ABSTRACT
In 1606, Anthony Wootton published a dense and learned Defence of the puritan divine William Perkins’s A Reformed Catholike (1598), in the wake of the violent assault recently launched against it by the Roman Catholic controversialist William Bishop. Wootton’s lengthy line-by-line refutation of Bishop’s book contains two intriguing illustrations. One (apparently from a eenth-century book of hours) shows the Virgin and child surrounded by angels and carries the imprimatur of the papal coat of arms. e text indicates that Sixtus IV had granted 11,000 years of pardon to those who recited a prayer before it. e second is a facsimile of the measure of Our Lady’s Foot with a Spanish inscription written across the middle (Figure 1.1 below). By order of a bull of John XXII, devout believers who kissed this pattern and said the Ave Maria three times earned 700 years of indulgence. In a context in which Church of England bishops and ocials regarded items of this kind as incriminating marks of popish superstition and dissidence, and in which they were actively seizing, conscating and burning them on bonres of vanities, the reproduction of these indulgenced medieval images seems, at rst sight, surprising and puzzling.1 What exactly are these Catholic devotional pictures doing in a polemical tract vehemently denouncing the religious institution that engendered them? What do they reveal about the visual culture of postReformation England and about the illustration of European religious books in an age of iconoclasm?
