ABSTRACT
This book seeks to extend the kind of inquiry described above, while challenging some of its basic assumptions. It examines the variety of possible reasons for this critical oversight. The notion of the afterimage captures one final problematic that continually attends the study of the past and its images (both visual and verbal): that all of history's images come after the events they seek to capture. As afterimages of sixteenth-century England, superimposed upon the visual field of the historical observer in the twenty-first century, the pages of the books that comprise this study pull in two directions toward an unrecoverable, ghostlike, and intriguing past and toward an equally unknown future. Mapping the hypothetical past onto the myriad of potential futures is as close as one can come to doing justice to history. The interrelations of linguistic and visual image making beyond the conventional iconographic correspondences, offer a unique space for an examination of cultural change in early modern England.
