| This dissertation describes an iconophobic English Renaissance (1560-1671), examining the causes and consequences of the widespread period belief, and fear, that devotional images were evil "in themselves" and that spiritual idolatry followed such material images "like a shadow" whenever they were allowed to stand.;Considering iconoclasm in relation to modernity, this dissertation observes that while iconoclasm has most often been discussed as an aspect of political and doctrinal struggle between Protestants and Catholics, participants in conflicts over images often viewed themselves as enemies of atheism, rather than any religious denomination. In an age when God's existence---and the possibility of salvation after death---was called into question by religious controversy, global cultural encounters, and emergent scientific modes of reasoning, the destruction of idols, which were defined as "N OTHING in the world" marking the absence of belief ("the sufferance of an image to be in a place, excludeth Religion out of that place," one minister wrote), could serve as a ritual exorcism of troubling doubt.;Conceived as a social history of material metaphor, this dissertation examines religious sermons and treatises (with special attention to John Jewel and Henry Smith), defenses of poetry and human knowledge (Robert Greville, Samuel Daniel, and Philip Sidney), the Elizabethan revenge tragedy (Robert Greene and Shakespeare), and seventeenth-century theories of toleration and political authority (Rutherford, Hobbes, and Milton).;The iconophobic use of material destruction to affirm God's existence and the immortality of cherished loved ones made the metaphor of iconoclasm a powerful engine for transforming human affection into acts of organized violence. This fundamentalist rhetoric, and the language of toleration that developed in response to it, are the subjects of this dissertation, which considers England's iconophobic renaissance in the context of its origins in mid sixteenth-century religious skepticism, and with attention to its role in shaping attitudes towards toleration and revolution in seventeenth-century Britain. |
