A ‘Fiction of the Mind’: Imagination and Idolatry in Early Modern England

Abstract

This chapter examines the conceptualization of Catholic liturgical practices within the Protestant anti-Catholic polemics of early modern England. I argue that, insofar as Protestants typically glossed such practices as ‘idolatry’, and thus, as the worship of a false god, Protestants explicitly accused Catholics of falling victim to the deceptive tendencies of their imaginations. Hence, for English Protestants, Catholics were responsible for transforming the good news of the Gospel into a mere fiction of their own making. More than a mere rhetorical posture — though of course it was also that — it is here argued that Protestant anti-Catholic polemic encodes a more generalized anxiety about the role of imagination within religious, social and political life, and thus serves as a microcosm of larger-scale transformations within the intellectual and political discourse of early modern England. Most obviously, the emphasis on the imagination, in particular within Protestant polemics, indicates a new context into which traditional scholastic psychological categories were forced in order to accommodate confessional differentiation and the new political realities of a post-Reformation world. Thus, by understanding just what Protestant polemicists meant by fictions, we can open up deeper continuities across the intellectual and political discourse of the period.

In a polemic republished at least three times over the seventeenth century, the preacher to the Inner and Middle Temples in London, William Crashawe (1572–1625/6) targets a figure who was regularly the subject of English Protestant anxieties: the Jesuit.¹ Crashawe particularly targets a poem written by a Jesuit, Carolus Scribanius (1561–1629), which venerates the miraculous Virgin of Halle, in Belgium. Such veneration, Crashawe argues, invoking a typical Protestant charge against Catholicism, sets Mary ‘in comparison with God or Jesus Christ... thereby ecclipsing the glory of Gods mercy and the worthynesse of Christs satisfaction’.² In particular, Crashawe contends that the miracles which Scribanius and other members of his order have attributed to the Virgin of Halle are false; they are ‘lyinge Wonders and no true miracles’. Crashawe specifically suggests that miracles have been invented by the Jesuits in an effort ‘to delude the common people’, and that ‘there scarce passeth a month wherin some new Image of our Lady is not found, or some strange miracle and wonders heard of’.³ By presenting God, in the form of the second person, Crashawe contends, as someone whose abilities are conditioned, limited or even equal to a mere created being, namely the Virgin Mary, or another saint, Catholic theology fails to accurately understand the nature of God, and therefore worships something other than God. Instead, Catholics worship a false god invented out of their own imaginations. The ‘Romish Church’, Crashawe remarks, has ‘not true Christ left amongst them, but an Idoll of their owne rearing, erected in their own carnall fancies’. Crashawe is quite clear, too, ‘that this is no slaunder, no cavill, no hybolicall [sic] nor figurative speech’, because, he elaborates, ‘the Christ of God and of his Church, is God equall to the father, and can do all things himselfe: the Christ of the Romish church is a childe inferiour to his mother and may deny her nothing’.⁴ Crashawe thus asserts that the religion of Rome is oriented not towards the true God, but rather to a false god, what the Elizabethan preacher, William Perkins (1558–1602), whom Crashawe cites and whose works he edited, called a ‘fiction or idol of the braine’.⁵

The clash of confessions left early modern Europe rife with competing truth-claims, as the spread of print facilitated the widespread diffusion of polemic, slander and declarations of revelatory truth.⁶ In England, changes in religion between Queen Mary and Queen Elizabeth served to create a culture of religious instability and a preoccupation with the infiltration of Catholicism into the nascent Protestant nation.⁷ It is, therefore, hardly surprising to witness condemnations of Catholicism, and a characterization of its liturgical practices as idolatrous. Particularly striking, however, is the specific claim of both Crashawe and his predecessor Perkins, that Catholic idolatry is a fictitious product of the imagination. While other contributors to this volume have examined the transmission of various forms of disinformation, this chapter concentrates specifically on how information was conceptualized as false. That is, it explores what, exactly, is meant when a piece of information is declared to be ‘fake news’. It argues that such a charge amounts primarily to a moral claim, more than just an epistemic one. Insofar as certain parties label misrepresentations false, fictitious or, as in this case, imaginary, they mean primarily to contest the orientation of that particular representation — that such representations vindicate the objectives of their opponents. Rather than objecting to their characterization of the ‘facts’, charges of fake news, it is here argued, are charges, at once, of something being both false and morally wrong. Thus, as this chapter endeavours to elucidate, when Protestants in early modern England accused Catholics of worshipping idols, they are especially concerned with the fact of their actions being oriented towards something other than God.

That Protestants in England, from separating presbyterian to establishment zealot, all described Catholicism and its theology as fake and fictitious will come as no surprise. Yet, these claims were more than slander or mere mudslinging. In essence, English Protestants, drawing on a scriptural link between idolatry and the imagination, specifically employed the categories of Aristotelian scholastic psychology to deride Catholic theology as fictitious; as naught, but an invention of their imaginations. As shown below, the imagination was invoked by early modern authors, both Catholic and Protestant, to explicate how fictitious entities were created — entities which are clearly epistemically false, in the sense of either not really existing (such as golden mountains), or metaphysically impossible, that is, not ever existing (such as chimeras, centaurs or tragelaphs). Protestant polemicists clearly describe Catholic idolatry as false in this sense — and this is hardly surprising; indeed, characterization of Catholic liturgical practices as imaginative was a trope of the Reformed tradition which dominated English Protestant theology from the reign of Edward VI. However, Protestants also invoke a different sense of the imagination in describing Catholic idolatry, one closely bound up with contemporary theories of psychology. According to these theories, all human actions respond to mental images which we construct on the basis of sense-perception. Thus, to act is, in some sense, to be oriented towards some particular image, as an end or goal. Morally upright acts are those that aim at some right or true end, while morally abhorrent acts aim at false ends. On this theory, Catholic idolatry is again imaginative, being oriented towards false mental images — incorrect imaginations of God — rather than true ends. But the story does not end there. For a further commonplace has it that all our actions ought to be aimed at God, rather than at mere temporal ends. Thus, idolatry could prove a surprisingly capacious category capable of absorbing nearly all morally abhorrent acts, for all acts which aim at some end other than God are in that sense idolatrous — they grant something which belongs to God to something which is not God. And, indeed, as we shall see, English Protestants did indeed employ the category of idolatry in exactly this capacious way. Ultimately, this allowed them the scope to hurl accusations of ‘idolatry’ just as widely as certain politicians are capable of hurling accusations of fake news.

While both literary scholars and historians have discussed the argumentative strategies of anti-Catholic polemics, including the ways in which English Protestants imagined Catholics as violent disrupters of the established order, as well as the construction of the pope as Anti-Christ, there has been little attention to the philosophical dimensions of these critiques, including their explicitly psychological register.⁸ Attending to these dimensions, as this chapter shows, opens up the multifarious ways in which English Protestants employed a consistent, scholastic psychology across genre, connecting their polemics against Catholics to those launched against the arts. Ever since Perry Miller’s ground-breaking The New England Mind (1939), scholars have been aware that English Protestant psychology relied on traditional scholastic categories.⁹ Nevertheless, contemporary disciplinary divisions have tended to reinforce the Catholic view that Protestants sharply divided philosophical from theological concerns. Instead, as discussed below, the English Protestant critique of Catholicism was more than polemical invective. Rather, Protestant charges emerge as regular, consistent conclusions drawn from their worries about the potential misuse of the imagination. Though employing a vocabulary originating in an academic context, the scholastic theory of fictions and the imagination moved well into the mainstream, and this chapter’s claims to its ubiquity are substantiated with reference to a variety of vernacular works. Even the term atheism, which has sometimes been viewed as a flexible, near-meaningless charge, in fact possessed a relatively fixed meaning determined by Protestant conceptions of scholastic psychology. The chapter aims to show, more generally, how the categories of scholastic psychology themselves functioned as a lens for the interpretation of scripture.

This thesis is elaborated in three main sections. Section I introduces the main themes of the Protestant critique of Catholic images, drawing on two of the key texts of the Elizabethan Settlement. It also indicates the scriptural and theological sources for the connection of idols and the imagination. The second section turns to philosophy, considering the dependence of Protestant theologians on the categories of scholastic psychology, especially its conception of the imagination. It suggests that two features of the scholastic imagination are implicated in the Protestant critique of idolatry: its image- and fiction-making capabilities, as well as the motive and orienting role it plays in Aristotelian theories of action. Finally, the discussion returns to the consideration of Catholic idolatry, showing how these scholastic categories were implicated in the influential account of the Elizabethan theologian William Perkins. It is argued that the connection of idolatry and the imagination played a central and determining role in the Protestant conception of Catholic idolatry, and, indeed, of sin more broadly. Ultimately, Protestant worries about idolatry extend into a larger, more general anxiety concerning fiction and imagination evident across the intellectual landscape of early modern England.

I Theological imaginations

By the time of Crashawe’s anti-Jesuit work (1610), anti-Catholic polemic was an established genre of English religious writing, while accusations of idolatry had motivated two waves of iconoclasm.¹⁰ This section considers some earlier examples of anti-Catholic writing, beginning with two of the central texts defending the new Protestant regime established with the accession of Queen Elizabeth. Theoretically, it highlights the creative tension between idolatry’s internal imaginative origins and its seemingly superfluous, external manifestations. As we shall see in section III below, although the claim that idolatry began in the imagination became more pronounced by the late-Elizabethan period, and was virtually ubiquitous in English writing by the start of the seventeenth century, the claim originated earlier. Indeed, it drew directly on the words of scripture and on the works of continental theologians.

Crashawe’s characterization of the idolatry of the Catholic Church contains two interrelated charges. On the one hand, he suggests that such idols are false, that is, they are untrue — this includes the fake miracles attributed to the Virgin. On the other, they are also false in the sense of being not normatively correct — they are oriented to something other than God, that is, they have an improper end or goal. Thus, Catholicism is both wrong and not right. Both of these senses of Catholic idolatry were presented in earlier English Protestant writing. Indeed, the polemical construction of Catholicism as false and set against the true and right doctrines of the established, English Protestant church was an essential feature of the defence of the new religious regime after Queen Elizabeth’s ascension to the throne upon the death of her Catholic sister Mary in 1558.¹¹ Among the foundational texts of the new, Protestant Elizabethan Settlement, Bishop of Salisbury John Jewel’s (1522–1571) Apology of the Church of England (1562) takes a specifically defensive posture against Roman Catholic opponents. In the English translation, which appeared in the same year as the Latin original, Jewel explicitly argues against the Catholic claim that Protestants ‘sowe abroad newe sects and furious fansies, that never before were hearde of’. Central to Jewel’s response, and echoed in virtually all subsequent critiques of Catholicism, is a reversal of this division. Instead, for Jewel, it is Protestantism which is grounded in naught, but ‘the holy Scriptures’ as opposed to ‘all things that may be devised by manne’.¹²

Like Crashawe, Jewel is insistent that much of Catholicism’s ‘grosse imaginacions’, including the ‘ydolatrous’ doctrine of transubstantiation, ‘should serve for nothinge els but to feede mens eies with foolyshe sightes and wanton boyes games’.¹³ The force of Jewel’s objection here is that, insofar as Catholicism is deceptive, it is false; by contrast, a religion based on the words of scripture, as Protestantism is, is true. He repeats this basic formula several times throughout the work, arguing that Catholics ‘deceive the simple with a vaine apparance of gay thinges’, their doctrines are but ‘dreames and lies’ and, generally, that theirs is a religion of ‘ignorance, error, superstition, worshipping of Idols, mans inventions’, and various things ‘contrary to the holy Scriptures’.¹⁴ The meaning of Jewel’s references to the imagination is underdeveloped; he claims that Catholic innovations from patristic or apostolic practice are ‘by imagination’ or ‘imagined’ in the sense of being made-up, of deviating from scripture. He puts this most plainly in his later Defence of the Apologie of the Churche of Englande (1567). Catholicism, he writes there, ‘attemptest with humaine imaginations, to treate of those thinges, whiche are attained by an onely, pure, and exquisite Faithe’.¹⁵ Here, too, he links the imagination directly to the issue of idolatry: ‘in your imagination, of the Sainctes of God have made Idolles’. Specifically, he claims that the sheer number of saints is indicative that they have simply been made up, rather than grounded in anything true.¹⁶

The definitive statement on idolatry for the early Elizabethan Church was the ‘Homily against perill of idolatrie and superfluous decking of Churches’ printed in the second volume (1563) of the officially sanctioned Book of Homilies meant to be read out by clergy who were not licensed to preach. The ‘Homily against Idolatry’ is the longest in the entire collection and has traditionally been attributed to Jewel’s own hand.¹⁷ Falling into three sections, the Homily opens with a juxtaposition largely parallelling the one we have seen mobilized in Jewel’s Apology. The ‘true ornaments’ of a church, public prayer and the right administration of the sacraments, are opposed to ‘outwarde ceremonies’ explicitly described as ‘contrarie to the... doctrine of the scriptures, and... to the usage of the primitive Church’. It is ‘the corruption of these latter dayes’, the homilist suggests, which ‘hath brought into the Churche infinite multitudes of images’. While the homilist does not elaborate on this point, he does mention that it has been our ‘phantasyng untruely... that all people should be the more moved to the due reverence’ of church buildings ‘if all corners thereof were glorious, and glistering with godle and pretious stones’.¹⁸ But it is, in fact, the homilist repeats throughout the work, these very same decorations which have actively encouraged people to commit idolatry. The homilist specifically suggests that the ‘cunnyng’ and ‘beawty’ of the decorations ‘deceaved’ the people, leading them ultimately ‘to erre from the knowledge of God’.¹⁹ After an extended historical discussion of biblical and patristic rejections of idolatry in the homily’s second section, the homilist introduces a central point in the third section: ‘the nature of man is none otherwyse bent to worshipping of images (if he maye have them and see them) then it is bent to whoredome and adultrie in the company of harlots’. That is, the homilist suggests here that it is the sensual nature of human beings that inclines them to idolatry. Even if they are suitably warned against the worship of church images, human nature ensures that idolatry will, nevertheless, proliferate.

The ‘Homily against Idolatry’ advances beyond the simple claim that Catholicism is false and deceptive; the Homily suggests that idolatry itself is both wrong and inherent to the human condition. In much writing, earlier and later, this innate human predisposition to idolatry is linked to the imagination, a faculty assumed to be a necessary feature of human beings, as we shall see in the next section. For English Protestants, reference to the imagination in this context was relevant because of its appearance within scripture itself. For St Paul, despite being an actual, physical entity, ‘an Idol is nothing’ (1 Cor. 8:4). Paul gives his fullest account of the origins of idolatry in the opening chapter of his Epistle to the Romans, influentially translated by William Tyndale (c.1494–c.1536) in 1526 at the outset of the Reformation in England. Paul writes of those ‘without excuse’, who ‘in as moche as when they knewe god/ they glorified him not as God/ nether were thankfull/ but wexed full of vanities in their imaginacions/ and their folisshe hertes were blynded’. Though, Paul continues, ‘they counted them selves wyse’, nonetheless, ‘they became foles and turned the glory of the immortall god/ unto the similitude of the ymage of mortall man’ (Rom. 1:21–3).²⁰ Here, Paul’s account of idolatry, like the charge levelled by Crashawe against the Catholics, is a theory of a falsely represented deity. Human imagination, on Paul’s account, renders God as other than he is. Tyndale’s own writings also convey this internalist theory of idolatry. ‘Mans wisdome is playne ydolatry’, Tyndale writes, ‘nether is there any other ydolatry then to imagen of God after mans wisdome. God is not mans imaginacion’, rather, ‘God is but his worde’.²¹

While this internal version of idolatry as ‘mans wisdom’ seems far removed from the superfluous and non-prescribed externalities condemned by Jewel, scripture makes clear elsewhere that idolatry is both internal and external. In Acts, Paul tells the Athenians, ‘we ought not to thynke that the godhed is lyke unto golde/ silver or stone/ graven by crafte and ymaginacion of man’ (17:29). That idolatry begins internally and culminates in images of gold, silver and stone crafted by human hand is put memorably in the English translation of John Calvin’s (1509–1564) Institutes: ‘the minde begetteth the idoll, and the hand bringeth it foorth’.²² Although Calvin’s own quotations of the passage from Romans, in both Latin and French, do not invoke the imagination directly as in Tyndale’s translation, his commentaries on the passage do, informing a remark in the margin of the English translation of his commentary on the book: ‘It hath beene a common faulte in all ages, that men trusting to their owne wit, have imagined of God and his worship according to their owne phantasies’.²³

But what exactly did these theologians mean by phantasy, fancy or imagination? The Italian Calvinist, and later transplant to England, Peter Martyr Vermigli (1499–1562) noticed that the vain ‘imaginations’ of Rom. 1:21, ‘cogitationibus’ in the Latin, and ‘διαλογισμοί’ (dialogismoí) in the original Greek, are ‘turned into English, imaginations, or cogitations, [they] are reasonings or disputations, which are done wyth great pesing [sic], and depe judgement’.²⁴ Thus, for Vermigli, imagination is simply an English synonym for thinking. The writings of English Protestants occasionally point to this as well. For instance, the aforementioned William Perkins, the single bestselling theologian of the late-Elizabethan and Jacobean period, who is discussed more fully in section III below, defines ‘Imagination’ as ‘the natural disposition of the understanding after the fall of man’.²⁵ However, as shown in more detail in section II below, by invoking the imagination in particular, English theologians were doing more than merely employing a synonym for thought. Instead, they were concerned to claim that idols emerged from the process of thinking in co-operation with imagination, or thinking relying on imagination. And, furthermore, these theologians took this process, although problematic, to be a natural and innate tendency of the human mind —thus inclining human beings to idolatry by default.

II Scholastic fictions

Previous scholarship has noticed the claim that, as the Book of Homilies put it, ‘idolatrie standeth cheefely in the minde’.²⁶ Despite the occasional provocative assertion, however, there has been little concentrated attention to the theme.²⁷ This section argues that theologians who postulated an internal origin for idolatry were concerned to link it specifically with the faculty of imagination. As the non-conformist and Westminster Assembly divine Thomas Goodwin (1600–1680) described it in a sermon published in 1638, he was concerned with that ‘which the understanding by the helpe of fancy frames within it selfe of things’.²⁸ This mode of expression, that of the understanding in co-operation with imagination, or fancy, is precisely how fictions were understood within the scholastic, Aristotelian philosophy which dominated European intellectual life throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The idea of a Protestantism utterly opposed to the use of scholastic categories has been radically modified in contemporary historiography.²⁹ It is now widely accepted that recourse to the more highly refined metaphysical and psychological categories of scholasticism allowed Protestants to pen highly specific attacks on Catholic doctrine. Indeed, Protestant theologians show considerably less anxiety than might be expected in borrowing from both pre-Reformation philosopher-theologians such as Thomas Aquinas and Duns Scotus, and from contemporary Catholic thinkers such as the influential Spanish Jesuit, Francisco Suárez (1548–1617). Although certain key aspects of the latter’s metaphysics did occasion debate in some Reformed circles, scholastic treatments of fiction and the imagination were embraced by both Catholics and Protestants.³⁰ In particular, the imagination was taken to be implicated in both the objections to idolatry discussed above. That is, the imagination was taken both to be the agency responsible for creating new and unprecedented things, that is, for making things up. And, the imagination was also importantly responsible for orienting human actions: I have an image in my mind, and thereafter pursue it. Idolatry, as we have seen, was taken to be implicated in both these senses. On the one hand, idols are false; they are imaginative projections rather than the real God. On the other hand, idolatry is an orientation; it points towards something other than God.

Both of these senses of idolatry, together with connection to the imagination, appear in the influential treatise Of True Theology (1592), by the continental Reformed theologian Franciscus Junius (1545–1602). Junius describes what he calls the ‘false theology’ by which our ‘imagination’ engages in ‘fashioning unalloyed dreams and games in place of the truth, and idols and tragelaphs in place of the true God’.³¹ The Herborn encyclopaedist and Calvinist, Johann Heinrich Alsted (1588–1638), employs the same formulation in his Preconceptions of Theology (1614).³² The significance here, apart from the invocation of the imagination, lies in the equation of the fictitious tragelaph, the half-goat, half-stag identified with artistic creation in Plato’s Republic (488a), with idols.³³ For the Portuguese, Jesuit Pedro da Fonseca (1528–1599), the tragelaph serves as a paradigm example of what he calls an ens fictum, a fictional being. Such a fiction, he argues, ‘is a being whose being depends on the operation of intellect, as can be said of no real being; of which kind are the Chimera, the Tragelaph and other fictions’.³⁴ That is, fictions, Fonseca argues, are wholly dependent upon the intellect for their existence; their essence explicitly renders any form of real existence impossible. The chimera and the tragelaph are impossible entities insofar as they are combinatorial — the essence of a goat and the essence of a stag positively precludes their being each other. While Fonseca distinguishes fictional beings from other ‘beings of reason’ (entia rationis), whose existence within the intellect is not so categorically different from the being of real entities, Suárez instead groups fictions and beings of reason together insofar as all are dependent upon the intellect for their instantiation.³⁵ However, for Suárez, the intellect is not the sole possible cause for the generation of fictitious beings of reason. Instead, he recognizes the possibility that the imagination, like intellect,

sometimes fashions certain beings which in fact never exist, nor even can exist, by composing them from those beings which are sensed — as when it fashions a golden mountain, which does not exist, although it is possible, and is able in the same way to fashion an impossible thing, such as a chimera.³⁶

In the Protestant philosophical tradition, too, there were discussions of what the Polish Calvinist, Bartholomaeus Keckermann (1572–1608), calls ‘apparent being, or the image of being’, namely, ‘a being of reason’ (ens rationis).³⁷ Though far from as technical as Suárez’s treatment, Keckermann uses the concept to group together such disparate items as the appearance of rainbows in the clouds, mirrors, logical concepts, rhetorical imagery and, finally, the ‘indirect image, something which does not correspond to things, but nevertheless is used effectively to represent something’. Under this category he mentions the ‘good fantasies of poets, the stories of Aesop, and other useful figments of this kind’.³⁸

For Keckermann, as for Suárez and the scholastic tradition more generally, the imagination which gives rise to these fictitious entities is a power of the soul distinct from the immaterial operations of the intellect. As the example of the golden mountain — standard in scholastic accounts of the imagination since at least Aquinas — is meant to show, the imagination combines two prior sense experiences, such as that of gold and a mountain, to create a new, previously unperceived entity. Chimeras and tragelaphs take this process one step further in that, unlike golden mountains, chimeras and tragelaphs are impossible entities — yet, they are nevertheless formed on the basis of a combination of previous perceptions. The intellect, by contrast, thinks abstractly, considering only the universals to which all perceived particulars refer. Different philosophers made these aspects of the imagination more or less obvious. The German Calvinist philosopher, Johannes Thomas Freigius (1543–83), for example, explicitly refers to the imagination itself as ‘Fictio’, while another, Otto Casmann (1562–1607), defines one of its functions as the formation of ‘impossibilia’.³⁹

Thus, the imagination is implicated in idolatry, firstly, through its combinatory status: it combines different aspects of things to form new entities which do not exist — false images, instead of the true God. But idolatry consists also in granting such false images worship; that is, idolatry has a behavioural as well as an epistemological basis. To understand the role of the imagination in this behavioural aspect, we need to appreciate the close association of the imagination to the external sensory powers, seeing, smelling, etc. This association is clear enough from the conventional scholastic vocabulary which describes the imagination as one of the ‘internal senses’, by which the sensible material acquired through the external senses is rendered suitable for intellection, and is stored for later use.⁴⁰ Typically, these internal senses also include operations such as memory and common sense, the ‘common’ meeting point of the five external senses. Fundamentally a physiological power, for Suárez and his scholastic contemporaries, the imagination, along with other internal senses, is based within the physical structure of the brain, and can thus become damaged or defective if the brain is injured externally or flooded with the melancholy humour.⁴¹ As the name ‘sense’ indicates, for scholastic philosophers, the operations of the imagination were far removed from the abstractive and universalistic activities associated with intellect. Indeed, the capacities of the imagination for processing, storing and judging the sensory data acquired through the external senses were conventionally thought to be a feature of both human and animal psychology.⁴² The imagination’s ability for judgement, in particular, was thought to be an animal’s highest quasi-cognitive capacity. Suárez’s fellow Jesuit, Rodrigo Arriaga (1592–1667), went further than this, claiming that animals were even capable of the formation of fictitious beings of reason.⁴³ But this was unusual; most scholastics claimed, as Suárez did, that the ability of the imagination to form fictions is ‘perhaps never... without the co-operation of reason’.⁴⁴

It is the role of the imagination in animal psychology, however, which best serves to illustrate its role in behaviour. Animals, lacking the rational faculties associated by scholastic philosophers with human beings, are primarily motivated by the imagination. Keckermann, in a set of Philosophical Disputations (1604), describes an eleven-step motive process beginning from the perception of an external object. In the fourth step, after apprehension by the common sense, the imagination ‘decides whether [the perceived object] is good, bad; useful or useless’. This judgement stimulates the blood and spirits which, in turn, move the muscles of the body.⁴⁵ Positing an additional judgement of reason, along with the co-operation of the will, would indicate the trajectory of motion for human beings. Of course, as was acknowledged by the scholastics, human beings do not always engage reason when initiating motion. Thus, the imagination stands as the de facto motivator of what we might think of as our subconscious, unthinking or instinctual reactions to sensory stimuli.

This scholastic psychology, which viewed the imagination as an internal sense housed within the brain, distinguished from the intellect by its limitation to sensory particulars and the primary motivator of non-rational actions, was, though originally articulated in academic contexts, near-ubiquitous in early modern England. In his poem Nosce Teipsum (1599), or Know Thyself, John Davies (1569–1626) offers what is, effectively, a verse-rendering of scholastic psychology. Delineating the duties of the external and internal senses, Davies writes, ‘Those outward Organs present things receive,/ This inward Sense doth absent things retaine;/ Yet straight transmits all formes she doth perceive,/ Unto a higher region of the braine’.⁴⁶ Robert Burton (1577–1640), too, in his Anatomy of Melancholy (1621; last rev. edn 1651) describes a brain ‘distinguished by certaine ventricles’, within which he locates common sense, memory and ‘Phantasie, or Imagination’.⁴⁷ Much as the scholastics, for Burton, the imagination, ‘In men... is subject and governed by Reason, or at least should be, but in Brutes it hath no superior, and is... all the reason they have’.⁴⁸ Some English authors of psychological works even linked the internal senses to the generation of entia rationis just as Suárez had. Not only did Latin works of philosophy, such as the Hypomnemata (pubd 1650) by Oxford theologian, John Prideaux (1578–1650), invoke the subject, but so did works in the vernacular.⁴⁹ The English Royalist, Nicholas Mosley (c.1611–72), for instance, in his work Psychosophia, or, Natural and Divine Contemplations of the Passions and Faculties of the Soul of Man (1653), describes internal senses of memory, common sense and imagination, which he calls ‘phantasie’.⁵⁰ Like Burton, Mosley describes the imagination as ‘the highest faculty that any brute or irrational creature is capable of’; its operation, he writes, ‘is more exactly to weigh, and diligently to examine those forms and similitudes received in the Common Sense’. He goes on to distinguish the imagination from common sense, suggesting that the former,

retains not onely those things which are, or were the objects of the External Senses... but those things also which never were, nor ever will be the objects of Sense, being entiâ rationis, non entiâ rei [beings of reason, not beings of things], chimaeraes, figments of the Brain, having no existence in nature, only a notionary, imaginary existence.

Such entia rationis, Mosley writes, include ‘the representation of Centaures and other Monsters, which Poets and Painters have feigned and painted, which are not, nor indeed have any existence in nature, but are a meer imagination of the Brain’. But, having just affirmed imagination as the highest power of irrational animals, Mosley denies the formation of beings of reason to animal imagination, attributing it instead to ‘the Intellectual Phantasie... which is proper to Man, not common with Beasts’.⁵¹

Such faculty psychology, dividing the various psychological operations of human beings into disparate internal senses was also used by Calvinist theologians. In his Institutes, for example, Calvin himself refers to the process of perception whereby, from the external senses, ‘al objectes are powred into Common sense, as into a place of receit: then followeth Phantasie, which judgeth of those thinges one from other that Common sense hath conceived’. Though, even as Calvin suggests that such divisions ‘entangle us with obscurenes’, nevertheless, he writes, ‘I am not much against it, neither will I confute this opinion’.⁵² A more extended discussion appears in the work of Calvin’s contemporary, the Heidelberg theologian, Girolamo Zanchi (1516–90).⁵³ The preacher, William Perkins, too, mentions ‘the outward senses... of sight, hearing, tasting, touching, smelling... also... the inward... imagination, memorie, etc.... done by the braine, and the parts of the braine’.⁵⁴ Meanwhile, Perkins’s contemporary anti-Catholic polemicist, Andrew Willet (1562–1621), in a sermon preached in 1592, explicitly suggests that ‘we read in the scripture’ of ‘the three faculties of the soule... the outwarde and externall sense, the inward and internall, called the phantasie, and the intellectuall and understanding part’.⁵⁵ Willet’s obvious engagement with scholasticism is evident elsewhere, too, for instance he refers to an ‘ens rationis’ in an anti-Jesuit work of 1603.⁵⁶ The scholastic theory of the internal senses was still being referred to in theological writing decades later, for example, the preacher, John Bisco (1605/6–79), defines the imagination, or ‘fancy’, in a work of 1655, as ‘an inferior power of the soule, which is placed in the middle of the interior senses, and bordereth between the senses and the understanding. This fancy is the former of many strange notions and conceits’.⁵⁷ As is alluded to above, this scholastic psychology would prove essential to the conception of idolatry articulated by English Protestants. Both the combinatory character of the imagination and its motive, behavioural aspect, were employed in the critique of idolatry, and it is to this application that we now turn.

III Idolatry and the imagination

As we have seen, Protestants objected to Catholic idolatry on two grounds. First, they objected to it because it was false; it constituted a claim about the nature of God which was incorrect. Second, they objected to it because it was wrong, in the sense of being morally abhorrent. That is, as an action (worship) it could only rightly be directed at God. In this section, I want to turn to elaborating these two claims and by showing how Protestants employed the category of imagination to explain them. I argue here that once the focus came to settle on the imaginative quality of idolatry, accusations of something’s being idolatrous easily moved beyond narrow liturgical concerns. Instead, idolatry was re-conceptualized in moral terms as that which grants something which belongs to God to something else. For if God is truly omniscient and omnipotent, then all our actions should be conducted as if under his watchful eye — for they are indeed so conducted. Therefore, any action which is sinful in fact constitutes a wilful denial of some aspect of God — such as his power or judgement. This claim, that idolatry consists in any action which takes some external end, such as temporal pleasure, as the orienting goal of human activity, enabled English Protestants to propagandize against a whole host of moral ills from theatre and cosmetics to far more consequential subjects, including politics and natural philosophy itself — all of which came to be categorized as idols by various English writers.

Although we have seen that the imagination was employed already by English Protestants as early as Tyndale, in this section I want to focus especially on writings from the late Elizabethan period and later. Particularly important is the preacher, William Perkins, typically considered a founding figure of the so-called ‘moderate puritan’ tradition.⁵⁸ Unlike earlier presbyterians, moderate puritans such as Perkins typically pressed for further reform from within the established Church. This led Perkins to place a strong emphasis on the need for internal reform and especially the cultivation of conscience. While some scholars have argued that this internal focus was due to particular historical circumstances, namely, the failure of institutionalized presbyterianism, in fact the work of Perkins and the moderate puritans remained influential for decades.⁵⁹ In particular, Perkins’s account of idolatry in his A Warning Against the Idolatrie of the Last Times (1601) was still among the recommended works on that topic by 1646.⁶⁰ In line with the general charges against idolatry we have considered so far, Perkins objected both to the fictional quality of Catholic idolatry, the fact that it misrepresented God’s nature, and to its orientation, the fact that it constituted an action directed to something other than God. Each is discussed here in turn.

The general grievance against the Catholic use of images in worship was simple enough: their employment transgressed what, to the Reformed, constituted God’s second commandment: ‘Thou shalt make thee no graven image’ (Ex. 20:4; Deut. 5:8). Perkins gives a clear delineation of this argument in his anti-Catholic polemic A Reformed Catholike (1598): ‘for God may appeare in whatsoever forme it pleaseth his majestie; yet doth it not followe, that man should therefore resemble God in those formes: man having no libertie to resemble him in any forme at all: unles he be commanded so to doe’.⁶¹ Here, Perkins warns Catholics against citing biblical precedent to inform their depiction, for example, of God as an old man based on his description as the Ancient of Days (Dan. 7:9). Similarly, Perkins suggests, the inclusion of decorative cherubim on the Tabernacle is no justification for Catholic image-making insofar as those cherubim ‘were erected by speciall commandement from God’.⁶² In his A Warning Against the Idolatrie of the Last Times, Perkins describes ‘Such images’ which ‘serve to signifie the holy things of God’ as ‘only at the appointment of God’.⁶³ These are ‘properly signes’, he argues, and constitute solely those things at which God has explicitly ‘bound himselfe’. Perkins names the cherubim, the brazen serpent and the sacraments among such lawful signs.⁶⁴ Thus, his argument against Catholic images, for example, of crucifix scenes, martyred saints and much else, was that such images had not been authorized by God. But, as we have seen already, English Protestants hardly stopped at that. Instead, they insisted as Crashawe did against the Jesuits, that the Catholic Church ‘has not true Christ left amongst them’.

Perkins gives an elaborate typology of idolatry in his Warning, distinguishing between worship given to a false god, such as paganism, and false worship given to the true God. Among the examples of this latter phenomenon, Perkins itemizes various occasions in the Old Testament in which the Israelites adopted the practices of their idolatrous neighbours. Although Perkins creates this dichotomy which suggests the possibility of improperly representing the true God, he almost immediately undermines it. For, he argues, ‘when men present themselves before Images, there to worship God, they worship not God, but either a fained god, that can and wil be present and heare at images, or the very images themselves’. Since God is beyond both human understanding and any possible sensory representation, whether physical or mental, Perkins suggests, in forming an image of God, God himself is re-defined; he is changed into something other than what he is. Perkins writes, ‘So soone as God is represented in an image, he is deprived of his glorie, and changed into a bodily, visible, circumscribed, and finite Majestie’.⁶⁵ That is, in taking God to be the kind of thing which can be represented in an image, Catholics make a false claim about the sort of thing God is. As he writes in A Reformed Catholike, ‘though in words they honour Christ, yet in deede they turne him into a Pseudo-Christ and an Idol of their owne braine’.⁶⁶ In worshipping images, Catholics assume that theirs is a god who is representable, and thus finite and limited. In short, rather than conceive of God with reference to scripture, Catholics merely ‘content themselves with the light of blinde nature, and frame God according to their own desires and affections’.⁶⁷ The use of images unduly restricts God to the material realm, and thus to ‘a phantasie of their own’, rather than the fullness of God’s nature as revealed ‘in his creatures and word, and specially in Christ... the ingraven image of the person of the father’.⁶⁸ Idols, or images, therefore, are not simply examples of the wrong way to worship the right God —rather, they are mere physical signifiers of the underlying falsity of the conception of God from which they originate.

Just as a tragelaph is impossible because it combines the essence of a goat with the essence of stag — both of which positively preclude the essence of the other — so, too, is an idol impossible. An idol combines the notion of God — an omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent being — with a physical, material object and spatial location. Both of these definitions necessarily preclude the inclusion of the other: a physical object simply cannot contain infinity. But orthodox Christianity defends a far more specific notion of God than that of his omnipotence and omniscience. For example, Perkins emphasizes the Triunity of God, writing ‘when the mind abstracts the godhead from the father, sonne, and holy Ghost, god is transformed into an idol’. On these grounds Perkins dismisses ‘the Idol-god of the greatest nations of the world, of Turkes, of Jewes; yea of many that pretend Christianitie, who upon ignorance worship nothing but an Absolute God’.⁶⁹ Concerning the second person of the Trinity, in particular, Perkins adds that ‘he in one person is perfect God and perfect man... And he which otherwise conceiveth of him, turnes him into an idol or forged Christ’. Thus, Perkins declares Catholic transubstantiation idolatrous, specifically because it fails to attribute to Christ his full humanity. He writes, ‘if the bread be verely transubstantiated into the bodie of Christ, this very bodie must needes be made not onely of the substance of the virgin, but also of the substance of bread: nay it is made a very monstrous bodie’. Specifically, he contends, it is monstrous because, physically, it is impossible for the full extent of a material, human body to fit inside the small quantity of bread.⁷⁰ Christ is also defined as priest, prophet and king, Perkins argues, and Catholic theology deviates from this conception in myriad ways.⁷¹ In short, Catholicism ‘changeth and reverseth the doctrine that Christ hath left to his Church specially in the books of the new testament by an heap of humane Traditions’.⁷²

Thus far we have considered the first of the two objections against Catholicism: its misrepresentation of the nature of God. For Perkins and the moderate puritan tradition that drew on his works, following the psychological model defended in scholastic philosophy, this misrepresentation was built directly into the nature of human beings. According to scripture, human beings do have a natural idea of the Godhead, and thus are ‘without excuse’ (Rom. 1:20). Nevertheless, we conjure up impossible ‘Idol-god[s]’, as Perkins describes them, because ‘we see through a glass, darkly’ (1 Cor. 13:12). That is, our natural idea of God is combined with our sensory perceptions, leading us, necessarily, to form a false image of God. This idea is itself the combination of two theories, the scholastic insistence that, as Aristotle famously put it, ‘the soul never thinks without an image’, and the Reformed doctrine of total depravity: the idea that original sin has not just corrupted human nature, but that it has left human beings utterly unable to achieve the good, without relying on the enlightening effects of God’s grace.⁷³ As Perkins puts it, ‘The minde and understanding part of man is naturally so corrupt, that so soone as he can use reason: he doth nothing but imagine that which is wicked, and against the lawe of God’.⁷⁴ But not only have our imaginations come to be wicked, we have also come to be more reliant upon them. Richard Sibbes (1577–1635), a moderate puritan of the generation after Perkins, puts the point clearly: ‘the judgement it selfe since the fall... yeeldeth to our imagination’.⁷⁵ For Sibbes, this manifests itself in a misapprehension of sensory reality. He argues, ‘the best things, if they bee attended with sensible inconveniences, as want, disgrace in the world, and such like, are misjudged for evill things; and the very worst things, if they bee attended with respect in the world and sensible contentments, are imagined to be the greatest good’.⁷⁶ Sibbes puts this explicitly in terms of a criticism of Catholicism only a few pages later: ‘It marres all in religion, when wee goe about heavenly things with earthly affections, and seeke not CHRIST in Christ, but the world: What is Popery but an artificiall frame of mans braine to please mens imaginations by outward state and pompe of Ceremonies’.⁷⁷

With Sibbes, therefore, we move from the first objection against idolatry to the second. Not only is idolatry fictitious in the sense of being an impossible and false image of God, it also constitutes an improper and wrong orientation on the world, a focus on the sensory, rather than the salvific. It is this sensual inclination, the desire ‘to please mens imaginations by outward state’ that has informed the physical signification of our false conceptions of God. But these two conceptions of idolatry pull simultaneously in both directions. That is, the wrong orientation turns out to also be an example of misrepresenting God. We can see this by considering the objections raised by Protestants against Catholic images of saints or the Virgin, such as was condemned in the work by Crashawe discussed at the outset of this article. Images of the Virgin or the saints, too, Calvinist theologians argue, violate not only the second commandment, but also represent idolatry in the same way. That is, they too serve as examples of a falsely conceived god. Crashawe reminds us of how this argument functions: saints and the Virgin are mere creatures, even if they ought, rightly, to serve as moral exemplars. By granting them veneration we raise them up to levels of power possessed only by God, thereby construing God, wrongly, as a being to whom others can equal. This is the theoretical import of Crashawe’s critique of the Jesuit’s praise for Mary’s milk mixed with Jesus’s blood — only Jesus’s blood is properly salvific.⁷⁸ Perkins makes the same argument with particular clarity in his Reformed Catholike. He writes, ‘To praie unto Saints departed... is to ascribe that unto them which is proper to God himselfe: namely, to know the heart, with the inward desires and motions thereof: and to know the speaches and behaviours of all men in all places upon earth at all times’. By this doctrine, he continues, ‘the Saints are still made more then creatures; because they are saide, to knowe the thoughts and all the doings of all men at all times, which no created power can well comprehend at once’. Ultimately, Perkins contends, this view of saintly power is little more than ‘a forgerie of mans braine’.⁷⁹

Thus, the misrepresentation of God extends to even implicit claims about his nature. But it also covers actions or orientations. As Perkins summarizes in his Warning, any way ‘whereby that which is gods is given to the creatures... thus they are transformed into idols’.⁸⁰ Perkins initially describes this entirely in terms of ‘worship’ granted to creatures, but when he turns to itemizing the forms of that worship his category of idolatry expands considerably. For, he argues, ‘all creatures are made idols, when men give their hearts unto them, and fixe their principall affections on them’. According to scholastic convention, to be virtuous is, in some sense, to orient one’s actions towards God, and thus to make God the proper end and goal of human existence. Thus, for Perkins, any action, or series of actions, which would displace God from this position as the orienting end of our entire existence, constitutes an idol — for we are thereby directing our actions towards an end which ought, rightly, to be occupied by God. And therefore, we are attributing to something which is not God, an action which ought properly to be given to God alone. Thus, he writes, ‘covetousnesse is the worshipping of idols; because the covetous man puts his confidence in his riches, for the preservation of his life’. That is, for a covetous person, riches are ‘placed above God, or matched with him in regard of obedience, feare, love, confidence, etc. it is made another god’.⁸¹ Idolatry, then, because it is, according to the formulation of these English Protestants, an internal more than an external process, can simply be defined as ‘placing somewhat that is not God in the roome of the true God’.⁸² The later preacher, John Bisco, refers explicitly to ‘thought-Idolatry’, which he defines as, ‘When they think and imagine some other thing besides the true God to be their chiefest good’.⁸³ Non-conformist, Thomas Goodwin, echoes the point, writing that our imagination can ‘hold up the images of those gods they create, which the heart falls downe and worships; they present credit, riches, beauty, till the heart hath worshipt them, and this when the things themselves are absent’.⁸⁴

This more expansive, and imaginative, idea of idolatry takes central stage in Perkins’s posthumously published A Treatise of Mans Imagination (1607). In this work, Perkins considers almost the entire range of possible sinful actions to constitute examples of idolatry, that is, as instances of a falsely conceived God. Thus, Perkins refers to ‘atheisme in practice’, or, ‘that sinne wherby men deny God in their deedes, lives and conversations’.⁸⁵ Perkins gives an exhaustive summary of the various ways in which human actions betray our underlying conviction that there is no god. For example, in sinning we may be ‘thinking that God is not present in all places’.⁸⁶ Or, in repeating a sinful action we have previously engaged in, we deny the reality of God’s justice.⁸⁷ ‘What’, asks Perkins, ‘is the cause why men use oppression, and injustice, deceit, and lying in their worldly affaires? Is it not because this thought of Atheisme doth possesse their hearts, that God regardeth not there outward things?’⁸⁸ Just as the more recognizable form of outward idolatry arises from humanity’s natural corruption, our orientation towards the sensory world rather than towards God, so too, Perkins suggests, such various forms of atheism arise from the darkness of the human mind since the Fall. He writes that because ‘mans minde by nature is full of darkness, he cannot without Gods speciall grace, perceive the things of God, and so he judgeth the gospell foolishness, and embraceth error, rather than the truth’.⁸⁹ For Perkins, then, the only way to overcome such psychological proclivity for falsity is, for humanity to ‘reject his owne naturall reason, and stoppe up the eyes of his naturall minde, like a blinde man, and suffer himselfe wholly to bee guided by Gods spirite in the thinges of God, that thereby he may bee made wise unto salvation’.⁹⁰

This claim, that an idol could be anything to which is allocated any action, or series of actions, which ought properly to be directed at God, allowed Protestants to deploy the charge of idolatry against any behaviour which they deemed to be immoral or improper. For instance, the French Huguenot, Pierre Du Moulin (1568–1658), who defines idolatry as transferring religious worship owed to God to a mere created being, derides the use of cosmetics in precisely such language.⁹¹ When women use cosmetics, Du Moulin claims, they are ‘Idolatrizing their owne bodies’.⁹² Du Moulin reaches hyperbolic levels of Augustinianism, too, when he proclaims that ‘the love and respect which [children] give to their poppets are eminent seeds of Idolatry’.⁹³ John Milton, too, expands the polemical use of idolatry. In his De Doctrina Christiana (c.1660), he characterizes idolatry as the result of substituting some human-derived affectivity for those willed by God. In the work’s second chapter, he writes, employing a technical Greek term, ‘It is better, therefore, to contemplate and to mentally grasp God not anthropopathically (ἀνθρωποπαθῶϛ), i.e., in the manner of humans, who make no limit of inventing subtilties concerning God, but in the manner of scripture, i.e., in the way he has offered himself to be contemplated’.⁹⁴ Later in the same work he describes the ‘idololatrica’, whereby we grant ‘gratitude toward idols or else created things in preference to God’.⁹⁵ The expansiveness of his account of idolatry appears especially in his earlier polemic against the late Charles I’s autobiographical apologia. Milton invokes an explicitly iconoclastic response to the king’s book through his title, Eikonoklastes (1649), while decrying monarchy itself as ‘a civil kinde of idolatry’.⁹⁶

That Du Moulin, theologian, and Milton, author of a theological tract, relate their concerns with moral and political topics to the religious language of idolatry, may be no surprise. However, anxieties about the fictitious character of Catholic liturgical practices were expressed across the intellectual landscape — including by the philosopher, Francis Bacon. In his Advancement of Learning (1605), Bacon suggests that Catholics ‘hath too easily receiued... narrations of Miracles wrought by Martyrs, Hermits, or Monkes of the desert, and other holy men’. Ultimately, such ‘impostures of the Cleargie, illusions of spirits, and badges of Antichrist’, Bacon continues, ‘grew to be esteemed... to the great scandall and detriment of Religion’.⁹⁷ I would suggest, too, that we can understand Bacon’s famous ‘idols of the mind’ within the more expansive notion of idolatry we have been discussing. Indeed, Bacon himself characterizes these philosophical idols as the improper reflection, by the imagination, of the nature of things as God created them. In the Advancement, Bacon is explicit about the parallel between humanity’s inability to perceive nature aright and its inability to perceive God aright:

in the inquirie of the diuine truth, their pride enclined to leaue the Oracle of Gods word, and to vanish in the mixture of their owne inuentions: so in the inquisition of Nature, they euer left the Oracle of Gods works, and adored the deceiuing and deformed Images, which the vnequall mirrour of their owne minds, or a few receiued Authors or principles, did represent vnto them.⁹⁸

In all these cases, the philosophical as much as the theological, humanity substitutes some image, invented by the imagination on the basis of sensory accidents, for the true reality willed and created by God. Protestant concerns about idolatry, therefore, extend beyond the liturgical into a more generalized anxiety about the status of fictions, and the potential for imagination to lead us into sin and inaccuracy.

Perhaps the most famous case of such anxiety is characterization of theatrical performance as idolatrous by English Protestants, from Stephen Gosson (1554–1624) to William Prynne (1600–69).⁹⁹ Indeed, in a sermon preached before the Virginia Company in 1609, Crashawe warns the assembled colonists against the ‘three great enemies’ of their project: ‘the Divell, Papists, and Players’, that is, actors. What, for Crashawe unites these three? They all ‘mocke at religion, and abuse the holie Scriptures’.¹⁰⁰ While Crashawe does not use the term idolatry in his condemnation of papists or players, he does assert clearly that they, like the devil, aim at some end other than God, while the colonial enterprise is justified on precisely those grounds, viz. that it is oriented towards a holy cause. This should give us cause to reconsider those other Protestant condemnations of theatre, and poetry too. Scholars have too often focused on the frequently negative characterization of the imagination within English Protestant discourse. Ioan P. Couliano, for example, claimed that ‘the Reformation leads to a total censorship of the imaginary, since phantasms are none other than idols conceived by the inner sense’.¹⁰¹ But, in fact, there was no question for those Protestants discussed in this article of abandoning the imagination altogether. And, indeed, close consideration of their views on religious images indicates that, there too, it is, as Perkins puts it, ‘the scope and intent of the commandement of God, onely to forbid the making of images, in respect they are to be applied to Divine or religious use’.¹⁰² Thus, it is evident that as far as the theatre is concerned, Protestants objected to its immorality; the lewd and debauched world in which theatrical performances were situated, rather than their representative character.¹⁰³

***

The fictions of the Catholic Church were opposed by English Protestants, not only because they were manifestly untrue, based on imaginative projections, rather than the truth of scripture, but also because they were wrong; they were oriented to an end other than God. Images of God were wrong, not only in that they falsely represented God, against his specific injunctions to the contrary in scripture, but also because, granting worship to a physical image meant devoting to an image that which ought rightly to be given to God alone. The adoration of the Virgin Mary in the poem criticized in Crashawe’s pamphlet with which this article opened is wrong too, not simply because it gives adoration to an image, but because the poem itself describes a false reality, and is oriented towards wrongful ends. Although English Protestants certainly did criticize the representation of the divine, representing the divine was not per se bad, for one could represent the divine if given explicit instruction to that end. Rather, a false conception of God, such as that enshrined in idolatry, oriented one towards immoral actions, such as valuing the material over the divine or the sensible over the salvific. Ultimately, the iconoclasm of English Protestants was decidedly puritanical; that is, it was moral more than it was metaphysical. If images were restricted to scripturally permitted contexts, if the Virgin Mary was understood as a creature like any other, then the fictions of the Catholic Church could be overcome. More fundamentally, if the imaginations of the English people were occupied with the right images and their actions oriented to the right doctrines, then God’s grace could surely be expected — though not, ultimately, guaranteed.

Thinking beyond the confines of early modern confessional conflict, I would suggest that, for the English Protestants I have discussed here, Catholic fake news is bad, as all other kinds of fake news, not solely because it misrepresents the facts (though it may also do that), but because it misrepresents the facts in a particular direction. If, say, a certain politician was to characterize representations of their agenda as ‘fake news’, more than decrying the facticity of this or that accounting, such a declaration might better be thought of as the claim that that representation serves to support an alternative agenda. It works against rather than with the politician making the claim. That is, fake news points in the direction of the enemy; it falsely imagines a world in which that rather than this is true. And if, to return to the early modern world, Protestant polemicists were sure about any one thing in particular, it is that their this was the only right and true representation of the world. Anything else is naught but a ‘fiction of the mind’.¹⁰⁴

Footnotes