Images, Idolatry, and Iconoclasm in Late Medieval England: Textuality and the Visual Image.(Book Review)

Publication: The Modern Language Review

Publication Date: 01-JUL-04

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COPYRIGHT 2004 Modern Humanities Research Association

Images, Idolatry, and Iconoclasm in Late Medieval England: Textuality and the Visual Image. Ed. by JEREMY DIMMICK, JAMES SIMPSON, and NICOLETTE ZEEMAN. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. 2002. xiii+250 pp. 45 [pounds sterling]. ISBN 0-19-818759-9.

This collection of eleven essays contains a scatter of riches. The volume's title is more a sop to the conventions of containment than a guide to what actually lies between its covers. Some of its chapters originated as papers presented at a conference on 'Images, Iconoclasm, and Idolatry' held in Cambridge in 1999, and it sees itself as furthering the work of Margaret Aston, England's Iconoclasts (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), and Michael Camille, The Gothic Idol (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).

James Simpson begins with 'The Rule of Medieval Imagination', in which he considers how English writers between the mid-sixteenth and early nineteenth century projected the Middle Ages as a period infantilized by the rule of the imagination, and how those writers sought to construct antithetical, periodizing psychological polities of imagination vs. reason. In this generous and wide-ranging essay, Simpson finds within pre-Reformation deliberation about images many of the...

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