fitzwilliam, NH: Loreto Publications, 2002), 20.
3. See the fifth-century papal assertion of St. Gelasius I, in Sources of Catholic Dogma, 68.
4. Council of Ephesus, 431, quoted in Sources of Catholic Dogma, 49.
5. For relevant discussions of Our Lady of Guadalupe see Jeanette Favrot Peterson, Visualizing Guadalupe: From Black Madonna to Queen of the Americas (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2014), Clara Román-Odio, Sacred Iconographies in Chicana Cultural Productions (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013); for an art historical approach that stresses European influence in the image and contrasts this to pious accounts of the image’s origin see John F. Moffitt, Our Lady of Guadalupe: The Painting, the Legend, and the Reality (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2006).
6. This is not to imply that Protestantism has pursued some sort of anticorporeal gnosticism, but to suggest that its understanding of embodiment is different than that of Catholicism. I have explored Protestant embodiment in The Embodied Eye: Religious Visual Culture and the Social Life of Feeling (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), chap. 7.
7. Council of Nicea II, 787, excerpted in Sources of Catholic Dogma, 121, para. 302.
8. Council of Constance, 1414–18, in Sources of Catholic Dogma, 217, para. 679; Council of Trent, 1545–63, in Sources of Catholic Dogma, 303, para. 998.
9. Council of Trent, 1559–65, in Sources of Catholic Dogma, 299, para. 986.
10. See Hans Belting, Likeness and Presence: A History of the Image before the Era of Art, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 57–59.
11. “Fourth Council of Constantinople,” in Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, ed. Norman P. Tanner, S.J., 2 vols. (London: Sheed and Ward, and Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 1990), vol. 1, 168.
12. Council of Trent, session 25, in Tanner, Decrees, vol. 2, 775.
13. Tanner, Decrees, vol. 2, 775–76.
14. Two insightful studies of this development in Catholicism are Marcia B. Hall and Tracy E. Cooper, eds., The Sensuous In the Counter-Reformation Church (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013) and Jeffrey Chipps Smith, Sensuous Worship: Jesuits and the Art of the Early Catholic Reformation in Germany (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002).
15. For further consideration of the face see Hagi Kenaan, The Ethics of Visuality: Levinas and the Contemporary Gaze, trans. Batya Stein (London: I.B. Tauris, 2013); Stephen Pattison, Saving Face: Enfacement, Shame, Theology (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2013); and Morgan, Embodied Eye, 89–97.
16. Saint Bonaventura, The Life of Saint Francis (London: J.M. Dent, 1904), 138.
17. Bonaventura, Life of Saint Francis , 139.
18. Bonaventura, Life of Saint Francis, 139.
19. Roman Council, 993, in Sources of Catholic Dogma, 140, para. 342.
20. Patrick J. Geary, Furta Sacra: Thefts of Relics in the Central Middle Ages (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978).
21. Council of Trent, in Sources of Catholic Dogma, 303, para. 998.
22. “Fourth Council of Constantinople,” in Tanner, Decrees, 1: 168.
23. See Robert A. Orsi, The Madonna of 115th Street: Faith and Community in Italian Harlem, 1880–1950 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985); Jon P. Mitchell, “Performing Statues,” in Religion and Material Culture: The Matter of Belief, ed. David Morgan (London: Routledge, 2010), 262–76.
24. On the Jesuit use of theater, see Friedrich Kittler, Optical Media: Berlin Lectures 1999, trans. Anthony Enns (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2010), 76–88.
25. See Jane Garnett and Gervase Rosser, Spectacular Miracles: Transforming Images in Italy from the Renaissance to the Present (London: Reaktion, 2013), esp. 161–89; David Freedberg, The Power of Images: Studies in the History and Theory of Response (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989); and William A. Christian, Jr., Local Religion in Sixteenth-Century Spain (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981).
26. Ulrich Zwingli, Commentary on True and False Religion, eds. Samuel Macauley Jackson and Clarence Nevin Heller (Durham, NC: Labyrinth Press, 1981), 182.
27. Zwingli, Commentary on True and False Religion, 181.
28. Zwingli, Commentary on True and False Religion, 184.
29. Zwingli, Commentary on True and False Religion, 211.
30. Zwingli, Commentary on True and False Religion, 214.
31. Zwingli, Commentary on True and False Religion, 224–28.
32. Zwingli, Commentary on True and False Religion, 229.
33. Zwingli, Commentary on True and False Religion, 214.
34. Zwingli, Commentary on True and False Religion, 331–32.
35. A few examples easily found in major museums and online are: Josse Lieferinxe, Saint Sebastian Interceding for the Plague Stricken, ca. 1497, Walters Art Gallery, Baltimore; Anthony van Dyke, Saint Rosalie Interceding for the Plague-stricken of Palermo, 1624, Metropolitan Museum, New York; Mattia Preti, Study for the Votive Fresco of the Virgin with Saint Francis Xavier and Saint Rosalie, Interceding for Victims of the Plague of Naples, 1656–1659, Museo e Gallerie Nazionale di Capodimonte, Naples; Pietro Liberi, Saint Anthony of Padua Begs the Holy Trinity to Help Venice in the War for Candia, 1652, Santa Maria della Salute, Venice; Francesco Fontebasso, Pope Gregory I and Saint Vitalis Intercede with the Madonna for the Souls of Purgatory, 1730–31, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Gemäldegalerie, Vienna; Jacques Louis David, Saint Roch Interceding with the Virgin for the Plague Stricken, 1780, Musée des Beaux-Arts, Marseilles.
36. Council of Trent, Session 25, in Tanner, Decrees, 2: 774.
37. Council of Trent, Session 25, in Tanner, Decrees, 2: 775.
38. Saint Augustine, Confessions, trans. Henry Chadwick (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 3.
39. For a perceptive analysis of the print see Carl C. Christensen, Princes and Propaganda: Electoral Saxon Art of the Reformation, Sixteenth-Century Essays and Studies, vol. 20 (Kirksville, MI: Sixteenth-Century Journal Publishers, 1992), 104–12.
40. Joseph Leo Koerner, The Reformation of the Image (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 76.
41. The full title is “Die Figur der Tauff unsers Heilands Jhesu Christi, aldo die herrliche Offenbarung der ewigen einigen Gottheit in dreien Personen geschehen is, welche alle Christen in der Anruffung betrachten sollen.” (The Figure of Our Savior Jesus Christ, in which took place the glorious revelation of the eternally united godhead in three persons, which all Christians should ponder in calling [on Jesus].)
42.Den soln wir alle hörn mit vleis
Und geben im allem den preis.
Derhalben sehe ein jeder Christ
Wenn er in angst und nöten ist
Das er im trost und rettung such
Nicht bey Creaturn es ist betrug
Die Götzen gar nicht heissen mögen
Ir krafft und wird ist all erlogen
Man sol allein Gott ruffen an.
43. Saint Ignatius Loyola, The Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius Loyola, trans. Father Elder Mullan (New York: P.J. Kenedy and Sons, 1914), 26.
44. Loyola, Spiritual Exercises, 26.
45. Loyola, Spiritual Exercises, 30.
46. Loyola, Spiritual Exercises, 17.
47. Loyola, Spiritual Exercises, 12.
48. Loyola, Spiritual Exercises, 53.
49. For a study of early Jesuit imagery that argues for its contribution to the Counterreformation, see Thomas Buser, “Jerome Nadal and Early Jesuit Art in Rome,” Art Bulletin 58, no. 3 (September 1976): 424–33. For imagery and its study see Jerome Nadal, ed., The Illustrated Spiritual Exercises (Scranton, PA: University of Scranton Press, 2001) and Jerome Nadal, S.J., Annotations and Meditations on the Gospels, 3 vols., trans. and ed. Frederick A. Homann, S.J. (Philadelphia: Saint Joseph’s University Press, 2003–7).
50. Loyola, Spiritual Exercises, 97.
51. Loyola, Spiritual Exercises, 98.
52. Loyola, Spiritual Exercises, 97.
53. See Mary Carruthers, The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).
54. See the classic study by Frances Yates, The Art of Memory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966).
55. Walter S. Melion provides a detailed discussion of the use of the images in Nadal’s work. See Melion, “The Art of Vision in Jerome Nadal’s Adnotationes et Meditationes in Evangelia,” in Nadal, Annotations and Meditations, vol. 1, 1–96.
56. Loyola, Spiritual Exercises, 26.
57. Loyola, Spiritual Exercises, 12.
58. Loyola, Spiritual Exercises, 26.
59. For an excellent overview of the new devotional culture and its visual forms in the seventeenth-century Netherlands, see John B. Knipping, Iconography of the Counter Reformation in the Netherlands: Heaven on Earth, 2 vols. (Nieuwkoop: B. de Graaf and Leiden: A.W. Sijthoff, 1974), vol. 1, 109–79; in southern Germany, Chipps Smith, Sensuous Worship; for several essays exploring the legacy of the Jesuits in emblem books, see Pedro F. Campa and Peter M. Daly, eds., Emblematic Images and Religious Texts: Studies in Honor of G. Richard Dimler, S.J. (Philadelphia: Saint Joseph’s University Press, 2010).
60. Antoni Sucquet, Via vitae aeternae (Antwerp: Martin Nuty, 1620); Antoine Sucquet, Le Chemin de la Vie Eternele (Anvers: Henry Aertssens, 1623). A partial English translation appeared much later: Some Mediations and Prayers selected from The Way of Eternal Life, in Order to Illustrate and Explain the Pictures by Boetius A. Bolswert, trans. Rev. Isaac Williams (Oxford: John Henry Parker, 1845). The English edition’s images are redrawn versions of Bolswert’s, and the text adds several images and discussion of them from subsequent editions.
61. An excellent discussion of Sucquet’s book as well as of the Spiritual Exercises, particularly with regards to imagery, is Chipps Smith, Sensuous Worship, 23–40.
62. Jesuits made considerable use of the fashionable emblematic mode of illustration, a figurative, allegorical approach that suited visual treatments of the very spiritual states of feeling, introspection, and quest for insight that the Spiritual Exercises cultivated. See Ralph Deckoninck, “Maximilianus Sandeaus (1578–1656): Théoricien de l’image mystique et symbolique,” in Campia and Daly, eds., Emblematic Images and Religious Texts, 171–81; and Dekoninck, Ad Imaginem: Statuts, fonctions et usages de l’image dans la littérature spirituelle jésuite du XVII Siècle (Geneva: Droz, 2005). For a wide-ranging collection of studies on Jesuit emblem production and use, see John Manning and Marc van Vaeck, eds., The Jesuits and the Emblem Tradition: Selected Papers of the Leuven International Emblem Conference 18–23 August, 1996, Imago Figurata Studies, vol. 1a (Turnhout: Brepols, 1999).
1. Ulrich Zwingli, Commentary on True and False Religion, ed. Samuel Macauley Jackson and Clarence Nevin Heller (Durham, NC: Labyrinth Press, 1981), 336.
2. Ulrich Zwingli, Eine Antwort, Valentin Compar gegeben, 27, April 1525, in Ulrich Zwingli, Sämtlich Werke, eds. Emil Egli and Georg Finsler (Leipzig; Verlag von M. Heinsius Nachfolger, 1927), vol. 4, 125.
3. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans. Henry Beveridge (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1989), 101.
4. For a brief overview of the material history of Christianity from the earliest days to the present, see David Morgan, “Material Belief,” in The Encyclopedia of Christian Civilization, ed. George Thomas Kurian, vol. 3 (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), 1,441–449. A readable and illuminating survey of the history of representations of Jesus from the early church to the twentieth century is Gabriele Finaldi, The Image of Christ (London: National Gallery, distributed by Yale University Press, 2000). An accessible study of early Christian art is Robin Jensen, Understanding Early Christian Art (London: Routledge, 2000).
5. There is a vast literature on the Reformation and images. It will suffice here to cite some of the best of it available in English: Charles Garside, Zwingli and the Arts (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1966); Carlos M.N. Eire, War against the Idols: The Reformation of Worship from Erasmus to Calvin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986); Margaret Aston, England’s Iconoclasts: Laws against Images (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988); Sergiusz Michalski, Reformation and the Visual Arts: The Protestant Image Question in Western and Eastern Europe (New York: Routledge, 1993); Lee Palmer Wandel, Voracious Idols and Violent Hands: Iconoclasm in Reformation Zurich, Strasbourg, and Basel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995; Julie Spraggon, Puritan Iconoclasm during the English Civil War (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell Press, 2003).
6. Andreas Bodenstein of Carlstadt, “On the Removal of Images and That There Should Be No Beggars Among Christians,” in The Essential Carlstadt, trans. and ed. E.J. Furcha (Waterloo, ON and Scottdale, PA: Herald Press, 1995), 103.
7. Carlstadt, “On the Removal of Images,” 104.
8. Zwingli, Commentary on True and False Religion, 331. Zwingli’s view is discussed further in chapter 3 here.
9. Martin Luther, “An Open Letter to the Christian Nobility of the German Nation Concerning the Reform of the Christian Estate,” 1520, in Three Treatises (Philadelphia: Muhlenberg Press, 1947), 9–111.
10. Luther, “An Open Letter,” 117.
11. John Foxe, Acts and Monuments, eds. Rev. George Townsend and Rev. Stephen Reed Cattley (London: Seeley and Burnside, 1838), vol. 5, 697.
12. Foxe, Acts and Monuments, 698–99. The comparison has been much discussed in secondary literature. For a very accessible biography of Edward VI, see Diarmaid MacCullough, The Boy King: Edward VI and the Protestant Reformation (New York: Palgrave, 1999). For a thorough study of its visual history from Henry VIII to Elizabeth I see Margaret Aston, The King’s Bedpost: Reformation and Iconography in a Tudor Group Portrait (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).
13. Foxe, Acts and Monuments, vol. 5, 698–99.
14. For important discussions of this image and others in Foxe’s book, see Elizabeth Evenden and Thomas S. Freeman, Religion and the Book in Early Modern England: The Making of Foxe’s ‘Book of Martyrs’ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 186–231; Brian Cummings, “Images in Books: Foxe EIKONOKLASTES,” in Art Re-Formed: Re-Assessing the Impact of the Reformation on the Visual Arts, eds. Tara Hamling and Richard L. Williams (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007), 183–200, esp. 183–84; John N. King, Foxe’s Book of Martyrs and Early Modern Print Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 162–242; Thomas Betteridge, “Visibility, Truth and History in Acts and Monuments,” in John Foxe and his World, ed. Christopher Highley and John King (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002), 145–59; Ruth Samson Luborsky, “The Illustrations: Their Pattern and Plan,” in John Foxe: An Historical Perspective, ed. David Loades (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999), 67–84; Margaret Aston and Elizabeth Ingram, “The Iconography of the Acts and Monuments,” in John Foxe and the English Reformation, ed. David Loades (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1997), 66–142; and Aston, The King’s Bedpost, 149–66.
15. On the publication history of the book as it relates to illustrations, see Luborsky, “The Illustrations;” and Evenden and Freeman, Religion and the Book in Early Modern England, 186–231.
16. Edmund S. Morgan, Visible Saints: The History of a Puritan Idea (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1963).
17. For a penetrating discussion of Cranach and the art of the Reformation, see Brian Cummings, on Eamon Duffy reviewing Joseph Leo Koerner’s The Reformation of the Image (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008): Cummings, “Images in Books,” 187–88. For a very readable study of Cranach and Luther see Steven Ozment, The Serpent and the Lamb: Cranach, Luther, and the Making of the Reformation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011).
18. See Juliane Schmieglitz-Otten, ed., Die Celler Schloss Kapelle: Kunstwelten, Politiken, Glaubenswelten (Munich: Hirmer Verlag, 2012); Thomas Pöpper and Susanne Wegmann, eds., Das Bild des neuen Glaubens: das Cranach-Retabel in der Schneeberger St. Wolfsgangskirche (Regensburg: Schnell and Steiner, 2011); and Christoph Weimer, Luther, Cranach und die Bilder: Gesetz und Evangelium, Schlüssel zum reformatorischen Bildgebrauch (Stuttgart: Clawer Verlag, 1999).
19. Zwingli, Eine Antwort, Valentin Compar gegeben, 120–22. Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, 94–96.
20. Martin Luther, Wider die himmlischen Propheten, von den Bildern und Sakrament, 1525, in Ausgewählte Werke, ed. Georg Merz, 3rd ed. (Munich: Chr. Raiser Verlag, 1957), vol. 4, 87: “Auch hab ich die Bilderstürmer selbst gesehen und hören lessen aus meiner verdeutschten Bibel. So weiβ ich auch, daβ sie dieselbige haben, lessen draus, wie man wohl spürt an den Worten, die sie führen. Nun sind gar viele Bilder in denselbigen Büchern, beide, Gottes, der Engel, Menschen und Tiere, sonderlich in der Offenbarung Hohannis und im Mose und Josua. So bitten wir sie nun gar freundlich, wollten uns doch auch gönnen zu tun, das sie selber tun, daβ wir auch solche bilder mögen an die Wände malen um Gedächtnisses und bessern Verstands willen, sintemal sie an den Wänden ja so wenig schaden, also in den Büchern. Es ist je besser, man male an die Wand, wie Gott die Welt schuf, wie Noah die Arche baute und was mehr gutter Historien sind, den daβ man sonst irgend weltlich unverschämt Ding malet; ja wollt Gott, ich könnt die Herren und die Reichen dahin bereden, daβ sie die ganze Bibel inwendig und auswendig an den Häusern vor jedermanns Augen malen lieβen, das ware ein christlich Werk.”
21. For studies of visual propaganda among Protestants, see R.W. Scribner, For the Sake of Simple Folk: Popular Propaganda for the German Reformation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981) and Carl C. Christensen, Princes and Propaganda: Electoral Saxon Art of the Reformation, Sixteenth Century Essays and Studies, vol. 20 (Kirksville, Missouri: Sixteenth Century Essays and Studies, 1992).
22. David D. Hall, Worlds of Wonder, Days of Judgment: Popular Religious Belief in Early New England (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 24. On book production during the Reformation across Europe, see Jean-François Gilmont, ed., The Reformation and the Book, trans. and ed. by Karin Maag (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1998).
23. Andrew Pettegree, “Illustrating the Book: A Protestant Dilemma,” in John Foxe and his World, eds. Christopher Highley and John N. King (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002), 133–44, situates the appearance of Foxe’s illustrated text fortuitously, at the outset of a period in which the influence of continental Calvinism’s iconophobia spread through England. Pettegree focuses his comments on upscale book illustration of Bibles and martyrologies, a fine-art market in comparison to the popular commerce in chapbooks, almanacs, broadsides, ballads, and tracts which were also illustrated during this period, and have been studied by Tessa Watt, Cheap Print and Popular Piety, 1550–1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). Watt shows that Foxe’s book influenced this body of illustrated materials, which appealed to popular consumption in spite of the genteel tastes of Puritan iconophobia, 134–37, 158–59.
24. See Alison Adams, Webs of Allusion: French Protestant Emblem Books of the Sixteenth Century (Geneva: Droz, 2003) and Bernhard F. Scholz, “Religious Meditations on the Heart: Three Seventeenth Century Variants,” in The Arts and the Cultural Heritage of Martin Luther eds. Eyolf Østrem, Jens Fleischer and Nils Holger Petersen (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, University of Copenhagen, 2003), 99–135.
25. Perkins’s diagram has been insightfully discussed by Lori Anne Ferrell, “Transfiguring Theology: William Perkins and Calvinist Aesthetics,” in Highley and King, eds., John Foxe and his World, 160–79; for a reproduction and discussion of an acrostic poem see Watt, Cheap Print and Popular Piety, 232–33.
26. On illustrations and the iconicity of texts see David Morgan, The Lure of Images: A History of Religion and Visual Media in America (London: Routledge, 2007), 13–15; for a study of the integration and interdependence of image and text in Protestant needlework, see Maureen Daly Goggin, “Visual Rhetoric in Pens of Steel and Inks of Silk: Challenging the Great Visual/Verbal Divide,” in Defining Visual Rhetorics, eds. Charles A. Hill and Marguerite Helmers (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2004; reprint, New York: Routledge, 2009), 87–110.
27. See Heimo Reinitzer, Gesetz and Evangelium: Über ein reformatorisches Bildthema, seine Tradition, Funktion und Wirkungsgeschichte, 2 vols. (Hamburg: Christians Verlag, 2006).
28. A major resource for the study of German epitaph and the didactic panels and images placed within Protestant churches is Reinitzer, Gesetz and Evangelium.
29. For studies of Reformer portraits see Ozment, The Serpent and the Lamb, 119–47; Mary G. Winkler, “Calvin’s Portrait: Representation, Image, or Icon,” in Seeing Beyond the Word: Visual Arts and the Calvinist Tradition, ed. Paul Corby Finney (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1999), 243–51; and R.W. Scribner, For the Sake of Simple Folk: Popular Propaganda for the German Reformation (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), 14–36.
30. For an example of defacing an image of Luther, see Koerner, Reformation of the Image, 114–16.
31. Luborsky, “The Illustrations,” 69.
32. Foxe, Acts and Monuments, vol. 8, 86.
33. Foxe, Acts and Monuments, vol. 8, 89–90.
34. Robert Parsons launched a three-volume rejoinder to Foxe’s Acts and Monuments, A Treatise of Three Conversions of England from Paganism to Christian Religion (Saint-Omer, France: Francois Bellet, 1603–4) and singled out the illustrations for criticism: “his lying Acts and Monuments, a booke composed wholy to deceyue, and by judgment of many men, hath done more hurt alone to simple soules in our country, by infecting and poysoninge them vnwares, vnder the bayte of pleasant historyes, fayre pictures and painted pageants, then many other the most pestilent books togeather,” vol. 3, ch. 18, p. 400.
35. Evenden and Freeman, Religion and the Book in Early Modern England, 221, 226. For the ongoing significance of Foxe’s book in England see Peter Nockles, “The Changing Legacy and Reception of John Foxe’s ‘Book of Martyrs’ in the ‘Long Eighteenth Century’: Varieties of Anglican, Protestant, and Catholic Response, c. 1760-c. 1850,” in Religion, Politics and Dissent, 1660–1832: Essays in Honour of James E. Bradley, eds. Robert Cornwall and William Gibson (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2010), 219–47.
36. Calvin, Institutes, 100. Compare with Zwingli, who began in his major treatment of images to differentiate “idols” from “images,” the first being “an image of a helper or comfort or one to which honor is given,” the second “the likeness of a thing that is visible but one to which no false hope is taken nor veneration made,” Zwingli, Eine Antwort, Valentin Compar gegeben, 96. In Commentary on True and False Religion, also produced in 1525, Zwingli stipulated that only images of human figures could threaten becoming objects of worship: “Only those images ought to be abolished which offend piety or diminish faith in God, such as are all those in human shape which are set up before altars or churches, even thought they were not at first set up to saints,” 336. For helpful studies of Zwingli on images, see Garside, Zwingli and the Arts, 146–78; and Eire, War Against the Idols, 73–86.
37. Calvin, Institutes, 101. Zwingli likewise had banned images from churches, though in the case of windows and figures on the outside he applied the criterion of use: if the images were being worshipped, they should be removed, if not, they could remain, Eine Antwort, 95–96. He made the same point in a major treatise, Commentary on True and False Religion, written at the same time (1525) as the Answer to Valentin Compar. Zwingli contended that decorative imagery or imagery imbued with allegorical or mystical meanings that were not being worshiped could remain in churches: “No one is so stupid as to think that we ought to do away with statues, images, and other representations, where no worship is offered them; for who is affected by the flying cherubim on the mercy seat or embroidered on the curtains, whether for their mystic meaning or for decoration, or by the palms, lions, oxen, pomegranates, and such like ornaments cunningly wrought in Solomon’s temple?” Zwingli, Commentary, 330–31.
38. Luborsky, “The Illustrations,” 68 et passim.
39. Two helpful studies of Richmond’s writings are Gary Kelly, “Romantic Evangelicalism: Religion, Social Conflict, and Literary Form in Legh Richmond’s Annals of the Poor,” English Studies in Canada 16, no. 2 (June 1990): 165–86; and Kyle B. Roberts, “Locating Popular Religion in the Evangelical Tract: The Roots and Routes of The Dairyman’s Daughter,” Early American Studies 4 (Spring 2006): 233–70.
40. Reverend Legh Richmond, The Young Cottager; A True Story, no. 151 (London: printed for the Religious Tract Society, 1819), 5.
41. Richmond, The Young Cottager, 5.
42. I have explored such images and associations in Protestants and Pictures: Religion, Visual Culture, and the Age of American Mass Production (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 223–34; and “Image,” in Key Words in Religion, Media, and Culture, ed. David Morgan (London: Routledge, 2008), 96–110.
43. Helpful work on the home and domestic interior in Protestant cultures includes: Colleen McDannell, The Christian Home in Victorian America (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986); McDannell, Material Christianity: Religion and Popular Culture in America (London: Yale University Press, 1995); Tara Hamling, Decorating the ‘Godly’ Household: Religious Art in Post-Reformation Britain (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010); and several essays in Hamling and Williams, eds., Art Re-Formed, 105–67.
44. Michalski, Reformation and the Visual Arts, 56.
45. Reverend Samuel Phillips, The Christian Home, As It Is in the Sphere of Nature and the Church (Social Circle, Georgia: E. Nebhut, 1861), 56.
46. Phillips, The Christian Home, 60.
47. Phillips, The Christian Home, 153.
48. Phillips, The Christian Home, 153–54.
49. See David Morgan, The Sacred Gaze: Visual Culture in Theory and Practice (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 191–206.
50. The preface to a German edition printed in Pennsylvania describes the origin of Gossner’s text: Johannes E. Gossner, Das Herz des Menschen: Ein Tempel Gottoes, oder die Werkstätte des Teufels (Harrisburg, PA: Theo. F. Scheffer, 1870), 3. The 1732 text is difficult to find, but the ten plates that comprised the booklet were reproduced in Paul Carus, “Heart of Man as Mirrored in Religious Art,” The Open Court 12, no. 4 (April 1898): 236–42. For biographical information on Gossner, see Ingetraut Ludolphy, “Gossner, Johannes Evangelista,” in The Encyclopedia of the Lutheran Church, 3 vols., ed. Julius Bodensieck (Minneapolis: Augsburg, 1965), vol. 2, 944–45. On Gossner’s text in mission history see www.common-place.org/vol-06/no-04/tales/, accessed August 14, 2014.
51. Gossner, Das Herz des Menschen, 6.
52. For reproductions and discussion of this set of images see Wu Tung, Tales from the Land of Dragons: 1,000 Years of Chinese Painting (Boston: Museum of Fine Arts, 1997), 90–95, 197–201.
1. Emile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, trans. Karen E. Fields (New York: The Free Press, 1995), 350.
2. Henri Hubert and Marcel Mauss, Sacrifice: Its Nature and Functions, trans. W.D. Halls (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964), 97.
3. Hubert and Mauss, Sacrifice, 100. Emphasis added.
4. Marcel Mauss, The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies, trans. W.D. Halls (New York: W.W. Norton, [1925] 1990). A large literature formed in the wake of Mauss’s seminal essay, especially with regard to things and images as gifts: Michel de Certeau, “What We Do When We Believe,” in On Signs, ed. Marshall Blonsky (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985), 192–202; Patrick Geary, “Sacred Commodities: The Circulation of Medieval Relics,” in The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, ed. Arjun Appadurai (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 169–91; Annette Weiner, Inalienable Possessions: The Paradox of Keeping-While-Giving (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992); Fred Myers, ed., The Empire of Things: Regimes of Value and Material Culture (Santa Fe: School of American Research Press; Oxford: James Currey, 2001); Fred Myers, “Ontologies of the Image and Economies of Exchange,” American Ethnologist 31, no. 1 (February 2004): 5–20. A key text to which Mauss’s study of the gift and the nature of gift exchange responded is Bronislaw Malinowsky, Argonauts of the Western Pacific: An Account of Native Enterprise and Adventure in the Archipelagoes of Melanesian New Guinea (London: G. Routledge and Sons, 1922).
5. Georges Bataille, Theory of Religion, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Zone Books, 1992), 49.
6. Jill Robbins, “Sacrifice,” in Critical Terms for Religious Studies, ed. Mark C. Taylor (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 285–97.
7. Weiner, Inalienable Possessions, 41, points out that Bataille was unaware that the Northwest Coast Kwakiutl chiefs who engaged in the potlatch, giving away all their possessions, actually “schemed to keep their most renowned cloaks and coppers out of exchange.” They used the potlatch’s ritual feast of expenditure to enhance the value of the objects they kept. Yet Bataille’s argument that the economy of expenditure augmented social bonds seems sound and is therefore better regarded as an alternative economy rather than a nullification of economies of exchange.
8. One possible exception, pointed out to me by Brenna Keegan, is madagh, the Armenian Christian Church’s annual practice of commemorating those victims with food offerings, most commonly lamb stew and flatbread. The animals are not ritually slaughtered or burnt, but they are butchered and roasted for the occasions on the night before.
9. Robert W. Shaffern, The Penitents’ Treasury: Indulgences in Latin Christendom, 1175–1375 (Scranton and London: University of Scranton Press, 2007), 84–87. A very instructive collection of essays on the history of indulgences is R.N. Swanson, ed., Promissory Notes on the Treasury of Merits: Indulgences in Late Medieval Europe (Leiden: Brill, 2006).
10. Shaffern, Penitents’ Treasury, 87.
11. Shaffern, Penitents’ Treasury, 40–45.
12. Clement VI, “Unigenitus Dei Filius,” in The Sources of Catholic Dogma, trans. Roy J. Deferrari, from Henry Denzinger, Enchiridion Symbolorum, 30th edition (Fitzwilliam, NH: Loreto Publications, 2002), 202. For an instructive discussion of the history of sources on the treasury, see Shaffern, Penitents’ Treasury, 79–94.
13. See Saint Louis Marie de Montfort, “The Secret of Mary,” first half of the eighteenth century, reprinted in God Alone: The Collected Writings of St. Louis Marie de Montfort (Bay Shore, New York: Montfort Publications, 1988): “God chose her to be the treasurer, the administrator and the dispenser of all his graces, so that all his graces and gifts pass through her hands. Such is the power that she has received from him that, according to St. Bernardine, she gives the graces of the eternal Father, the virtues of Jesus Christ, and the gifts of the Holy Spirit to whom she wills, as and when she wills, and as much as she wills.” Monfort contended in this letter that the task was “to discover a simple means to obtain from God the grace need to become holy,” 266. Mary was the answer, and he understood her power in visual terms: “Mary is the great mold of God, fashioned by the Holy Spirit to give human nature to a Man who is God by the hypostatic union, and to fashion through grace men who are like to God . . . No godly feature is missing from this mold. Everyone who casts himself into it and allows himself to be molded will acquire every feature of Jesus Christ, true God, with little pain or effort, as befits his weak human condition,” 267.
14. Winfrid Herbst, Indulgences (Milwaukee: Bruce Publishing Company, 1955), 14.
15. Henry Charles Lea, A History of Auricular Confession and Indulgences in the Latin Church, 3 vols. (Philadelphia: Lea Brothers, 1896), 3: 184. The thirteenth-century text that reports this indulgence is reprinted in Hans Belting, Likeness and Presence: A History of the Image before the Era of Art, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 543.
16. Ambrose St. John, The Raccolta: Or, Collection of Indulgenced Prayers and Good Works (London: Burns and Oates; New York: Benziger Brothers, 1910), xiv–xv. “Raccolta” is the title popularly used for successively issued versions of the handbook on indulgences, the Enchiridion Indulgentiarum, produced whenever popes change the collection. All references to Raccolta here are to the 1910 edition published by Benziger brothers.
17. Raccolta, 350.
18. Herbst, Indulgences, 96.
19. Herbst, Indulgences, 127, 147, 234, 415.
20. “Fourth Lateran Council,” in Norman P. Tanner, ed., Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, 2 vols. (London: Sheed and Ward; Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 1990), 1: 263.
21. “Fourth Lateran Council,” 1: 263.
22. Albert of Mainz, “Instructio summaria (1515),” excerpted in A Reformation Reader, ed. Denis R. Janz (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1999), 53.
23. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans. Henry Beveridge (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, [1559] 1989), 94.
24. Calvin, Institutes , 98.
25. R.W. Scribner, For the Sake of Simple Folk: Popular Propaganda for the German Reformation (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), 104.
26. Martin Luther, “Ninety-Five Theses or Disputation on the Power and Efficacy of Indulgences,” in A Reformation Reader, ed. Denis R. Janz (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1999), 84–85.
27. Triglot Concordia: The Symbolical Books of the Evangelical Lutheran Church (Minneapolis: The Mott Press, 1955), part 2, art. 2, sect. 12, p. 465.
28. Triglot Concordia, part 2, art. 4, sect. 9, p. 473.
29. Triglot Concordia, part 2, art. 4, sect. 10, p. 475.
30. Triglot Concordia, part 2, art. 2, sect. 25, p. 468.
31. Martin Luther, “Autobiographical Fragment: Preface to the Complete Edition of Luther’s Latin Writings (1545),” reprinted in Janz, ed., A Reformation Reader, 75.
32. Martin Luther, “A Brief Instruction on What to Look for and Expect in the Gospels,” 1522, in Martin Luther’s Basic Theological Writings, ed. Timothy F. Lull (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1989), 108. For the German original see Luthers Werke, eds. D. Buchwald, Gustave Kawerau, Julius Koestlin, Martin Rade, and Eugenio Schneider, 3rd ed. (Berlin: C.A. Schwetschke und Sohn, 1905), vol. 5, 121. Luther discussed the dual significance of Jesus as gift and example further in the same essay, providing greater elaboration of the significance for Christian life: “Therefore make note of this, that Christ as a gift nourishes your faith and makes you a Christian. But Christ as an example exercises your works. These do not make you a Christian. Actually they come forth from you because you have already been made a Christian. As widely as a gift differs from an example, so widely does faith differ from works, for faith possesses nothing of its own, only the deeds and life of Christ. Works have something of your own in them, yet they should not belong to you but to your neighbor,” in Lull, Basic Theological Writings, 107; for the original German, see Luthers Werke, vol. 5, 120.
33. Council of Trent, in Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, ed. Norman P. Tanner S.J, 2 vols. (London: Sheed and Ward, and Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 1990), 2: 796.
34. Council of Trent, 797.
35. Compare Raccolta, 428, and Herbst, Indulgences, 4–5.
36. Raccolta, 412, 415.
37. Raccolta, ix. Emphasis in original.
38. Herbst, Indulgences, 9–10. Emphasis in original.
39. Raccolta, 7.
40. For a discussion of the sacred economy of devotion to Fatima, see David Morgan, “Aura and the Inversion of Marian Pilgrimage: Fatima and Her Statues,” in Moved by Mary: Pilgrimage in the Modern World, eds. Anna-Karina Hermkens, Willy Jansen and Catrien Notermans (Oxford: Ashgate, 2009), 49–65.
41. Margaret Mary Alacoque, The Autobiography of Saint Margaret Mary Alacoque, trans. Sisters of the Visitation (Rockford, Illinois: TAN Books, 1986), 106.
42. Father John Croiset, The Devotion to the Sacred Heart, 2nd ed., trans. Father Patrick O’Connell, B.D. (Rockford, Illinois: TAN Books, 1988), 76.
43. Croiset, Devotion to the Sacred Heart, 242–54.
44. For a list of indulgences dedicated to the Sacred Heart by Pius X, see The Messenger of the Sacred Heart of Jesus 12, no. 9 (September 1908), 530–31, and for indulgenced prayers, see The Messenger of the Sacred Heart of Jesus 12, no. 11 (November 1908), 671–72.
45. “Apostolic Constitution on Indulgences,” Papal Encyclicals Online, www.papalencyclicals.net/Paul06/p6indulg.htm, accessed October 8, 2012.
46. Indulgentiarum Doctrina, ch. 4, sect. 8.
47. Indulgentiarum Doctrina, ch. 2, sect. 5.
48. See for instance Paul M. Kane, “Marian Devotion Since 1940: Continuity or Casualty?” in Habits of Devotion: Catholic Religious Practice in Twentieth-Century America, ed. James M. O’Toole (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004), 89–129, esp. 91–92, 96.
49. “First Vatican Council,” in Tanner, ed., Decrees, vol. 2, p. 803.
50. Indulgentiarum Doctrina, ch. 4, sect. 8.
51. Indulgentiarum Doctrina, ch. 5, sect. 12.
52. Indulgentiarum Doctrina, norm 17.
53. Indulgentiarum Doctrina, ch. 5, sect. 12.
54. John Paul II, Incarnationis Mysterium, 2000, para 9. www.vatican.va/jubilee_2000/docs/documents/hf_jp-ii_doc_30111998_bolla-jubilee_en.html, accessed January 19, 2014.
55. Apostolic Penitentiary, Manual of Indulgences: Norms and Grants, trans. from 4th ed. (1999) of Enchiridion Indulgentiarum: Normae et Concessiones (Washington, DC: United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, 2006), 5.
56. Apostolic Penitentiary, Manual of Indulgences, 34.
57. Tom Kington, “Vatican offers ‘time off purgatory’ to followers of Pope Francis tweets,” The Guardian, July 16, 2013, www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jul/16/vatican-indulgences-pope-francis-tweets?utm_source=buffer&utm_campaign=Buffer&utm_content=buffer48ca5&utm_medium=twitter, accessed July 19, 2013.
58. “Mission Statement,” Apostolate for Holy Relics website, www.apostolateforholyrelics.com/mission-statement.php, accessed August 29, 2013.
59. “Mission Statement,” Apostolate for Holy Relics.
60. Weiner, Inalienable Possession, 26.
61. Mauss, The Gift, 12.
62. An insightful study of religious artifacts and their collection and display in museums is Crispin Paine, Religious Objects in Museums: Private Lives and Public Duties (London: Bloomsbury, 2013). See also pertinent anthropological studies of gifting, inalienable value, and exchange as cited in note 4.
63. Thomas Shephard, “First Principles of the Oracles of God,” in Puritans in the New World: A Critical Anthology, ed. David D. Hall (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 73. The economy was stressed throughout Puritan preaching and literature. Here is Bunyan’s rendition of it: “But again, order to Pardon by deed, there must something be paid to God as a price, as well as something prepared to cover us withal. Sin has delivered us up to the just Curse of a Righteous Law: Now from this Curse we must be justified by way of Redemption, a price being paid for the harms we have done, and this is by the Blood of your Lord, who came and stood in your place, and stead, and died your Death for your Transgressions. Thus as he ransomed you from your Transgressions by Blood, and covered your polluted and deformed Souls with Righteousness,” John Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress, ed. W.R. Owens (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 199.
64. John Winthrop, “A Modell of Christian Charity,” 1630, reprinted in Conrad Cherry, ed., God’s New Israel: Religious Interpretations of American Destiny, rev. ed. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 37–38.
65. Shephard, “First Principles,” 75.
66. The order issued by the House of Commons on April 18, 1642 was reprinted in a later edition of Mede’s book, The Key of the Revelation, Searched and Demonstrated out of the Naturall and Proper Characters of the Visions, trans. Richard More (London: printed by J.L. for Phil. Stephens, 1650), xi.
67. The 1650 edition of the book carried a forward by translator Richard More, which revealed that he had been approached by a man named Haydock with a letter of 1634 from Mede to himself, which indicated that the contents of the engraving already under production (figure 22) reflected a good deal of material from Haydock, whose name subsequently was included in the sealed (upper) and opened (lower) scrolls. More reproduced the letter, which included a fascinating and very important detail: Mede confided to Haydock that he was unsure whether the visions of the seals were actually read by the writer of Revelation. “At length therefore (because it seemed too unseemly a thing to affirm, that the thing was performed by a meer outward representation, the book conferring nothing thereunto), I fell into the opinion, that both were to be joined together, and that we must say that indeed the Prophesies were described and pourtrayed in the Volume, whether by signes and shapes, or letters; but that these were no otherwise exhibited to John, and other beholders of this celestiall Theater, then by a foreign representation, supplying the room of a rehearsal, not much unlike to our Academicall interludes, where the prompters stand near the Actors, with their books in their hands, whereas then neither the Lambe himself could recite any thing out of the book, neither did the Apostle stand so near (for the Lamb stood near to him that sate on the Throne) that he might read out of the hand of him who opened the Seals, it must needs be, that he apprehended all these after the manner as I have said” (Mede, Key of the Revelation, x–xii). In other words, John saw the seal scroll closed and opened, but was not close enough to read the words written thereon, though he heard a voice with the opening of each seal (see Rev. 6). The detail is fascinating because it suggests that Protestant literalism actually endorsed the use of imagery to portray sacred truth on the assumption that events were both seen and heard by John as he witnessed the mystery of the Revelation. The result was, even among Puritans with their famous intolerance of sacred imagery, a respect for the importance of images in the representation of the prophetical truths of holy writ. Images and words work together for Protestants to affirm the authority of sacred text, as I argued in chapter 2.
68. Bunyan, Pilgrim’s Progress, 86.
69. Bunyan, Pilgrim’s Progress, 87.
70. Calvin, Institutes, 262.
71. J. Franklin Jameson, ed., Johnson’s Wonder-Working Providence, 1628–1651 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1910), 154. For an encompassing account of this relationship between commerce, material progress, and American Puritanism see Mark A. Peterson, The Price of Redemption: The Spiritual Economy of Puritan New England (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997).
72. Jameson, ed., Johnson’s Wonder-Working Providence, 209.
73. Mark Valeri, Heavenly Merchandize: How Religion Shaped Commerce in Puritan America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010), 113.
74. Valeri, Heavenly Merchandize, 58.
75. Several such maps of the pilgrim’s progress were printed in the nineteenth century in London. J. Pitts’s 1813 map (plate 5) inspired several more. The Reverend Daniel Wight used Pitts’s image as the basis for a design that was produced as a lavish, large-scale engraving in 1853, entitled Bunyan’s Pilgrim, engraved by J. Andrews, etched by E.A. Fowle, designed by Wight, drawn by H. Billings, and published by John P. Jewett and Co., Cornhill, Boston. A copy is in the collection of the American Antiquarian Society. Another version of Wight’s image was produced as a wood engraving in London in 1860, as John Bunyan’s Dream of the Pilgrim’s Progress, with a Key. A version of this latter appeared as “John Bunyan, A Pilgrim’s Progress,” in The Sunday at Home 4, no. 431 (August 2, 1862): 488. Other examples of maps of the book also exist. See for example Map of the Pilgrim’s Progress by John Melish, an American cartographer, produced sometime before 1822; an example can be found in the American Antiquarian Society. Another nineteenth-century instance is A Plan of the road from the City of Destruction to the Celestial City, engraved for William’s Elegant Edition of The Pilgrim’s Progress.
76. Louisa May Alcott, Little Women, ed. Elaine Showalter (New York: Penguin, 1989), 9.
77. Ulrich Zwingli, Commentary on True and False Religion, eds. Samuel Macauley Jackson and Clarence Nevin Heller (Durham, North Carolina: The Labyrinth Press, 1981), 331. The suggestion was, as Lee Palmer Wandel’s work on reformation iconoclasm has shown, a widely shared commonplace among reforming voices in Zurich and Strasbourg; see Wandel, Voracious Idols and Violent Hands: Iconoclasm in Reformation Zurich, Strasbourg, and Basel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 66, 79, 97–98, and 124–27.
78. See the various epistles and encyclicals of popes Pius VII (1816), Leo XII (1824), Gregory XVI (1844), and Pius IX (1864), in The Sources of Catholic Dogma, trans. Roy J. Deferrari, from the thirteenth edition of Henry Denziger’s Enchiridion Symbolorum (Fitzwilliam, NH: Loreto Publications, 1955), 398–401, 409, and 437.
79. For an account, see Richard Shaw, Dagger John: The Unquiet Life and Times of Archbishop John Hughes of New York (New York: Paulist Press, 1977), 186–87. The burning was organized by an itinerant French friar who had crossed the Canadian border and collected forty-two Bibles from parishioners in Champlain, which he burned despite opposition from the local diocesan priest. The Bibles, distributed by a local Bible Society chapter, would have been most likely duodecimo-size (7–3/8 × 5 inches), not the costly folio-sized, heavily bound volumes shown in the illustration. The event was quickly denounced by the bishop of Montreal, but nonetheless became iconic in Nativist Protestant discourse and was tirelessly repeated.
When a Catholic priest in Providence defended the destruction of the Bibles on the basis of the “unfaithfulness of the Protestant version,” anti-Catholic writer and Baptist minister John Dowling (1807–78) responded with two articles in the Providence Journal, and then republished these in a volume on the incident, The Burning of Bibles: Defence of the Protestant Version of the Scriptures against the Attacks of Popish Apologists for the Champlain Bible Burners (Philadelphia: Nathan Moore, 1843), to which he added a number of other anti-Catholic commonplaces. Dowling reprinted a letter to a newspaper editor by four Protestant inhabitants of Champlain who provided their version of the event. The letter stated that “the number burned altogether we are not able accurately to ascertain; more than one hundred no doubt; perhaps two or three hundred,” 23. The letter went on to say that the president of Champlain’s Bible Society had approached the priests to request that “inasmuch as the Bibles had been given by the different won Societies, they should be returned to the donors, and not destroyed,” 24. The irony is worth noting: Luther had urged iconoclasts to do just this with images donated to churches, rather than sanctioning their destruction.
Dowling reprinted much of the account in the 1845 and subsequent editions of his History of Romanism, but there significantly reduced the number of bibles burned to “as many bibles as he [the Jesuit missionary whom he claimed had staged the burning] could carry in his arms at three times,” Reverend John Dowling, The History of Romanism: From the Earliest Corruptions of Christianity to the Present Time, 6th ed. (New York: Edward Walker, 1845), 613. His 1845 account first carried the illustration reproduced here (figure 24). But the earlier and exaggerated estimates first publicized by Dowling remained in the literature for many years. Several years later, for example, a controversial Nativist congressman from Pennsylvania (responsible for inciting crowds in Philadelphia in 1844 to riots that ended in the burning of several Catholic churches and a monastery), opposing the establishment of a diplomatic mission to the Vatican, claimed in a speech that on this occasion “upwards of twenty Bibles were shamefully, publicly burnt” in October 1842, at Corbeau, a hamlet within the precinct of Champlain; “Speech of Mr. L(ewis). C(harles). Levin, of Penn., on the Proposed Mission to Rome, delivered in the House of Representatives of the United States, March 2, 1848 (Washington, DC: J. and G.S. Gideon, 1848), 15, note. The story was still in circulation in Reverend Samuel W. Barnum’s Romanism as It Is: An Exposition of the Roman Catholic System for the Use of the American People (Hartford: Connecticut Publishing Company, 1871), 418, where the number of bibles burned had been scaled back to forty-two, though another source is cited as having said one hundred.
80. See Russell H. Conwell, Acres of Diamonds (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2002), 34–39.
81. Quoted from another version of Conwell’s sermon, reprinted in R. Marie Griffith, American Religions: A Documentary History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 309.
82. Griffith, American Religions, 305.
83. Griffith, American Religions, 306.
84. Conwell, Acres of Diamonds, 27.
85. Autobiography of Andrew Carnegie (Boston: Houghton and Mifflin Company, 1924), 255.
86. Kenneth Copeland, The Laws of Prosperity (Greensburg, PA: Manna Christian Outreach, 1974), 19.
87. Friedman made this argument in the first chapter of Capitalism and Freedom (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962).
88. Copeland, Laws of Prosperity, 23.
89. Copeland, Laws of Prosperity, 58.
90. Copeland, Laws of Prosperity, 74–75. For a fascinating discussion of money, gifting, Pentecostalism, and the materializing of words, see Simon Coleman, “Materializing the Self: Words and Gifts in the Construction of Charismatic Protestant Identity,” in The Anthropology of Christianity ed. Fenella Canenell (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006), 163–84, esp. 175–80.
91. Copeland, Laws of Prosperity, 33–4.
92. Copeland, Laws of Prosperity, 34.
93. Copeland, Laws of Prosperity, 9.
94. Copeland, Laws of Prosperity, 52.
95. Copeland, Laws of Prosperity, 27.
96. Copeland, Laws of Prosperity, 45.
97. Copeland, Laws of Prosperity, 50.
98. Copeland, Laws of Prosperity, 45.
99. Copeland, Laws of Prosperity, 69.
100. Not to be found in the Bible, according to Copeland, poverty entered Christianity as a religion “during the Dark Ages when the Word was taken from the people and put away in monasteries. Poverty oaths were fed into Christianity when the religious hierarchy took over. The men operating it were not born-again men,” Laws of Prosperity, 32.
101. Asonzeh Ukah, “Roadside Pentecostalism: Religious Advertising in Nigeria and the Marketing of Charisma,” Critical Interventions: Journal of African Art History and Visual Culture 2 (Spring 2008): 125–41; see also Asonzeh Ukah, “Branding God: Advertising and the Pentecostal Industry in Nigeria,” LIWURAM: Journal of the Humanities 13 (2006): 83–106. For an insightful study of the role of visuality in Pentecostalism’s contribution to the public sphere in Ghana, see Birgit Meyer, “Impossible Representations: Pentecostalism, Vision, and Video Technology in Ghana,” in Religion, Media, and the Public Sphere, eds. Birgit Meyer and Annelies Moors (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006), 290–312; and J. Kwabena Asamoah-Gyadu, “Of Faith and Visual Alertness: The Message of ‘Mediatized’ Religion in an African Pentecostal Context,” Material Religion 1, no. 3 (2005): 340–46.
102. Facebook page of Heal the World Mission Inc., www.facebook.com/healtheworldmission/info, accessed October 15, 2012.
103. My thanks for Asonzeh Ukah for very helpful conversation on Nigerian Pentecostalism, which he has studied very closely, especially with respect to economy and advertising.
1. Louis Klopsch, “Explanatory Note,” in The Holy Bible: Red Letter Edition (New York: Christian Herald, 1901), xvi.
2. Both pamphlets were prompt retorts to Karlstadt’s tract, On The Removal of Images: Hieronymous Emser, That One Should Not Remove Images of the Saints from the Churches Nor Dishonour Them and That They Are Not Forbidden in Scripture, 1522; and Johannes Eck, On Not Removing Images of Christ and the Saints, 1522. All three tracts are translated and published in Bryan D. Mangrum and Guiseppe Scavizzi, trans. and eds., A Reformation Debate: Karlstadt, Emser, and Eck on Sacred Images. Three Treatises in Translation (Toronto: Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 1998).
3. Council of Trent, in Norman P. Tanner, S.J., ed., Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils (London: Sheed and Ward; Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 1990), session 25, vol. 2, 775. All bishops “must also teach that images of Christ, the virgin mother of God, and the other saints should be set up and kept, particularly in churches, and that due honour and reverence is owed to them, not because some divinity or power is believed to lie in them as reason for the cult, or because anything is to be expected from them . . . but because honour showed to them is referred to the original which they represent.” The text goes on to cite the second council of Nicea, of 787, which championed the use of icons in the Byzantine church on the basis of this claim.
4. Martin Luther, “The Second Sermon, Monday after Invocavit,” The Eight Wittenberg Sermons, 1522, in Works of Martin Luther (Philadelphia: Muhlenberg Press, 1943), vol. 2, 397–98; Luther, Ausgewählte Werke, ed. Georg Merz, 3rd ed. (Munich: Chr. Raiser Verlag, 1957), vol. 4, 38: “den Gott soll mans anheimgeben und sein Wort alleine wirken lassen, nicht unser Zutun und Werk. Warum? Denn ich hab nicht in meiner Gewalt oder Hand ihre Herzen (der Menschen) als der Häfner den Leimen, mit ihm zu schaffen nach meinem Gefallen. Ich kann nich weiterkommen den zu den Ohren; ins Herz kann ich nicht kommen. Dieweil ich den den Glauben ins Herze nicht gieβen kann, so kann noch soll ich niemand dazu zwingen noch dringen, denn Gott tut das alleine und macht, daβ er zuvor im Herzen lebt . . . Man muβ der Leute Herz zum ersten fangen, das geschieht aber, wenn ich Gottes Wort alleine treibe, predige das Evangelium . . . . Wer da folgen wollte, der folgete, wer nicht wollt, bliebe auβen. Mit dem fiele das Wort unten in das Herze und wirkte.”
5. Luther, Wider die himmlischen Propheten, von den Bildern und Sakrament, 1525, in Luther, Ausgewählte Werke, vol. 4, 75: “Das Bilderstürmen habe ich also angegriffen, daβ ich sie zuerst durchs Wort Gottes aus denn Herzen risse und unwert und veracht machte: wie es den auch also schon geschehen ist, ehe denn D. Karlstadt vom Bilderstürmen träumte. Denn wo sie aus dem Herzen sind, tun sie vor den Augen keinen Schaden.”
6. See Innocent Chiluwa, “Religious Vehicle Stickers in Nigeria: A Discourse of Identity, Faith, and Social Vision,” Discourse and Communication 2, no. 4 (2008): 371–87, esp. 378.
7. On broadsides, see Tessa Watt, Cheap Print and Popular Piety, 1550–1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1901), 75–127; on house blessings and related display texts and illustrated texts in the nineteenth century, see Don Yoder, The Pennsylvania German Broadside: A History and Guide (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2005), 195–283; on Protestant women’s needlework, see Maureen Daly Goggin, “Visual Rhetoric in Pens of Steel and Inks of Silk: Challenging the Great Visual/Verbal Divide,” in Defining Visual Rhetorics, eds. Charles A. Hill and Marguerite Helmers (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2004; reprint, New York: Routledge, 2009), 87–110, and Lauren F. Winner, A Cheerful and Comfortable Faith: Anglican Religious Practice in the Elite Households of Eighteenth-Century Virginia (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), 60–89; on mottoes, see Colleen McDannell, Material Christianity: Religion and Popular Culture in America (London: Yale University Press, 1995), 46–52, 229–34; on Protestant textuality and healing, see Pamela E. Klassen, “Textual Healing: Mainstream Protestants and the Therapeutic Text, 1900–1925,” Church History 75, no. 4 (December 2006): 809–48. Closer to the present, anthropologist Simon Coleman has studied with great insight the discursive practices of Pentecostals who transform narratives and biblical texts into modes of embodiment in a variety of ways, then rearticulate them in a number of practices on a scale that constitutes a global habitus, in The Globalization of Charismatic Christianity: Spreading the Gospel of Prosperity (Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 2000), 117–42.
8. Pat Robertson, “The Law of Miracles,” The Secret Kingdom, Christian Broadcasting Network, CBN TV www.cbn.com/tv/1405564599001, accessed February 28, 2013.
9. My thanks to colleagues Shalom Goldman and Marc Brettler for their assistance with identifying the Hebrew letter.
10. In addition to Luther and Philipp Melanchton, the group includes Johannes Bugenhagen, Caspar Cruciger, Justus Jonas, and Matthäus Aurogallus. Before them lie a variety of open books labeled “Greek Bible,” “German Bible,” “Latin Bible,” “Hebrew Bible,” “Targum,” and “Rabbis.”
11. A Dutch example of the engraving, The Candle is Lighted, is in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, and dates to sometime between 1640 and 1684. For an English version of the print (though inaccurately titled), see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Calvinism#mediaviewer/File:Leading_Theologians_of_the_Middle_Ages.jpg, accessed February 26, 2015.
12. Johann Muthmann, “Vorede: Von der Schätzbarkeit der deutschen Uebersetzung Lutheri,” in Evangelische Deutsche Original-Bibel, 5. Emphasis in original. Muthmann paraphrased Psalm 36: 9 at the close of his preface, p. 24. The “Oriental” in the lower banner of the frontispiece may have derived from Muthmann’s figure of “der Aufgang aus der Höhe.” In traditional astronomical use, Aufgang refers to the ascension of the sun in the east, and therefore signifies the Orient.
13. Of course, this was not restricted to the Lutheran view of scripture. Calvin understood the authority of the Bible in a comparable manner: the scripture “came to us, by the instrumentality of men, from the very mouth of God,” John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans. Henry Beveridge (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eedrmans, 1989), 72.
14. Calvin, Institutes, 38. Although first published in 1536 as Institutio Christianae Religionis, I am using the English translation of the last and much expanded Latin edition of the text, published in 1559: Joannis Calvini, Institutionis Christianae religionis, in Opera Selecta, 2nd rev. ed., eds. Petrus Barth and Guilelmus Niesel (Munich: Chr. Kaiser, 1957), vol. 3.
15. Calvin, Institutes, 43; Institutionis Christianae religionis, 45: “sed ita se patefecit in toto mundi opificio, ac se quotidie palam offert, ut aperire oculos nequeant quin aspicere eum cogantur. Essentia quidem eius incomprehensibilis est, ut sensus omnes humanos procul effugiat eius numen: verum singulis operibus suis certas gloriae suae notas insculpsit, et quidem adeo claras et insignes u tsublata sit quanlibet rudibus et stupidis ignorantiae excusatio.”
16. Calvin, Institutes, 51. Wesley A. Kort has argued that Calvin’s reading of nature’s texts as “second scriptures” was an important turn toward modern practices of reading nature, history, and poetry as scriptures; “Calvin’s Theory of Reading,” Christianity and Literature 62, no. 2 (Winter 2013): 189–202, esp. 199.
17. Calvin, Institutes, 59; Institutionis Christianae religionis, 56: “stetuum enim cuique ingenium instar labyrinthi est, ut mirum non sit singulas Gentes in varia commenta diductas esse; neque id modo, sed singulis prope hominibus proprios fuisse deos.”
18. Calvin, Institutes, 62–3; Institutionis Christianae religionis, 60: “Simul enim ac modicum divinitatis gustum ex mundi speculatione delibavimus: vero Deo praetermisso, eiius loco somnia et spectra cerebri nostri erigimus.”
19. Calvin, Institutes, 64.
20. Calvin, Institutes, 64–65.
21. Calvin, Institutes, 66; Institutionis Christianae religionis, 62–63: “Ergo quanvis hominem serio oculos intendere conveniat ad consideranda Dei opera, quando in hoc splendidissimo theatro locates est ut eorum esset spectator: aures tamen praecipue arrigere convenit ad verbum, ut melius proficiat . . . . Quum itaque palam sit, Deum erga eos omnes quos unquam erudire cum fructu voluit, subsidium verbi adhibuisse, quod effigiem suam in pulcherrima mundi forma impressam, parum esse efficacem provideret: hac recta via contendere expedit, si ad synceram Dei contemplationem serio aspiramus. Ad verbum, inquam, est venienum, ubi probe, et ad vivum, nobis a suis operibus describatur Deus, dum opera ipsa non es iudicii nostril pravitate, sed aeterna veritatis regular aestimantur.”
22. Calvin, Institutes, 67.
23. Calvin, Institutes, 37.
24. Calvin, Institutes, 69.
25. Calvin, Institutes, 71; Institutionis Christianae religionis, 68–69: “Itaque summa Scripturae probatio passim a Dei loquentis persona sumitur . . . Imo si puros oculos, et integros sensus illuc afferimus, statim occurret Dei maiestas, quae subacta reclamandi audacia, nos simi parare cogat.”
26. Calvin, Institutes, 72.
27. Calvin, Institutes, 72–73, italics added; Institutionis Christianae religionis, 70–71: “Neque qualiter superstitionibus solent miseri homines captivam mentem addicere: sed quia non dubiam vim numinis illic sentimus vigere ac spirare, qua ad parendum, scientes quidem ac volentes, vividius tamen et efficacius quam pro humana aut voluntate, aut scientia trahimur et accendimur.”
28. Calvin, Institutes, 72; Institutionis Christianae religionis, 70: “Illius ergo virtute illuminati, iam nonaut nostro, aut aliorum iudicio credimus, a Deo esse Scripturam: sed supra humanum iudicium, certo certiius constituimus (non secus acsi ipsius Dei numen illic intueremur) homineum ministerio, ab ipsissimo Dei ore ad nos fluxisse.”
29. John Calvin, A Treatise on Relics, trans. Count Valerian Krasinki, 2nd ed. (Edinburgh: Johnstone, Hunter and Co., 1870), 162. Project Gutenberg eBook, www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/32136, accessed July 20, 2013. Jean Calvin, Traité des reliques, 1543, Avertissement contre l’astrologie: Traité des reliques (Paris: Librairie Armond Colin, 1962), 40–41: “Or, le premier vice, et comme la racine du mal, a été, qu’au lieu de chercher Jésus-Christ en sa parole, en ses sacrements et en ses graces spirituelles, le monde, selon sa coutume, s’est amuse à ses robes, chemises et drapeaux; et en ce faisant a laissé le principal, pour suivre l’accessoire.”
30. Calvin, Treatise on Relics, 163; Traité des reliques, 41: “Car il [Paul] proteste de ne le connoître plus selon la chair, après sa resurrection, admonestant par ces mots que tout ce qui est charnel en Jésus-Christ se doit oublier et mettre en arrière, afin d’employer et mettre toute notre affection à le chercher et posséder selon l’esprit.”
31. See Carlos M.N. Eire, War against the Idols: The Reformation of Worship from Erasmus to Calvin (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 72–73, for a discussion of his differences with Zwingli and others.
32. Martin Luther, “A Brief Instruction on What to Look for and Expect in the Gospels,” 1522, in Timothy F. Lull, ed., Martin Luther’s Basic Theological Writings (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1989), 110; “Ein kleiner Unterricht, was man in den Evangelien suchen und gewarten solle,” in Luthers Werke, ed. D. Buchwald et al, 3rd ed. (Berlin: C.A. Schwetschke und Sohn, 1905), vol. 5, 123: “Und Evangelium eigentlich nicht Schrift, sondern mündlich Wort sein sollte, das die Schrift hervor trüge, wie Christus und die Apostel gethan haben. Darum auch Christus selbst nichts geschrieben, sondern nur geredet hat, und seine Lehre nicht Schrift, sondern Evangelium, das ist, eine gute Botschaft oder Verkündigung genannt hat, das nicht mit der Feder, sondern mit dem Munde soll getrieben warden.”
33. R.W. Scribner, For the Sake of Simple Folk: Popular Propaganda for the German Reformation (Oxford: Clarendon, 1994), 161.
34. Raymond A. Mentzter, Jr., has discussed the use of biblical inscriptions in Huguenot churches. He points out that “decalogue boards” appeared in French and Dutch churches in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. These were tables displaying the Ten Commandments and appeared on walls behind and above the pulpit; see Mentzer, “The Reformed Churches of France and the Visual Arts,” in Paul Corby Finney, ed., Seeing Beyond the Word: Visual Arts and the Calvinist Tradition (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1999), 216–17.
35. The text is signified by portions of the following French, imitating the abbreviated Latin inscriptions on Roman altars and public tablets, which the pedestal forms in the painting recall: “Tu aimeras le Seigneur ton Dieu de tout ton coeur, de toute ton âme et de tout ton esprit,” and “Tu aimeras ton prochain comme toi-meme.” For a discussion of Lyon’s religious upheaval at this moment, see Timothy Watson, “Preaching, Printing, Psalm-Singing: The Making and Unmaking of the Reformed Church in Lyon, 1550–1572,” in Raymond A. Mentzer and Andrew Spicer, eds., Society and Culture in the Huguenot World 1559–1685 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 10–28; and on Huguenot temples see, in the same volume, Andrew Spicer, “‘Qui est de Dieu oit la parole de Dieu’: The Huguenots and Their Temples,” 175–92; and Hélène Guicharnaud, “An Introduction to the Architecture of Protestant Temples Constructed in France before the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes,” in Finney, ed., Seeing Beyond the Word, 133–55, esp. 142. For an essay devoted to the architecture of the Temple de Paradis, see Bernard Reymond, “D’où le temple Paradis (1564–1567) tenait-il son modèle?” in Le Bulletin de la Société de l’Histoire du Protestantisme Français, no. 145 (April-June 1999): 263–84.
36. Calvin, Institutes, 324.
37. D.-F. Sécousse, ed., Memoires de Condé, 6 vols. (London: Claude de Bosc et Guillaume Darrés, 1743), vol. 2, 372.
38. Sécousse, ed., Memoires de Condé, 370.
39. The Edict of Saint Germaine (1562) allowed private construction outside walled cities and the Edict of Amboise (1563) allowed worship in certain cities, in the suburb of one city in each magistrate’s jurisdiction, and on the grounds and in the homes of certain nobles. For further discussion see Spicer, “‘Qui est de Dieu’,” 180–81; Mack P. Holt, The French Wars of Religion, 1562–1629, 2nd edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 50–75; and Olivier Christin, “From Repression to Pacification: French Royal Policy in the Face of Protestantism,” in Reformation, Revolt and Civil War in France and the Netherlands 1555–1585, eds. Philip Benedict, Guido Marnef, Henk van Nierop, and Marc Venard (Amsterdam: Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, 1997), 201–14, esp. 211–12.
40. For a historical overview of the religious landscape in England in the late eighteenth century, see David Hempton, “Enlightenment and Faith,” in The Eighteenth Century, 1688–1815, ed. Paul Langford. Short Oxford History of The British Isles (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 71–100; for a narrative on British and American Evangelicals in the period, see Richard Cawardine, Trans-Atlantic Revivalism: Popular Evangelicalism in Britain and America, 1790–1865 (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1978).
41. As archdeacon of St. Alban’s in 1787, Samuel Horsley attacked Evangelical ministers as unequal to the calling of Established clergy; see Horsley, A Sermon, preached in the Cathedral Church of Glocester, at the Public Ordination of Priests and Deacons, On Sunday, September 9, 1787, by the Rev. Samuel Horsley, LL.D, F.R.S., Archdeacon of St. Alban’s and Prebendary of Glocester. Published by the command of the Right Rev. The Lord Bishop of Glocester (Glocester: R. Raikes, 1787). Horsley continued his attack on Methodists and Dissenters after he was elevated to the rank of bishop and took a seat in Parliament; see “The Charge of Samuel, Lord Bishop of St. David’s, to the Clergy of his Diocese; delivered at his primary Visitation, in the year 1790,” 32–34, and “The Charge of Samuel, Lord Bishop of Rochester, to the Clergy of his Diocese; delivered at his second general visitation, in the year 1800,” 148, both in The Charges of Samuel Horsley, LL.D.F.R.S.F.A.S. Late Lord Bishop of St. Asaph; delivered at his several Visitations of the Dioceses of St. David’s, Rochester, and St. Asaph (Dundee: Robert Stephen Rintoul, for James Chalmers, 1813).
42. The Debate in the House of Commons on Mr. Beaufoy’s Motion for the Repeal of Such Parts of the Test and Corporation Acts as affect the Protestant Dissenters, on Friday the Eighth of May, 1789 (London: Printed for J. Johnson, 1789), 70: “Mr. Pitt declared, he was ready to do justice to the Dissenters of former times, as he was ready to do justice to the present. It was not on the ground that they would do any thing to affect the civil Government of the country, that they had been excluded from holding civil offices, but that if they had any additional degree of power in their hands, they might.”
43. See “The Charge of Samuel, Lord Bishop of Rochester, to the Clergy of his Diocese; delivered at his second general visitation, in the year 1800,” 145.
44. Debate on the Repeal of the Test and Corporation Act, Wednesday, March 28, 1787 (London: John Stockdale, 1787), 60: Ayes, 100; Noes, 178; Majority against the motion to repeal, 78; The Debate in the House of Commons on Mr. Beaufoy’s Motion for the Repeal of Such Parts of the Test and Corporation Acts as affect the Protestant Dissenters, on Friday the Eighth of May, 1789 (London: J. Johnson, 1789), 98: Ayes, 102; Noes, 122; majority against the motion to repeal, 20; The Debate in the House of Commons, on the Repeal of the Corporation and Test Acts, March 2, 1790. 2nd ed. (London: John Stockdale, 1790), 59: Ayes, 105; Noes, 294; majority against repeal, 189.
45. David Bogue and James Bennett, History of Dissenters, from the Revolution in 1688, to the Year 1808. 4 vols. (London: printed for the authors, 1808–12), vol. 4, 187, 212, 217, 250, and 433.
46. Andrew Fuller, A Sermon on the Importance of a Deep and Intimate Knowledge of Divine Truth (Elizabethtown, NJ: Shepard Kollock, [1796]), 34.
47. Fuller, A Sermon , 16.
48. Fuller, A Sermon , 16.
49. I have examined the same process in the premillennial theology of William Miller in the United States; David Morgan, Protestants and Pictures: Religion, Visual Culture, and the Age of American Mass Production (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 124–28. Also a Baptist, Miller may very well have read Fuller’s sermon.
50. “Objections against a Mission to the Heathen, Stated and Considered, preached at Tottenham Court Chapel, before the Founders of the Missionary Society, On Thursday the 24th September, 1795, by David Bogue, of Gosport,” in Sermons, Preached in London, at the Formation of the Missionary Society, September 22, 23, 24, 1795 (London: T. Chapman, 1795), 130.
51. For an account of the voyage, see John Griffin, Memoirs of Captain James Wilson: Containing an Account of His Enterprises and Sufferings in India, His Conversion to Christianity, His Missionary Voyage to the South Seas, and His Peaceful and Triumphant Death, 2nd ed. (London: Williams and Son, [1815?]).
52. See the following works by members of the magazine’s editorial board: George Burder, Village Sermons, or, Short and Plain Discourses for the Use of Families, Schools, and Religious Societies (London: Black, Parry and Kingsbury, 1812); William Kingsbury, An Apology for Village Preachers (London: T. Baker, 1798). For a polemical reply by two editors of the Evangelical Magazine to Samuel Horsley’s criticism of Dissenter Sunday schools in his “Charge” of 1800, see John Townsend, Hints on Sunday Schools and Itinerant Preaching; in a Letter to the Bishop of Rochester (London: printed for the author, 1801) and Rowland Hill, An Apology for Sunday Schools: The Substance of a Sermon, preached at Surry Chapel, February 22, 1801 . . . with Incidental Remarks on the late Charge of the Right. Rev. The Lord Bishop of Rochester (London: C. Whittingham, and T. Williams, [1801]).
53. [Reverend David Bogue,] An Address to Christians, on the Distribution of Religious Tracts, No. 1 (London: Printed for the RTS by P. Applegath and E. Cowper, [1799]), 3.
54. Report of the Directors to the Members of the Missionary Society, at the Fourth General Meeting (London: T. Chapman, 1798), 16.
55. Report of the Directors to the Members of the Missionary Society, At their Fifth Annual Meeting (London: T. Chapman, 1799), vi-vii.
56. An Account of the Origin and Progress of the London Religious Tract Society (London: Printed by A. Paris, 1803), 32.
57. Bogue, Address, 5.
58. Bogue, Address, 15.
59. Proceedings of the First Twenty Years of the Religious Tract Society (London: Benjamin Bensley, 1820), 257.
60. Bogue, Address to Christians, 10–11.
61. David Bogue, The Diffusion of Divine Truth: A Sermon preached before the Religious Tract Society, on Lord’s Day, May 18, 1800 (London: S. Rousseau for the Religious Tract Society, 1800), 10.
62. Bogue, Diffusion of Divine Truth, 10–11, 41.
63. John Gillies, quoted in Harry S. Stout, The Divine Dramatist: George Whitefield and the Rise of Modern Evangelicalism (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1991), 140.
64. Morgan, Protestants and Pictures, 6–8.
65. I have discussed this in David Morgan, “Protestant Visual Piety and the Aesthetics of American Mass Culture,” in Mediating Religion: Conversations in Media, Religion and Culture, eds. Jolyon Mitchell and Sophia Marriage (London: Continuum, 2003), 107–20, and in The Lure of Images: A History of Religion and Visual Media in America (London: Routledge, 2007), 31–36.
66. Bogue, An Address to Christians, 11.
67. Anecdotes, Part I, Tract No. 162 (London: A. Applegath and E. Cowper, [1808]), 7–8.
68. For a fascinating overview of the history of Evangelical fiction and reading in nineteenth-century America, see R. Laurence Moore, Selling God: American Religion in the Marketplace of Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 12–39.
69. C.I. Latrobe, A Concise Account of the Present State of the Missions of the United Brethren (Commonly called Moravians) (London: Glendinning, 1801), 9.
70. Samuel Greatheed, “Plan of a General Union among Real Christians,” General Union Recommended to Real Christians, in a Sermon, preached at Bedford, October 31, 1797 (London: T. Conder, W. Button, and T. Chapman, 1798), xvii. The editors of the Evangelical Magazine enthusiastically promoted the Bedfordshire Union plan, “Befordshire Union,” Evangelical Magazine 5 (October 1797), 425–28.
71. Bogue, “Objections against a Mission to the Heathen,” in Sermons, 127.
72. A very fine study of the place of writing in British mission efforts is Anna Johnston, Missionary Writing and Empire, 1800–1860 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
73. Marilla Baker Ingalls, Ocean Sketches of Life in Burmah (Philadelphia: American Baptist Publication Society, 1858), 48.
74. “From a Speech of C.S. Dudley, Esq., at a late meeting of the Southampton Bible Society, England,” 1817, reprinted in Proceedings of the First Twenty Years, 178. It is impossible to know with certainty how much of this account was concocted or assembled from numerous other narratives. Of course, its accuracy was of little importance to the cultural work it performed among Christians in the United States. But the anecdote’s details are suggestive. The final detail regarding the merchant’s inability to return to China may also reflect a real circumstance: ostracism for betraying family and clan might await a Christian convert in China.
75. Letter from Reverend Joseph Edkins, 12 April 1852, in Missionary Sketches, no. 137 (October 1852), 2. Edkins went on to become a learned and well-published scholar of Chinese and Chinese religions.
76. The Kan Ying Pien: Books of Rewards and Punishments, trans. James Webster (Taipei: Ch’eng Wen, 1971).
77. For a discussion of Christian textualism and textual imperialism in Indian mission efforts, see Richard King, Orientalism and Religion: Postcolonial Theory, India and ‘The Mystic East’ (London: Routledge, 1999), 101–8.
78. David Shaw King, Food for the Flames: Idols and Missionaries in Central Polynesia (San Francisco: Beak Press, 2011), 30–31.
79. For discussion of such objects and the LMS Museum, see Sujit Sivasundaram, Nature and the Godly Empire: Science and Evangelical Mission in the Pacific, 1795–1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 181–85; David Morgan, “Thing,” Material Religion 7, no. 1 (March 2011), 140–46; and Rosemary Seton, “Reconstructing the Museum of the London Missionary Society,” Material Religion 8, no. 1 (2012): 98–102.
80. “Destruction of Idols,” Missionary Register, March 1820, 127.
81. “Amboyna,” Twenty-sixth Report, 1820, 39.
82. For a harrowing account of the series of temple and image burnings in 1830 on the island of Rarotogna, see the “Translation of a Letter received from Papeiha, Native Teacher at Rarotogna,” Transactions of the Missionary Society, April 1831, in Quarterly Chronicle (1833), 291–93. The LMS expressed general approbation of this iconoclastic violence in Missionary Sketches, see “Destruction of Idols,” no. 22 (July 1823), 4.
83. “Abolition of Idolatry,” Missionary Register, February 1818, 68. See King, Food for the Flames, for careful documentation and narration of LMS mission history and its interaction with indigenous culture in Polynesia. For fascinating and insightful studies of the museum formed from the collection of cult objects from Oceania and elsewhere by the LMS, see King, Food for the Flames, 53–67, and 195–206; for the LMS catalogue and the portion of its collection that went to the British Museum, see Christopher Wingfield, “The Moving Objects of the London Missionary Society,” PhD thesis, University of Birmingham, 2012.
84. “Java,” Twenty-third Report of the Missionary Society, 1817, 10; see also Supper’s letter to Steinkopf, dated August 12, 1816, reproduced in the appendix to the same issue, 54.
85. “Twenty-first Annual Report of the Religious Tract Society,” abstracted in Missionary Register, December 1820, 512–14.
86. “Nineteenth Report of the Religious Tract Society,” abstracted in Missionary Register, October 1818, 407.
87. Twenty-third Report of the Religious Tract Society,” abstracted in Missionary Register, November 1822, 467,
88. “Circulation of Chinese and Malay Scriptures and Tracts,” Missionary Register, May 1820, 216.
89. “Twentieth Report of the Religious Tract Society,” abstracted in Missionary Register, September 1819, 392.
90. “Anecdotes and Incidents interspersed throughout the foregoing Journal,” Tranquebar, March 15, 1805, in Transactions in the Years 1803–1806, vol. 2, 423.
91. “Extracts from the Journal of the Missionary Ringeltaube,” Transactions to the end of the Year 1812, vol. 3, 138–39.
1. I do not undertake an intellectual history of the imagination, but limit my remarks to the role of nationhood and the likeness of Jesus as principal and characteristic forms of engaging imagination among Protestants and Catholics in the modern era. For a brief sketch of key contributions to the history of the imagination in Western philosophy and theology, see the Introduction. For work on the modern history of imagination, see Horst Bredekamp, Christiane Kruse, and Pablo Schneider, eds. Imagination und Repräsentation: Zwei Bildsphären der Frühen Neuzeit (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2010); Volkard Wels, “Zur Vorgeshichte des Begriffs der ‘kreativen Phantasie,’” Zeitschrift für Ästhetik und Allgemeine Kunstwissenschaft 50 (2005): 199–226; Alessandro Nova and Klaus Krüger, eds., Imagination und Wirklichkeit: Zum Verhältnis von mentalen und realen Bildern in der Kunst der frühen Neuzeit (Mainz: Philipp von Zabern, 2000).
2. Richard King, Orientalism and Religion: Postcolonial Theory, India, and “The Mystic East” (London: Routledge, 1999), 96–117; and Brian K. Pennington, Was Hinduism Invented? Britons, Indians, and the Colonial Construction of Religion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).
3. For the importance of the idea of the nation as body in the Orientalist construction of India, see Ronald Inden, Imagining India (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000), 7–13.
4. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans. Henry Beveridge (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1989), 97; Jean Calvin, Institution de la Religion Chrestienne, ed. Abel Lefranc, Henri Chatelain and Jacques Pannier (Paris: Librairie Honoré Champion, 1911), 131: “Premierement l’entendement de l’homme, comme il creve d’orgueil et de temerité, ose imaginer Dieu selon son apprehension: et comme il est plein de rudesse et ignorance, au lieu de Dieu, il ne conceoit que vanité et un phantasme.” A fascinating study of the theological evolution of the idea of imagination in the Reformed tradition is William A. Dyrness, Reformed Theology and Visual Culture: The Protestant Imagination from Calvin to Edwards (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).
5. Thomas Shepard, The Sincere Convert, in The Works of Thomas Shepard, vol. 1 (New York: AMS Press, 1967), 107.
6. John Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress, ed. W.R. Owens (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 10.
7. Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy I: Inferno, trans. and ed. Robin Kirkpatrick (London: Penguin, 2006), p. 3 (canto 1, lines 1–3).
8. For a study of the literary form of the late medieval dream vision and its history see J. Stephen Russell, The English Dream Vision: Anatomy of a Form (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1988).
9. Thomas Hobbes, Elements of Law Natural and Public, ed. Ferdinand Tönnies (London: Simpkin, Marshall, 1889), part 1, chap. 1, para. 8, p. 2.
10. Hobbes, Elements of Law, part 1, chap. 3, para. 1, p. 8.
11. John Milton, Paradise Lost, ed. Scott Elledge, Norton Critical Edition, 2nd ed. (New York: W.W. Norton, 1993), book 5, lines 105–8, p. 116.
12. Bunyan, Pilgrim’s Progress, 11.
13. Bunyan, Pilgrim’s Progress, 14.
14. Bunyan, Pilgrim’s Progress, 15.
15. Milton, Paradise Lost, book 5, lines 571–76, p. 128. Reference to Milton by David Hawkes, in John Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress (New York: Barnes and Noble Classics, 2005), 344–45.
16. Alberto Ronco, Fortezza reale del cuore humano (Modena: Cassian, 1628), 55: “Cosi puoi dire, ò anima mia, riuolta al dolcissimo Giesù, metre lo comtempli sedente nel tuo cuore, e che l’adorna, fregia, dipinge, e riccama cò i colori delle virtù; tu mi creaste, o signore, e doppò d’hauermi creata ponesti la mano della tua gratia nel mio cuore per abbellirlo, e qui potrai anima mia far guiditio dell’affettione, & amore del tuo Dio verso di te, mentre non solo ti creò ad imagine, e somiglianza sua, quando disse, faciamus hominem ad imaginem, & similitudinem nostrum, mà ti fregiò di tanti doni, e fauori.”
17. Ronco, Fortezza reale, 1.
18. Hannah More, Practical Piety, in The Works of Hannah More, 7 vols. (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1855), vol. 4, 14.
19. More, Practical Piety, 113. The idea of the inner eye may derive from Adam Smith’s notion of the internal spectator as described in his Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759).
20. Hannah More, “The Sunday School,” Stories for Persons of the Middle Ranks, in The Works of Hannah More, 2 vols. (Boston: S.G. Goodrich, 1827), vol. 1, 180.
21. Hannah More, The Shepherd of Salisbury Plain (West Smithfield: J. Evans and Co., printers to the Cheap Repository for Moral and Religious Tracts; London: Hatchard; Bath: S. Hazard, 1795), 2–3.
22. More, Shepherd of Salisbury Plain, 6.
23. More, The Shepherd of Salisbury Plain , 16–17.
24. More, Practical Piety, 119.
25. More, Practical Piety, 122.
26. More, Practical Piety, 94.
27. More, Practical Piety, 98.
28. More, Practical Piety, 100.
29. The image of Leviathan has been very carefully and insightfully discussed by Horst Bredekamp, “Thomas Hobbes’s Visual Strategies,” in The Cambridge Companion to Hobbes’s Leviathan, ed. Patricia Springborg (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 29–60; and Bredekamp, Thomas Hobbes Visuelle Strategien Der Levithan: Urbild des modernen Staats (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1999).
30. Ernest Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957), 9.
31. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Edwin Curley (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1994), 109 (part 2, ch. 17, para. 13).
32. Bredekamp, “Thomas Hobbes’s Visual Strategies,” 30–3.
33. Hobbes, Leviathan, 106 (part 2, ch. 17, para. 1).
34. Hobbes, Leviathan, 109 (12, 13). For consideration of Hobbes within the history of early modern British political thought, see Glenn Burgess, British Political Thought, 1500–1660 (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 296–323; for a fascinating study of images of kingship in England, see Richard C. McCoy, Alterations of State: Sacred Kingship in the English Reformation (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002).
35. This is a highly condensed characterization, but I prefer to direct the reader to specialists engaged in the much-contested topic of the nation and its origin. For a very fine and learned introduction to the definition of nationhood see Peter Hoppenbrouwers, “The Dynamics of National Identity in the Later Middle Ages,” in Networks, Regions and Nations: Shaping Identities in the Low Countries, 1300–1650, eds. Robert Stein and Judith Pollmann (Leiden: Brill, 2010), 19–41. Hoppenbrouwers makes a case for situating the birth of nationhood in the late Middle Ages. Adrian Hastings, The Construction of Nationhood: Ethnicity, Religion and Nationalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), is a spirited argument not only for a medieval basis for nations, but for an explicitly Christian influence, according religion a principal role in the formation of nationhood. Patrick J. Geary mounts strong opposition to dating the process to the earlier Middle Ages, The Myth of Nations: The Medieval Origins of Europe (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002). For the perennial account of nationalism see John Armstrong, Nations Before Nationalism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982). Among the most influential modernist explications of nationhood are Eric Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1991), and Liah Greenfeld, Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992). A very clear and informed overview of the debate, and one that favors in the end a modern definition of nation and nationalism, is Anthony D. Smith, The Nation in History: Historiographical Debates about Ethnicity and Nationalism (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 2000), 27–51.
36. Anderson, Imagined Communities, 37–46.
37. Hannah More, Moral Sketches of Prevailing Opinions and Manners, Foreign and Domestic (Boston: Wells and Lilly, 1819), 5.
38. More, Moral Sketches , 12–13.
39. More, Moral Sketches , 66.
40. More, Moral Sketches , 53.
41. See Raymond Jonas, France and the Cult of the Sacred Heart: An Epic Tale for Modern Times (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 24–27.
42. Margaret Mary Alacoque, letter 100, to Mother de Saumaise, June 1689, The Letters of St. Margaret Mary Alacoque, Apostle of the Sacred Heart, trans. Father Clarence A. Herbst, S.J. (Rockford, IL: TAN Books, 1997), 147. The French original, Sainte Marguerite-Marie, Oeuvres choisies (Paray-Le-Monial: Monastère de la Visitation Sainte-Marie, 1962), 238–39, reads: “Il désire donc, ce me semble, entrer avec pompe et magnificence dans la maison des princes et des rois, pour y être honoré autant qu’il y a été outragé, méprisé et humilié en sa Passion, et qu’il reçoive autant de plaisir de voir les grands de la terre abaissés et humiliés devant lui, comme il a senti d’amertume de se voir anéanti à leurs pieds. Et voici les paroles que j’entendis au sujet de notre Roi: ‘Fais savoir au Fils aîné de mon sacré Cœur que, comme sa naissance temporelle a été obtenue par la dévotion aux mérites de ma sainte Enfance, de même il obtiendra sa naissance de grâce et de gloire éternelle par la consecration qu’il fera de lui-même à mon Cœur adorable, qui veut triompher du sien, et par son entremise, de celui des grands de la terre. Il veut régner dans son palais, être peint dans ses étendards et gravé dans ses armes, pour les render victorieuses de tous ses ennemis, en abattant à ses pieds ces têtes orgueilleuses et superbes, pour le render victorieux de tous les ennemis de la sainte Eglise.’”
43. I have examined the history of the Sacred Heart in this regard, see The Embodied Eye: Religious Visual Culture and the Social Life of Feeling (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), 127–36.
44. Jonas offers a helpful historical account of the Sacré-Coeur within French national history and the Sacred Heart of Jesus: France and the Cult of the Sacred Heart, 198–223.
45. John Winthrop, “A Modell of Christian Charity,” 1630, reprinted in Conrad Cherry, ed., God’s New Israel: Religious Interpretations of American Destiny, rev. ed. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 39. For a compelling history of the republican ideal in British Protestantism from Tudor England to the Massachusetts Bay Colony see Michael P. Winship, Godly Republicanism: Puritans, Pilgrims, and a City on a Hill (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012).
46. Winthrop, “A Modell,” 40.
47. Winthrop, “A Modell,” 39.
48. Winthrop, “A Modell,” 40.
49. Jonathan Edwards, “The Latter-Day Glory Is Probably to Begin in America,” 1743, reprinted in Cherry, ed., God’s New Israel, 54–58.
50. Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress, 229.
51. See Hawkes, commentary to Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress, 361n21.
52. Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress, 202.
53. I have discussed Boughton’s picture and its historical situation, “Painting as Visual Evidence,” in Using Visual Evidence, eds. Richard Howells and Robert W. Matson (London: Open University Press, 2009), 8–23, and in “The Protestant Image of the Bible in America,” in The Bible in the Public Square, eds. Carol Meyers, Mark Chancey, and Eric Meyers (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2014), 102–4.
54. William George Read, Oration Delivered at the First Commemoration of the Landing of the Pilgrims of Maryland (Baltimore: John Murphy, 1842), 6.
55. Father Andrew White provided his own account in a report to the superior general of the Society of Jesus in Rome: “On the day of the annunciation of the Holy Virgin Mary, on the 25th of March, in the year 1634, we offered in this island [which they’d named Saint Clement’s Island, just off the coast of the mainland, downstream from where the Potomac intermingles with the Chesapeake Bay], for the first time, the sacrifice of the mass: in this region of the world it had never been celebrated before. Sacrifice being ended, having taken up on our shoulders the great cross which we had hewn from a tree, and going in procession to the place that had been designated, the Governor, commissioners, and other catholics participating in the ceremony, we erected it as a trophy to Christ the Saviour, while the litany of the holy cross was chaunted humbly on our bended knees, with great emotion of soul,” Father Andrew White, A Relation of the Colony of the Lord Baron of Baltimore, in Maryland, near Virginia; a Narrative of the Voyage to Maryland, trans. N.C. Brooks Force, Collection of Historical Tracts, vol. 4, no. 12 (Washington, DC, 1846), 19.
56. Read, Oration, 15.
57. Read, Oration, 44n1.
58. Read, Oration, 29.
59. Address of the Editorial Committee of the Catholic Tract Society of Baltimore to the Public (Baltimore: Catholic Tract Society, 1839), 2. Both this tract and Read’s Oration were printed by John Murphy in Baltimore, which may account for the availability of the engraving for the cover of Read’s speech.
60. See for example Theodore Maynard, The Catholic Church and the American Idea (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1953), 26: “The true line of descent therefore of the Founding Fathers was from Locke to Hooker and from Hooker to the scholastics.”
61. Read, Oration, 31–32. The “Act of Religious Toleration” has been viewed in different ways over the years. For the text of the Act, see “Maryland’s Act of Religious Toleration (1649),” in Mark Massa, S.J., with Catherine Osborne, ed. American Catholic History: A Documentary Reader (New York: New York University Press, 2004), 17–19; for historical discussions of the Act and the Maryland colony see James Hennesey, “Roman Catholicism: The Maryland Tradition,” 41–54, and Gerald P. Fogarty, S.J., “Property and Religious Liberty in Colonial Maryland Catholic Thought,” 55–82, in Early American Catholicism, 1634–1820: Selected Historical Essays, ed. Timothy Walch (New York: Garland Publishing, 1988).
62. Read, Oration, 32.
63. Robert Michaelson, “Common School, Common Religion? A Case Study in Church-State Relations, Cincinnati 1869–1870,” Church History 38, no. 2 (June 1969): 201–17; R. Laurence Moore, “Bible Reading and Nonsectarian Schooling: The Failure of Religious Instruction in Nineteenth-Century Public Education,” Journal of American History 86, no. 4 (March 2000): 1,581–599; Tracy Fessenden, “The Nineteenth-Century Bible Wars and the Separation of Church and State,” Church History 74, no. 4 (December 2005): 784–811; and for a detailed discussion of the Catholic history of the topic, see Jon Gjerde, Catholicism and the Shaping of Nineteenth-Century America, ed. S. Deborah King (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 138–75. For the visual history of the Bible and later flag controversies, see Morgan, The Sacred Gaze, 220–55, and “The Image of the Protestant Bible in America,” in The Bible in the Public Square, eds. Carol Meyers, Mark Chancey, Eric Meyers. Biblical Scholarship in North America (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2014), 93–120.
64. “Archbishop John Hughes Condemns the Public School Society of New York and New York Politicians,” in Massa, ed., American Catholic History, 48.
65. See Moore’s helpful research in, “Bible Reading and Nonsectarian Schooling.” For discussion of the bible controversy in Cincinnati, see Michealson, “Common School, Common Religion?” and Fessenden, “Nineteenth-Century Bible Wars,” 801–6.
66. Cited in Reverend George W. Gue, Our Country’s Flag (Davenport, IA: Edbert, Fidlar, and Chambers, 1890), 95. Gue was a member of the GAR and pastor of the First Methodist Episcopal Church of Rock Island, Illinois. He included in his book a poem entitled “Our Country’s Flag on God’s Sacred Altars,” by J.W. Temple, 93. On the page opposite Temple’s poem is an illustration of public school and a church flying the flag. As many of the quotations, speeches, verse, and hymns in Gue’s volume demonstrate, flag piety was born in the crisis of the Civil War.
67. Newton Bateman, “The Patriot’s Flag,” in Gue, Our Country’s Flag, 137.
68. Thus, the author of one well-known guide to the veneration of the flag in public schools, Colonel George T. Balch, criticized sectarian religious schooling, insisting that all Americans attend public schools, where they might be properly engaged in the civic piety of the nation; Balch, Methods of Teaching Patriotism in the Public Schools (New York: D. Van Nostrand, 1890), xviii. Catholic prelates meeting in the First and Second Plenary Councils of Baltimore (1852 and 1866) issued policies that required Catholic parents in America to send their children to Catholic schools. In 1875 the Vatican reinforced the councils’ directives; see “Instruction of the Propaganda Fide Concerning Catholic Children in American Public Schools,” in Massa, ed., American Catholic History, 54–7.
69. See Scot M. Guenter, The American Flag, 1777–1924: Cultural Shifts from Creation to Codification (Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses, 1990); Robert Justin Goldstein, ed., Desecrating the American Flag: Key Documents of the Controversy from the Civil War to 1995 (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1996); Cecilia Elizabeth O’Leary, To Die For: The Paradox of American Patriotism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), esp. 172–93; and Morgan, The Lure of Images, 187–95.
70. Guenter, The American Flag, 178.
71. Owen Chadwick, A History of the Popes 1830–1914 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), 72.
72. Chadwick, A History of the Popes, 92.
73. “Syllabus of Errors,” excerpted in The Sources of Catholic Dogma, trans. Roy J. Deferrari, from the thirteenth edition of Henry Denziger’s Enchiridion Symbolorum (Fitzwilliam, NH: Loreto Publications, 1955), 439.
74. “Syllabus of Errors,” 440.
75. Jay Dolan, In Search of an American Catholicism: A History of Religion and Culture in Tension (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 37.
76. Dolan, In Search, 54.
77. The image also appeared soon after on the cover of a brochure to promote the construction of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Washington, DC. The image is discussed in Thomas A. Tweed, America’s Church: The National Shrine and Catholic Presence in the Nation’s Capital (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 158, 185–86; see also Morgan, The Sacred Gaze, 245–47.
78. Read, Oration, 23. A contemporary speech celebrating Calvert, White, and their founding of the colony also made a point of holding up their peaceful and forthright relations with local Indians: “What is now St. Mary’s county was immediately purchased and payment made, not in fire arms or fire-water, but in hatchets, axes, hoes, and cloth. In other plantations pretended purchase were but bribes of present drunkenness for future slaughter, but here the means of tilling the soil and covering their nakedness were the substantial benefits conferred. If such had been the conduct of all the settlers, what protracted contexts, what sacrifice of human life, what national dishonor what terrible offerings on the altar of the Evil One might have been avoided!” William A. Stokes, “The Pilgrims of Maryland,” The Religious Cabinet 1, no. 4 (April 1842), 197.
79. See Tweed, America’s Church, 206–14, esp. 211 regarding Pfisterer.
80. An instructive survey of Black nationalist movements in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is E.U. Essien-Udom, Black Nationalism: A Search for an Identity in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962), 17–62. A more recent study of the topic, and one that includes a chapter on religion, is James Lance Taylor, Black Nationalism in the United States: From Malcolm X to Barack Obama (Boulder: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2011). A study of the nineteenth-century African colonization movement in the United States is P.J. Staudenraus, The African Colonization Movement 1816–1865 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1961). For a discussion of the racially grounded understanding of nationhood that informed the colonization idea, and the visceral reaction against it from many Black leaders, see Morgan, The Embodied Eye, 140–45. For an excellent tracing of the history of Black nationalism from Harlem to the present with respect to the legacy of African religious influence, see Tracey E. Hucks, Yoruba Traditions and African American Religious Nationalism (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2012).
81. Marcus Garvey, “An Appeal to the Conscience of the Black Race to See Itself,” 1923, reprinted in Let Nobody Turn Us Around: Voices of Resistance, Reform, and Renewal: An African American Anthology, eds. Manning Marable and Leith Mullings (Oxford: Rowan and Littlefield, 2000), 266.
82. Quoted in in Bruce J. Dierenfield and John White, A History of African-American Leadership, 3rd ed. (Harlow, England: Pearson, 2012), 97.
83. Garvey on the UNIA, 1914, quoted in Dierenfield and White, A History of African-American Leadership, 94.
84. Garvey, “An Appeal,” 267.
85. See www.jonmcnaughton.com/vedio3/, accessed November 27, 2012. On the history of the pledge see Ralph J. Ellis, To the Flag: The Unlikely History of the Pledge of Allegiance (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2005).
86. http://lds.about.com/od/historyfamilyhistory/a/Church-Dispensations.htm, accessed November 27, 2012. See also the entry “dispensation” in the Bible Dictionary of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, www.lds.org/scriptures/bd/dispensations?lang=eng&letter=d, accessed November 27, 2012.
87. A pertinent study of the American jeremiad tradition to the present day is Andrew R. Murphy, Prodigal Nation: Moral Decline and Divine Punishment from New England to 9/11 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009).
1. For a discussion of the letter of Publius Lentulus and its visual history, see Alexander Sturgis, “Diptych with the Head of Christ and the Lentulus Letter,” in The Image of Christ, ed. Gabriele Finaldi (London: National Gallery, 2000), 94–97.
2. The French text reads: “Je vous envoie ce Portrait et vous donne quelques détails d’un home d’une vertu singuliere que est en Judée dans ce moment, et qu’on appelle JÉSUS-CHRIST; Les barbares le croient prophète, mais ses sectateurs l’adorent comme descendu des Dieux immortels. Il ressucite les morts et guérit toutes sortes de maladies par la parole ou l’attouchement. Il est d’une taille grande et bien formée; il a l’air doux et vénérable; ses cheveux sont d’une couleur qu’on ne saurait guere comparer; ils tombent en boucles jusqu’au dessous des oreilles, et se répandent sur les épaules ave beaucoup de grace, partagés sur le sommet de la tête à la maniere des Nazarèens; son front est uni et large, et ses joues ne sont marquées que d’une amiable rougeur; son nez et sa bouche sont formés avec une admirable symetrie, sa barbe épaisse; et d’une couleur qui correspond à celle de ses cheveux, descend un ponce au dessous du menton, et se divisant vers le milieu fait à peu près la figure d’une fourche; ses yeux sont brillants clairs et sereins. Il censure avec majesté, exhorte avec douceur; soit qui’l parle on qu’il agisse, il le fait avec élégance et gravité. Jamais on ne l’a vu rire mais on l’a vu souvent pleurer; il est fort tempéré, fort discret, et fort sage. C’est un homme enfin qui, par son excellente bonté et ses divines perfections surpasse les enfants des hommes.”
3. Conversation with the author, October 5, 2000, Los Angeles Temple Visitors Center, Los Angeles, California.
4. Saint John of Damascus, Three Treatises on the Divine Images, trans. Andrew Louth (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2003), 25.
5. John quoted Gregory of Nyssa on the perception of divine beauty as comparable to the way in which “painters transfer human forms on to tablets by means of certain colors, applying corresponding paints by imitation, so that the beauty of the archetype is transferred with accuracy to the likeness,” Three Treatises, 47.
6. Appealing to the Byzantine tradition in which images of the emperor could stand in for the absent emperor, John commented that “if the image of the emperor is the emperor, and the image of Christ is Christ, and the image of the saint is a saint, then the power is not divided nor the glory shared, but the glory of the image becomes that of the one depicted in the image,” Three Treatises, 42.
7. Pliny the Elder, Natural History, trans. H. Rackham, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1952), book 35, ch. 43, para. 152, p. 373.
8. David Hume, The Natural History of Religion, in Principal Writings on Religion, ed. J.C.A Gaskin. Oxford’s World Classics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 141.
9. E.F., Son of Man: Pictures and Carvings by Indian, African and Chinese Artists (London: Society for the Propagation of the Gospel, 1946), 4.
10. An excellent study of the history of race in American Christian thought, practice, and social history is Edward J. Blum and Paul Harvey, The Color of Christ: The Son of God and the Saga of Race in America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012). A fascinating historical study of Christian belief and practice on the matter of race and imagination is Willie Jennings, The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010).
11. See David Morgan, “The Likeness of Christ in Sallman’s Art,” in Icons of American Protestantism: The Art of Warner Sallman, ed. David Morgan (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), 192–93.
12. Matthew O. Richardson shared this anecdotal account at a conference at Brigham Young University Museum of Art, November 16, 2006. For a brief history of images of Christ among Latter-Day Saints, see his essay “Bertel Thorvalden’s Christus: A Latter-Day Saint Icon of Christian Evidence,” in Herman du Toit and Doris R. Dant, eds., Art and Spirituality: The Visual Culture of Christian Faith (Provo: BYU Studies, 2008), 189–201. For a television piece produced by Brigham Young University on Thorvaldsen and his statue, see www.byutv.org/show/66d6413f-c116-441a-a094-33a8a9c0226f/bertel-thorvaldsens-christus, accessed March 9, 2015.
13. I invited readers of two dozen Christian magazines and newsletters to send their evaluations of Warner Sallman’s imagery to me. The result was 531 letters, which I analyzed in Visual Piety: Religious Visual Culture in Theory and Practice (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998). See also Morgan, ed., Icons of American Protestantism.
14. For an example of the event today in Brazil, see www.youtube.com/watch?v=JzNcovNKqwk, accessed March 9, 2015.
15. This is of course the historian’s perspective, not that of believers who can point to a long tradition of conviction that Jesus’s likeness was recorded in one way or another. The belief that there were ancient and authentic portraits of Jesus was firmly asserted by the learned sixteenth-century Flemish theologian Johannes Molanus in his monumental Treatise on Sacred Images (1570); see Molanus, Traité des sainte images, trans. François Bœspflug, Olivier Christin, and Benoît Tassel (Paris: Les Éditions du Cerf, 1996), vol. 1, 286–89.
16. See Robin Margaret Jensen, Face to Face: Portraits of the Divine in Early Christianity (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress Press, 2005) and Thomas F. Matthews, The Clash of the Gods: A Reinterpretation of Early Christian Art, rev. and ex. ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999).
17. Here is an instance of the story as it continues to circulate: “We’ve all heard the story about how Del Parson took the first painting to Spencer W. Kimball himself (or a different prophet), who said that it didn’t look enough like the Savior, and then gave Brother Parson further instructions until he was finally able to produce a painting that looked enough like the Savior to be appropriate.” Inspiring Stories (blog), Nov. 23, 2010, http://jbb-inspiringstories.blogspot.com/2010/11/del-parsons-painting-christ-in-red-robe.html, accessed September 19, 2012.
18. For reproductions of each picture and the suggestion that Chambers’s image influenced Parson’s, see Seeking Zion (blog), August 15, 2012, http://seekingzion.blogspot.com/2012_08_01_archive.html, accessed November 29, 2014.
19. See Sixten Ringbom, Icon to Narrative: The Rise of the Dramatic Close-Up in Fifteenth-Century Devotional Painting (Doornspijk: Davaco, 1984); Henk van Os, with Eugène Honée, Hans Nieuwdorp, Bernhard Ridderbos, The Art of Devotion in the Late Middle Ages in Europe, 1300–1500, trans. Michael Hoyle (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994); Ena Giurescu Heller, ed., Icons or Portraits? Images of Jesus and Mary from the Collection of Michael Hall (New York: Gallery at the American Bible Society, 2002).
20. On portrait imagery as modern means of personal identification, see Richard Brilliant, Portraiture (London: Reaktion, 1991), 40–43.
21. See Seymour Slive, Dutch Painting 1600–1800 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), 93.
22. See Michael Zell, Reframing Rembrandt: Jews and the Christian Image in Seventeenth-Century Amsterdam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 56–57; although he is not referring to the series of images from 1648 to 1656, Franz Landsberger, Rembrandt: The Jews and the Bible, trans. Felix N. Gerson (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society of America, 1946), 116, confidently states that “Rembrandt was the first artist courageous enough to show Jesus with Jewish features.” For a technical analysis, dating, and attributions of the group of images see Mark Tucker, Lloyd DeWitt, and Ken Sutherland, “The Heads of Christ: A Technical Survey,” in Rembrandt and the Face of Jesus, ed. Lloyd DeWitt (Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2011), 31–72.
23. Lloyd DeWitt, “Testing Tradition Against Nature: Rembrandt’s Radical New Image of Jesus,” in Rembrandt and the Face of Jesus, 109–45.
24. As reported to the author; see Morgan, “Warner Sallman and the Visual Culture of American Protestantism,” in Icons of American Protestantism, 32–33.
25. James Tissot, The Life of Our Saviour Jesus Christ (New York: Doubleday and McClure, 1898), vol. 1, ix.
26. On the prominent example of F. Holland Day, a photographer who created artistic imagery of Jesus, see Kristin Schwain, Signs of Grace: Religion and American Art in the Gilded Age (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008), 71–103.
27. Henry Ward Beecher, The Life of Jesus, the Christ (New York: J.B. Ford, 1871), 102: “No man will ever succeed in so reproducing an age long past that it shall seem to the beholder as it did to those who lived in it. Even if one is in possession of all the facts, and has skill to draw a perfect picture, he cannot prevent our looking upon a past age with modern eyes, and with feelings and associations that will put into the picture the coloring of our own time . . . . We cannot see [Jesus] in Galilee, nor in Judea, just as he was. We look back upon him through a blaze of light. The utmost care will not wholly prevent our beholding Jesus through the medium of subsequent history. It is not the Jesus who suffered in Palestine that we behold, but the Christ that has since filled the world with his name.”
28. Kate P. Hampton, “The Face of Christ in Art: Is Portraiture of Jesus Strong or Weak?” The Outlook 61, no. 13 (April 1, 1899): 736.
29. For a contemporaneous catalogue of newspaper adulation of Munkácsy’s painting, see Charles M. Kurtz, Christ before Pilate: The Painting by Munkascy [sic] (New York: published for the exhibition, 1887); I have discussed the reception of Munkácsy’s image and its relation to contemporary visual media in David Morgan, The Lure of Images: A History of Religious Visual Media in America (London: Routledge, 2007), 170–72. Not everyone appreciated the painting or its promotion in Manhattan. A review in the New York Times was largely critical of the image itself, but especially contemptuous of what the reviewer alleged was the painting’s financially motivated hyping, evident, for example, in its theatrical staging at the Twenty-third Street Tabernacle, where the picture debuted “in the presence of a number of clergymen” in November 1886: “Christ Before Pilate: Munkacsy’s Picture as a Star,” New York Times, November 1886, 5. When the Times reviewed Tissot’s biblical imagery when it appeared in Manhattan in 1898, the writer recalled the controversy over Munkácsy’s painting, but refused to treat Tissot’s project as having been undertaken with “thought of gain” (“The Tissot Pictures and Drawings,” New York Times, November 15, 1898, 6). In 1892, Gustave Doré’s art was brought to Manhattan, where an entire gallery of work (thirty-eight canvases) was displayed in Carnegie Music Hall for several months; see Eric Zafran, “‘A Strange Genius’: Appreciating Gustave Doré in America,” in Fantasy and Faith: The Art of Gustave Doré, ed. Eric Zafran, with Robert Rosenblum and Lisa Small (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), 156–57.
30. On Tissot’s reception, see Judith F. Dolkart, “The Life of Christ Comes to the “Acropolis of Brooklyn,” in James Tissot: The Life of Christ, ed. Judith F. Dolkart (Brooklyn: Brooklyn Museum; London: Merrell, 2009), 35–47.
31. Hampton, “The Face of Christ in Art,” 744.
32. Hampton, “The Face of Christ in Art,” , 740.
33. See note 26 above.
34. Hampton, “The Face of Christ in Art,” 746. For a contemporaneous example of composite photography, in which different portraits were overlaid photographically to produce a single, collective image, see H.P. Bowditch, “Are Composite Photographs Typical Pictures?” McClure’s Magazine 3 (September 1894), 331–42.
35. Hampton, “The Face of Christ in Art,” 748.
36. Letter 274, May 10, 1993, correspondence file, Sallman Archives, Jessie Wilson Art Galleries, Anderson University.
37. Pamela Schaeffer and John L. Allen Jr., “Jesus 2000,” National Catholic Reporter Online, December 24, 1999, http://natcath.org/NCR_Online/archives2/1999d/122499/122499a.htm, accessed November 27, 2012.
38. Schaeffer and Allen, “Jesus 2000.”
39. Elizabeth A. Johnson, “Jesus of the People,” in Susan Perry, ed., Holiness and the Feminine Spirit: The Art of Janet McKenzie (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 2009), 73.
40. The image is available online at “Why Do We Think Christ was White?” BBC News, March 27, 2001, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/1244037.stm, accessed August 19, 2014. For further discussion see Megan Rosenfeld, “Putting a Fresh Face on Jesus: Discovery, PBS Specials Explore Changing Images,” The Washington Post, April 15, 2001, www.highbeam.com/doc/1P2-434970.html, accessed March 9, 2015.
41. Mike Fillon, “The Real Face of Jesus,” Popular Mechanics 179, no. 12 (December 2002): 68–71.
42. Bruce Barton, The Man Nobody Knows: A Discovery of the Real Jesus (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill Company, [1924] 1925), vi.
43. Fillon, “The Real Face of Jesus,” 71. For further discussion of the modern American history of the masculinity of Jesus in religious imagery see Morgan, Visual Piety, 97–123.
44. Fillon, “The Real Face of Jesus,” 71.
1. Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984).
2. Howard S. Becker, Art Worlds (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), x
3. Friedrich Schiller, Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man, in Essays, eds. Walter Hinderer and Daniel O. Dahlstrom (New York: Continuum, 1993), 164.
4. Michel Foucault, “About the Beginning of the Hermeneutics of the Self,” in Religion and Culture, ed. Jeremy R. Carrette (New York: Routledge, 1999), 159.
5. Foucault, “About the Beginning,” 162.
6. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books, 1995), 195–228.
7. John Wilton-Ely, Giovanni Battista Piranesi: The Complete Etchings (San Francisco: Alan Wofsy, 1994).
8. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 200.
9. Thomas Stackhouse, Reflections on the Nature and Property of Languages [1731], excerpted in The Sublime: A Reader in British Eighteenth-Century Aesthetic Theory, eds. Andrew Ashfield and Peter de Bolla (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 49. It is worth pointing out that the sublime was not without an important precedent in earlier Protestant thought. John Calvin taught that the glory of God was imprinted on the physical features of the created universe. Although God’s essence was “incomprehensible, utterly transcending all human thought,” his splendor was visible indeed, and Calvin described its effect in terms that recall the language of sublimity. “Wherever you turn your eyes,” Calvin wrote, “there is no portion of the world, however minute, that does not exhibit at least some sparks of beauty; while it is impossible to contemplate the vast and beautiful fabric as it extends around, without being overwhelmed by the immense weight of glory.” John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans. Henry Beveridge (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1989), 51 (chap. 5, para. 1). Yet for Calvin this overwhelming glory did the important work of obviating any human excuse not to affirm the existence of God. The visceral force of its manifest facticity stood in stark contrast to the abject failure of human reason and imagination to apprehend the transcendent deity. God’s very glory was proof of his sovereignty and of the affront of human attempts to circumscribe him in the forge of idols that the mind could only be. The eighteenth-century sublime, by contrast, was something that even clergymen could embrace as a compelling sensation of the expansive and glorious life of the human mind.
10. John Baillie, An Essay on the Sublime [1747], excerpted in Ashfield and De Bolla, The Sublime, 88.
11. Friedrich Schiller, “On the Sublime (Toward the Further Development of Some Kantian Ideas),” 1793, in Essays, 22. Emphasis in original.
12. Schiller, “On the Sublime,” 43.
13. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, tr. J.H. Bernard (New York: Hafner Publishing Company 1951), 39.
14. Kant, Critique of Judgment, 37, 157.
15. Kant, Critique of Judgment, 88.
16. Kant, Critique of Judgment, 95.
17. G.W.F. Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, trans. T.M. Knox (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), vol. 1, 81.
18. G.W.F. Hegel, On Art, Religion, Philosophy, ed. J. Glenn Gray (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1970), 31.
19. Hegel, Aesthetics, 175.
20. Hegel, On Art, 59.
21. William Blake, Jerusalem: The Prophetic Books of William Blake, eds. E.R.D. MacLagan and A.G.B. Russell (London: A.H. Bullen, 1904), stanza 5, lines 15–18, 39–40, p. 8.
22. Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, trans. E.F.J. Payne (Indian Hills, Colorado: The Falcon’s Wing Press, 1958), vol. 1, 197–98. Schopenhauer called the state of knowing in aesthetic experience “objectivity” and the state of normal rational consciousness “subjectivity,” since the former meant rising above the self and the latter meant sinking into it. But the aesthetic ideal that I am describing does not conform to his Platonist scenario, which neatly recapitulates what Plato described as the reincarnation of the soul in Phaedrus.
23. Bernard Berenson, Aesthetics and History (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, [1948] 1954), 93.
24. For an instructive summary account of the painting and its fascinating reception, see Joseph Leo Koerner, Caspar David Friedrich and the Subject of Landscape, 2nd edition (London: Reaktion Books, 2009), 56–61.
25. F.W.B. von Ramdohr, “Über ein zum Altarblatte bestimmtes Landschaftsgemälde von Herrn Friedrich in Dresden, und über Landscahftsmalerei, Allegorie und Mystizismus überhaupt,” Zeitung für die elegante Welt 9 (1809): 89–95, 97–104, 108–11, 113–19; reprinted in Sigrid Hinz, ed., Caspar David Friedrich in Briefen und Bekenntnissen (Berlin: Henschelverlag, 1968), 138: “es teilt die Meinung des Publikums; es macht Effekt auf den großen Haufen. Und wenn ich nun sehe, daß die Tendenz, die hier das Talent nimmt, dem guten Geschmack gefährlich wird, daß sie dem Wesen der Malerei, besonders der Landschaftsmalerei, ihre eigenthümlichsten Vorzüge raubt.”
26. Hinz, ed., Caspar David Friedrich, 89: “Denen Herren Kunstrichtern genügen unsere teutsche Sonne, Mond und Sterne, unsere Felsen, Bäume und Kräuter, unsere Ebenen, Seen und Flüsse nich mehr. Italienisch muß alles sein, um Anspruch auf Größe und Schönheit machen zu können.” For a discussion of the occasion and the resulting text, see Hinz, ed., Caspar David Friedrich, 251.
27. I have said nothing about the importance of landscape painting in the Romantic tradition in the United States and elsewhere. The literature is quite large and I am happy to point the reader to it in order to address the massive ranges of material that space will not allow me to consider: William H. Truettner and Alan Wallach, eds., Thomas Cole: Landscape into History (New Haven: Yale University Press and Washington, DC: National Museum of American Art, 1994); Diane Apostolos-Cappadona, The Spirit and the Vision: The Influence of Christian Romanticism on the Development of Nineteenth-Century American Art (Atlanta: Scholar’s Press, 1995); John Davis, The Landscape of Belief: Encountering the Holy Land in Nineteenth-Century American Art and Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996); and Andrew Wilton and Tim Barringer, American Sublime: Landscape Painting in the United States 1820–1880 (London: Tate Publishing, 2002). I have also not taken up the legacy of Swedenborgianism and other sorts of mystical and hermetic traditions. For work in these areas see Adrienne Baxter Bell, George Inness and the Visionary Landscape (New York: National Academy of Design and G. Braziller, 2003); David Bjelajac, Washington Allston, Secret Societies, and the Alchemy of Anglo-American Painting (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996); and Regina Soria, Joshua C. Taylor, Jane Dillenberger, and Richard Murray, Perceptions and Evocations: The Art of Elihu Vedder (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1979).
28. See Cordula Grewe, Painting the Sacred in the Age of Romanticism (Burlington: Ashgate, 2009), 2–4, 149–85. See also Cordula Grewe, The Nazarenes: Romantic Avant-Garde and the Art of the Concept (University Park, Pennsylvania: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2015); Lionel Gossman, The Making of a Romantic Icon: The Religious Context of Friedrich Overbeck’s Italia und Germania (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 2007); and William Vaughan, German Romantic Painting (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980), 163–90.
29. See Bruno Foucart, Le renouveau de la peinture religieuse en France, 1800–1860 (Paris: Arthena, 1987) and Michael Paul Driskel, Representing Belief: Religion, Art, and Society in Nineteenth-Century France (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992).
30. Alphonse Germain, “L’art religieux au XIXe siècle en France,” Le Correspondent (1907): 244, quoted in Foucart, Renouveau, 247.
31. Quoted in Linda Nochlin, ed., Realism and Tradition in Art 1848–1900: Sources and Documents (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1966), 108. For further discussion see Tim Barringer, Jason Rosenfeld, and Alison Smith, Pre-Raphaelites: Victorian Avant-Garde (London: Tate Publishing, 2012), 124–25.
32. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans. Henry Beveridge (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans, 1989), 51.
33. Calvin, Institutes , 52.
34. See William A. Dryness, Reformed Theology and Visual Culture: The Protestant Imagination from Calvin to Edwards (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).
35. See Henri Dorra, ed., Symbolist Theories of Art: A Critical Anthology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994); Patricia Townley Mathews, Aurier’s Symbolist Art Criticism and Theory (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1986); Jean-Marc Debenedetti and Serge Baudiffier, Les Symbolistes (Paris: Henri Veyrier, 1990); Reinhold Heller, Munch: His Life and Work (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984); Debora Silverman, Van Gogh and Gauguin: The Search for Sacred Art (New York: Farrar Straus and Giroux, 2000).
36. G. Albert Aurier, “Symbolism in Painting: Paul Gauguin,” 1891, in Dorra, ed. Symbolist Theories of Art, 199.
37. Albert Aurier, “Essay on a New Method of Criticism,” ca. 1890, reprinted in Herschel B. Chipp, Theories of Modern Art (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968), 87.
38. Aurier, “Symbolism in Painting,” 198.
39. To Emile Bernard, from Le Pouldu, June 1890, in Maurice Malingue, ed., Paul Gauguin: Letters to his Wife and Friends, trans. Henry J. Stenning (Cleveland and New York: The World Publishing Company, 1949), 144.
40. See Silverman, Van Gogh and Gauguin, 31–35, and 278–303, for aspects of this.
41. Silverman, Van Gogh and Gauguin, 297.
42. Adding insult to injury, Vincent, his erstwhile comrade in art, expressed disappointment in the method of Gauguin’s picture, accusing him of relying on memory as a way of distancing the image from nature. Vincent referred to Gauguin and his painting explicitly in a letter to his brother; see Richard Brettell, François Cachin, Claire Frèches-Thory, and Charles F. Stuckey, The Art of Paul Gauguin (Washington, DC: National Gallery, 1988), 161–63.
43. To Emile Schuffenecker, from Le Pouldu, November 16, 1889, in Malingue, ed., Paul Gauguin, 131.
44. See Sven Loevgren, The Genesis of Modernism: Seurat, Gauguin, van Gogh, & French Symbolism in the 1880’s, rev. ed. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1971), 142. Yet Loevgren goes on to suggest that Gauguin may have regarded Aurier himself as a Judas in 1890 for choosing not to continue to hail his work in public, 147.
45. Aurier, “Symbolism in Painting,” 202.
46. Wassily Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual in Art and Painting in Particular, 2nd edition (1912), in Kandinsky: Complete Writings on Art, eds. Kenneth C. Lindsay and Peter Vergo (New York: Da Capo Press, 1994), 133–34, 137.
47. Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual , 177.
48. Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual , 181.
49. For a study of veiled figures, especially figures drawn from religious imagery, in Kandinsky’s work around 1911–12, see Rose-Carol Washton Long, Kandinsky: The Development of an Abstract Style (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980).
50. Washton Long, Kandinsky, 96–97, 108–22.
51. An especially insightful discussion of Kandinsky and his art as spiritual is a presentation by the art historian and critic Donald Kuspit, “Reconsidering the Spiritual in Art,” Blackbird 2, no. 1 (Spring 2003): http://blackbird.vcu.edu/v2n1/gallery/kuspit_d/reconsidering_text.htm, accessed March 9, 2015.
52. I have already cited studies of the Romantic landscape tradition and the various traditions of mystical, hermetic, masonic thought and practice in the visual arts (see note 27 above); on the occult and theosophical, see note 65 below; to these may be added several other lines of inquiry that examine different aspects of art and religion in the twentieth century: Sally M. Promey, Painting Religion in Public: John Singer Sargent’s Triumph of Religion at the Boston Public Library (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999); Joanne Cubbs and Eugene W. Metcalf, eds., Hard Truths: The Art of Thornton Dial (Indianapolis: Indiana Museum of Art, and Munich: Prestel, 2011), and Samantha Baskind, Jewish Artists and the Bible in Twentieth-Century America (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2014).
53. Willem De Kooning, “What Abstract Art Means to Me,” 1951, reprinted in Abstract Expressionism: A Critical Record, eds. David Shapiro and Cecile Shapiro (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 222.
54. “Northwest Coast Indian Painting,” 1946, reprinted in Barnett Newman, Selected Writings and Interviews, ed. John P. O’Neill (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1990), 108.
55. Edmund Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, ed. J.T. Boulton (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame, 1958).
56. Barnett B. Newman, “The Sublime is Now,” 1948, reprinted in Shapiro and Shapiro, eds., Abstract Expressionism, 325.
57. See Wendy Steiner’s fascinating study, Venus in Exile: The Rejection of Beauty in Twentieth-century Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), where she strongly critiques the aesthetic of the sublime in modernism as rooted in misogyny. Steiner’s point is corroborated by Aurier’s remark about the sensualism of women and by Newman’s consignment of basketwork design to women.
58. Newman, “The Sublime in Now,” 328.
59. Newman, “The Sublime in Now,” 328. In this essay, Newman contrasted invigorated American art, in quest of the sublime, with the sensualism of European art driven by the ideal of figural beauty.
60. Quoted in Newsweek, May 9, 1966, 100; reprinted in Newman, Selected Writings, 187–88.
61. “The Fourteen Stations of the Cross, 1958–1966,” ARTnews 65, no. 3 (May 1966): 26–28, 57; reprinted in Newman, Selected Writings, 189.
62. His comments came on the occasion of a symposium entitled “Spiritual Dimensions of Contemporary Art,” 1967, reprinted in Newman, Selected Writings, 290
63. Newman, Selected Writings, 289.
64. Newman, Selected Writings, 190, see also 284.
65. Lynn Gamwell, Exploring the Invisible: Art, Science, and the Spiritual (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002); Richard Francis, ed. Negotiating Rapture: The Power of Art to Transform Lives (Chicago: Museum of Contemporary Art, 1996); Roger Lipsey, An Art of Our Own: The Spiritual in Twentieth-Century Art (Boston: Shambhala, 1989); Andreas C. Papadakis, ed., Abstract Art and the Rediscovery of the Spiritual (London: Art & Design, 1987); Maurice Tuchman, ed., The Spiritual in Art: Abstract Painting, 1890–1985 (Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1986).
66. For an exhibition that included a good deal of such work by major artists, see Meg Cranston and John Baldessari, 100 Artists See God (New York: Independent Curators International, 2004). I organized a forum on this exhibition in a journal that I coedit: “100 Artists See God: A Forum,” Material Religion 3, no. 1 (March 2007): 120–42. There is no shortage of other publications that document the broad interests among contemporary artists in religion. See Paul C. Burns, ed., Jesus in Twentieth-century Literature, Art, and Movies (New York: Continuum, 2007). S. Brent Plate, Blasphemy: Art That Offends (London: Black Dog, 2006); Eleanor Heartney, Postmodern Heretics: Catholic Imagination in Contemporary Art (New York: Midmarch Arts Press, 2004); Erika Doss, “Robert Gober’s ‘Virgin’ Installation: Issues of Spirituality in Contemporary American Art,” in David Morgan and Sally M. Promey, eds. The Visual Culture of American Religions (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001): 129–45; Kay Turner, Beautiful Necessity: The Art and Meaning of Women’s Altars (London: Thames and Hudson, 1999); Rosemary Crumlin, Beyond Belief: Modern Art and the Religious Imagination (Melbourne: National Gallery of Victoria, 1998); Jane Daggett Dillenberger, The Religious Art of Andy Warhol (New York: Continuum, 1998).
67. See for example Karen von Veh’s studies of contemporary South African artists who make use of Christian subject matter: “The Intersection of Christianity and Politics in South African Art: A Comparative Analysis of Selected Images since 1960, with an Emphasis on the Post-Apartheid Era,” De Arte, no. 85 (2012): 5–25.
68. See James Elkins and David Morgan, eds., Re-Enchantment (New York: Routledge, 2009), for a documentation of the mess of sorting out the conflicted relation. For a range of other views, see Ena Giurescu Heller, ed., Reluctant Partners: Art and Religion in Dialogue (New York: Gallery at the American Bible Society, 2004).
69. See Steiner, Venus in Exile, esp. 1–31.
70. James Elkins, On the Strange Place of Religion in Contemporary Art (New York: Routledge, 2004), 20.
71. Elkins, On the Strange Place, 20.
72. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, “Ueber Wahrheit und Wahrscheinlichkeit in der Kunstwerke,” 1798, reprinted in Goethe’s Sämmtliche Werke (Stuttgart: J.G. Cotta’schen Verlag, 1855), vol. 5, 304: “Wenn die Oper gut is, macht sie freilich eine kleine Welt für sich aus, in der alles nach gewissen Gesetzen vorgeht, die nach ihren eigenen Gesetzen beurtheilt, nach ihren eigenen Eigenschaften gefühlt seyn will.”
73. Thierry de Duve, in Re-Enchantment, 160–61.
74. Paco Barragán, “Interview with Bill Viola,” ArtPulse Magazine, http://artpulsemagazine.com/interview-with-bill-viola, accessed January 9, 2014; also published in Selene Wendt and Paco Barragán, eds., When a Painting Moves . . . Something Must be Rotten! (Milan: Edizione CHARTA, 2011), 31–35.
75. http://filefestival.org/site_2007/filescript_pop.asp?cd_pagina=311&id=2&cd_materia=414, accessed March 9, 2015.
76. “Artist Biography,” Bill Viola (website), www.billviola.com/biograph.htm, accessed January 9, 2014.
77. www2.artsmia.org/blogs/art-remix/the-remixes/bill-viola/, accessed March 9, 2015.
78. Barragán, “Interview with Bill Viola.”
1. See www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/09/04/pledge-of-allegiance-challenge_n_3866087.html, accessed March 9, 2015.
2. See Joshua Green, “Roy and His Rock,” The Atlantic (October 1, 2005): 70–82, and Joshua Green, “What Happened to Roy Moore’s Ten Commandments Monument?” The Atlantic (March 30, 2011): www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2011/03/what-happened-to-roy-moores-ten-commandments-monument/73221/, accessed July 2, 2013. Moore was reelected chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court in November 2012.
3. Albert Schweitzer, The Quest of the Historical Jesus: A Critical Study of Its Progress from Reimarus to Wrede, 2nd ed., trans. W. Montgomery (London: Adam and Charles Black, 1910), 4.
4. Talal Asad, Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 27–54.
5. Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 10.
6. See for instance the massive hodgepodge of essays, Iconoclash: Beyond the Image Wars in Science, Religion, and Art, eds. Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel (Karlsruhe: Center for Art and Media, and Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002).
