Defending Images in Pecock's Repressor: Caritas, the Absent Friend and the Sense of Touch

Reginald Pecock's defense of orthodox practices in the Repressor of Over Much Blaming of the Clergy is grounded in the biblical commandment to love God, which, following Thomas Aquinas's thoroughly Aristotelianized theology, is understood as "a friendship of man and God." Images are key tools—proxies for forms of presence—in the dual processes of learning and recollection that are needed to mediate friendship with God. In this context, the efficacy of physical images derives from the structures of human memory and imagination, which are reliant on sensory perception: physical sight thus aids the imaginative work of making present something that is absent. The paradigm of caritas as friendship surfaces powerfully in the Repressor's defense of images: Christ is the absent friend, an image of whom offers a form of presence essential to imagining, and so to loving, him. Aristotelian friendship's emphasis on presence and proximity, however, underpins Pecock's advocacy of the value of the physical image not just in terms of its appeal to the sense of sight, but also to the sense of touch: love for a friend, ordinarily fostered by presence and completed in touch, is mediated between God and man not only by seeing but also through touching an image. That Pecock's arguments about the lawfulness of image-use culminate in a powerful defense of those who caress and kiss images registers not only the strength of Lollard objection to touching images in fifteenth-century controversy, but also the under-recognized importance of touch to medieval understandings of memory, cognition, and love.