Image, Text, and Religious Reform in Fifteenth-Century England (review)

Image, Text, and Religious Reform in Fifteenth-Century England explores a set of English discourses on the relation of image and text in the fifteenth century. Intentionally devoid of actual images, Gayk’s study focuses instead on vernacular writing in the wake of the Lollard critique and rejection of images at a time when image use was controversial, changing, and closely tied to the church’s efforts to regulate lay piety. Building upon the research of such scholars as Margaret Aston, who have surveyed this territory before, Gayk fills in some important gaps by showing that the concern with images was explored by literary writers and theologians such as Thomas Hoccleve, John Lydgate, John Capgrave, and Reginald Pecock. She demonstrates the ways in which these writers “model reformist responses to the changing religious environment of late medieval England” (14), and in so doing forces us to rethink some long-held beliefs about orthodox and heterodox attitudes toward image and text.

In Chapter 1, Gayk looks at a series of “moderate” Lollard texts that advocate their own reformation of the image. While many Lollard writings are known for condemning religious imagery and other forms of imaginative and visual piety, these texts are “surprisingly incarnational” and employ what she calls a “Lollard iconography” (17): pictorial imagery and rhetorical devices that aim to regulate visual literacy. She argues that these writers embrace visual language in order to lead readers into an ethical understanding of images, highlighting the often-overlooked reality that not all Lollards renounced images altogether. Some were keen to provide the devout with their own form of aesthetic education, as she demonstrates. In Chapter 2, Gayk examines the theme of sight and vision in Hoccleve’s writings, detailing the ways in which religious images in his poems thematize links between sight and knowledge, optics, and epistemology. In particular, she focuses on the use of the metaphor of eyeglasses to convey the need for regulating vision in order to avoid heresy and error: “Hoccleve suggests a model of ‘speculative poetics’ in which books are treated as textual spectacles through which images might be better seen and visual experience more effectively mediated” (83). Hoccleve’s interest in visionary discourse is revealed to be both orthodox and reformist, as well as indebted to contemporary optical theory and theories of the imagination that emphasized the power of images to transform viewers. Hence Gayk reveals Hoccleve’s aesthetic ideas to be denser and more variegated than critics have often acknowledged.

Like Hoccleve, Lydgate also seeks to instruct readers in how to view religious images, and Chapter 3 scrutinizes the role of image and text in his writings. Gayk reveals Lydgate to be both conservative and innovative in his attitudes toward images. In his orthodox efforts to regulate lay piety, Lydgate translates clerical, Latinate, and pre-Bernardine modes of affective piety and monastic lectio into vernacular poetry—an inherently reformist gesture. This act of translation finds a parallel in his treatment of images, which are also shown to elide boundaries, as Lydgate’s writings make concrete some compelling transitions from image to text: moments when material, artistic images such as the pietà and Man of Sorrows become textualized. Gayk rightly notes the “permeable boundaries” (110) between image and text in these works and the often mobile, enigmatic transformations between media they exemplify. Indeed, some of Lydgate’s poetry was subject to multiform identity and translated from manuscript page to church walls, and his translation of the Danse macabre—itself inspired by the painted poem in the cemetery of the Church of the Holy Innocents in Paris—migrated from text to image and back again, eventually making its way into print. This fluid dynamic of transmission can be connected to what Gayk intriguingly calls “the chameleon quality of the image” (3), its capacity for shifting, ever-changing (and often textual) permutation. This is a research area ripe for further exploration, especially in the study of...