ABSTRACT

Medieval canon law defined and defended public religious imagery, such as murals or stained glass windows in parish churches, as the libri laicorum – the books of the laity and thus the books of the 'unlettered'. Even some of the English Lollards, the fourteenth-century 'heretical' followers of John Wyclif accepted that images might function as books for the illiterate. This concept of substitution was also central to the church's defence of images against Reformation criticism. However, in the case of English church art, such as wall paintings, we rarely have evidence for the identities of the artists and certainly cannot construct 'biographies' for them. Moreover, basic 'housekeeping' documents such as wills and churchwardens' accounts, tell us only about the practical details of creation: the date, cost, patron and the painter. The stability of the rhetorical defence of images described stands in opposition to a radical and rapid development in the use of images in churches.