Abstract

This article examines how John Foxe and Edmund Spenser utilize the trope of invisibility to imagine an English Protestant church that, having defined the “true Church” by its lack of worldly visibility, was forced to create a mode of self-representative imagery without sacrificing its validating status as an invisible, spiritual community. Through the woodcut illustrations of Actes and Monuments, Foxe crystallizes the challenge of locating the invisible church within visible history, and in the figure of Una, The Faerie Queene perfects the Protestant project of embodying the invisible while exploring the anxieties and ambiguities inherent in that embodiment.

pdf

Share