A Reformation debate: Karlstadt. Emser, and Eck on sacred images. Three treatises in translation (review)

202 Reviews about the medieval Church, this is a very good synthesis indeed. Toby Burrows University Library University of Western Australia Mangrum, Bryan D. and Giuseppe Scavizzi, trans, A Reformation debate: Karlstadt, Emser, and Eck on sacred images. Three treatises in translation (Renaissance and Reformation texts in translation, 5), Ottawa and Toronto, Dovehouse Editions and Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies of Victoria University Toronto, 1991; paper; pp. ix, 115; R.R.P. CAN$10.00. The cult of images and the iconoclasm that destroyed it have attracted much scholarly interest in recent times. At a seminar in Toronto twenty years ago, art historians and social historians showed a mutual incomprehension over Reformation iconoclasm, the former grieving over lost works of art, the latter seeking to understand the dynamics of violence andritualcleansing in sixteenth-century society. Since then, signs and their meaning, images and then prototypes have become staples of scholarly conversation, and sympathetic study of what was once called superstition hasflourished.The subject demands interdisciplinary treatment The editors of this collection have touched on the wider issues in then introduction, "The debate on images at the beginning of the Reformation', but the background they offer falls mostly within religious history, as conventionally understood. That Reformation iconoclasm was necessary for the development of m o d e m Christianity and Western culture is, they say frankly, 'an unquestioned and unquestionable assumption', though they acknowledge the dangers of imaginative and emotional impoverishment. Both the Reformation and Counter Reformation sought to rein in the veneration of images. The three tracts translated and well annotated here came at the beginning of the Reformation debate. Some of the argument was very old, going back to patristic times, to the Byzantine controversies, and to the scholastics. One piece, Andreas Karlstadt's 'On the removal of images', is iconoclastic. The other two, by Hieronymus Emser and Johannes Eck, defend the veneration of images. The latter are conservative but, in then recognition of abuses such as the 'whorish and roguish' representations of the saints, they anticipate the Counter Reformation. Reviews 203 This is a typically Reformation controversy in its reliance on conflicting interpretations of scripture and on authoritative voices from the past. Karlstadt relied on the Decalogue and other Old Testament prohibitions and on Johannine and Pauline expressions about the efficacy of the spirit alone and the profidessness of the flesh. His spiritualism and 'hermeneutic of transcendence', as Carlos Eire has put it, separated him from Luther, for w h o m spiritual truth must come in afleshlyenvelope, if human incapacity is to be overcome. Karlstadt's writing is racy, at times earthy, with 'the abrupt cadences and ellipses of oral speech', which made problems for the translator. H e finishes with an appeal to the secular authorities to imitate King Josiah, who destroyed the cult of Baal. Emser, who organized his tract partly in the form of a disputation with Karlstadt's propositions,restedhis cause on two distinctions, that between image and prototype, and that between creatures and Creator. Believers sought the intercession, not of images, but of the saints they represented, and grace came, not from the saints, but from the God with w h o m they interceded. H e also included, as did Eck, legendary matter about images of Christ from the earliest times, paintings by Nicodemus and St Luke, for example. There are pragmatic arguments: 'For if there was no image in the church, one would not know whether it was a church or a dance hall' (p. 51). There are also arguments one might call semiological: 'What more can the letter [of scripture] do than be a sign which signifies and indicates something, which images also do' (p. 64). Eck was more systematic about marshalling his authorities, and the ancient sources of sixteenth-century controversies are most apparent in his treatise; for example, BasU and John of Damascus on the doctrine of the prototype and Gregory the Great on images as Bibilia pauperum. There is something here for the social historian. Karlstadt speaks of those who bring 'wax offerings in the form of your afflicted legs, arms, eyes, head, feet, hands, cows, calves, oxen, tools, house, court, fields, meadows, and the...