ABSTRACT
In her study of woodcuts from the Bishops’ Bible (1568), Margaret Aston commented that ‘the depiction of visionary or dream appearances could be seen as belonging to a dierent category’ than other images of God.1 e use of anthropomorphic pictures of God in woodcuts of prophetic visions suggested at least a small loophole for visual representation of the divine in the English Protestant visual culture. Even though this exceptional category would eventually collapse under the ‘reforming taboo on any representation of God’, the issue was much more important to the Protestant use of images than even Aston’s analysis lets on. e portrayal of divine visions in the Bible posed a pragmatic problem for iconoclastic reformers, because of their animosity toward manufactured images of God, on the one hand, and their desire to accurately represent and translate scripture, on the other. How can prophetic visions be displayed in print without either portraying God or compromising the historical integrity of the image (i.e. by not portraying God)? Despite the almost universal Protestant condemnation of Catholic images of God, as a type of scriptural event visions of heaven received more commentary and visual depiction in English print than most things in the Bible.
