ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses how the long-taught notion of Reformed England as an aniconic or iconophobic culture has proved erroneous. The early modern period is characterised by a disruption in the paradigms of visuality, that is, first of all, by the passage from the extramission to the intromission theory of vision. Marcus Nordlund’s study remains the authority in this field of research: according to him, early modernity experienced a common transition from speculative to enclosed visuality, participational, specular, and homogeneous conception of the relationship between perceiver and perceived, in favour of a discontinuous, passive, and interioristic optics. The visual culture of early modern England was rich, though embattled and contested. On the contrary, within “enclosed visuality,” the individual is passive: the sense of sight is constructed as a camera obscura. The humoural conception of the body entailed physiological permeability.
