Cupid, Idolatry, and Iconoclasm in Sidney's Arcadia

by eTHan gUagliardo in 1563, not long after her coronation, elizabeth outlawed witchcraft. it was a dramatic act of self-promotion. in suppressing idolatry, the queen proved herself to be an agent of god. 1 yet if elizabeth hoped to cleanse the nation of demons, beginning in the late 1570s new fears of the hidden influence of witches, idolaters, and their devilish consorts over england suggested she had failed. as keith Thomas observes, this outbreak of iconophobia expressed the anxiety of many Protestants that the nation was being devoured from within by a moral and spiritual rot, traceable in this instance to the queen's marriage negotiations with the catholic duke of anjou. 2 John Stubbes even fumed that in flirting with the duke, elizabeth flirted with demons, tacitly allowing "idolatry the highest treason" to infiltrate england. She thus proved derelict in performing her divinely ordained duty: for if "Priuate men are bidden to flye away from idolatrye," all the more are "Princes [who] beare the lords sword to make it flee and to chace it far away." 3 Stubbes's language reveals the extent to which demonological habits of thought and elizabethan political theology were cut from the same conceptual cloth, an imaginative order in which political conflicts were the visible signs of an invisible, supernatural war. if the queen was god's earthly representative, his instrument for maintaining order in this life, then her subversive foil was the idolater, the devil's instrument for working mischief. 4 Trading on this interplay of political theology and demonology, William Perkins declared that "rebellion was as the sinne of Witchcraft" in both a religious and political sense: the witch, having committed "a most heinous and detestable sinne in the sight of god," also "betraies his Soueraigne, and consequently cannot be a friend vnto the common-wealth." 5 in this way, demonological theories of idolatry lent a high, mystical credence to the analogy between sovereigns and god: as the idolater's opposite, the magistrate appeared to be a white magician of politics, channeling divine authority. in 1563 this demonology was useful to elizabeth. as a new prince, she could play the savior of her people, liberating them from their catholic (and

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Linear Perspective and the Renaissance Lyric

Johnson¹

2019

Publ. Mod. Lang. Assoc. Am.

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As recent art historical scholarship has demonstrated, the techniques of linear perspective displace narrative (the artwork's content) in favor of the relations between aesthetic objects (the artwork's form). In this regard, perspectival art performs a rhetorical transaction analogous to that of its “sister art,” lyric poetry. The formal features and poetic strategies of lyric parallel the geometric effects of perspectival art: both practices differentiate the aesthetic surface from the transparentizing demands of narrative. Each art form stages the interaction of irreconcilable terms—content and form—and documents the dynamic and incommensurable relation between semantic meaning and meaninglessness. Lyric's dominance in the Renaissance, exemplified here by sonnets of Sidney and Shakespeare, reflects a wider cultural valorization of the experiential and materializing priorities of the aesthetic, an affirmation of objective, apprehensible elements whose significance is unyoked from the obligation to narrative.

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Cupid, Idolatry, and Iconoclasm in Sidney's Arcadia

Cited by 3 publications

References 31 publications

“I know a Bank …”:A Midsummer Night's Dream, fairies, and the erotic history of England

“I know a Bank …”:A Midsummer Night's Dream, fairies, and the erotic history of England

The Poet, the Skeptic, his Witches, and their Queen: Political Theology and Poetic Charms in Sidney’s Defence

Linear Perspective and the Renaissance Lyric

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