Translating iconoclasm: William Thomas’s The Perygrine and the Historie of Italie

Abstract

Iconoclasm is always a "physical rupture with the past", Margaret Aston writes. 1 When Henry VIII ordered the removal of all idolatrous images from the churches and monasteries in 1538, the breaking of the images was to visualize the break with Rome. The king's divorce and his subsequent politics had placed England at the centre of a religious and political dispute all over Europe. Especially in Italy the controversy divided the Catholic majority and the jurists and theologians of the great universities. This is the setting into which the go-between William Thomas inscribes his dialogue The Perygrine, defending Henry's line of action. I will illustrate in which way the power of the word contested with the power of the image and which strategies were applied in this propagandistic text to succeed. By juxtaposing the dialogue to Thomas's Historie of Italie, I will furthermore show how a similar line of argument and verbal imagery is being used to denounce the Pope, stylizing him as the iconoclast of Roman antiquity. In Thomas's accounts iconoclasm is not a rupture with the past but re-establishes historic continuity. I.In John Foxe's Actes and Monuments a wood-cut (Ill. 1) illustrates the licensed iconoclasm in England practiced during Edward VI's reign. The bottom part of the wood-cut shows two scenes of the reformed churchthe king delivers the bible to his prelates on the left, and two of the retained sacraments, baptism and the Eucharist, on the right, below which an assembled congregation listens closely to a preacher and his sermon.While two thirds of the picture are occupied by the scenes propagating the newly reformed church, the upper part describes the line of action taken by the king and his council: In the upper centre, paintings are being burnt in a fire; on the left, the statue of a saint is about to be pulled down while a large crowd leaves the church carrying out the last remains of Catholic inventory and loading them onto "