Reforming Signs: Semiotics, Calvinism and Clothing in Sixteenth-Century England

Review of periodical literature published in 2003

“…The behaviour expected of the laity in church is reconstructed by Brown, who takes confessional interpretations of the problem of noise in church as a point of entry into the liturgical debates of the period. In a somewhat opaque reading of the discussions of appropriate modes of dress (in pulpit and playhouse) provided by Elizabethan Calvinists, Streete seeks to expose tensions in reformed theology, which he reads in terms of semiotics. On the one hand, Phillip Stubbes and his contemporaries argued that the divine could not have a visible locus on earth; on the other, they could not free themselves from the inherited fear that the holy could take material form, especially in clerical vestments.…”