ABSTRACT
Camille noted earlier that it was not just the so-called ‘hammer-happy iconoclasts’ that brought down the images of the medieval word but the power of the word (Camille 1989: 347). This was in great part due to the particular power of typography in face of the visual and material. Typography was at the heart of the transition from the aural/oral-centred cultures of the medieval period to the ocularcentric cultures of the Renaissance and Reformation. In particular the Reformation addressed in very explicit and violent terms the question of material register and presencing and the terms by which propinquity in religious and social life could be achieved. However, these were the unanticipated consequences deriving from pre-existing controversies over material images, both external in two and three dimensions and internal in terms of immaterial mental images. Such images were fundamentally indistinguishable from one another despite differences in media, except in terms of how adequately they were perceived to apprehend the divine. Typography and the exteriorizing of the word reconfigured this medieval understanding into radically new ones of self, material register and propinquity described by Ong (1967) and also by Boulnois (2008) in reference to the counter-Reformation ‘Spiritual Exercises’ of Loyola. Here the differences over the effects of images, immaterial and material in two and three dimensions between the great protestant reformers, Karlstadt, Zwingli, Luther and Calvin, illustrate how respective notions of propinquity function in terms of the way the divine is presenced. These differences reveal the specific material registers in which propinquity is achieved, and the terms within which social relations are formed. In particular we can see in the different proposals for a new ‘physics’ of the Eucharist (Wandel 2006) how the question of substance was handled. The significance of the substance of the material in relation to the immaterial divine described different ways in which these re-workings of substance could facilitate new social means of being such as those evinced in the various forms of iconoclasm, both ordered and spontaneous, which took place. Similarly, as these new ‘physics’ (Wandel 2006) helped rework understandings of the material and immaterial, new technologies such as the camera obscura, the telescope, the microscope and of course typography helped refigure understandings of what constitutes the material and its substances and the kinds of human engagements such re-figurations then enabled.
