ABSTRACT
In early modern England, scholars now agree, images not only retained their potent cultural force but even flourished in an iconosceptic age. This should not surprise us. What made visual representation important to an earlier era – indeed, made it seem so treacherous to the reformers of the sixteenth century – was its power of direct appeal: a persuasive effect of signification which ensured that its relevance would survive the cautions and strictures of the reformers. Images, after all, were never decorations. On medieval walls, altars and manuscripts, images worked alongside – on a parity with – the word as preached or limned; in the early modern period they served in much the same way, if in different media: as extensions of and essential adjuncts to the verbal content of printed broadsides, pamphlets and books.
