After nearly twenty years in abeyance, religion has returned as a major subject for early modern cultural studies, as literary critics and historians shift their attention from short-term political calculations and contingencies to broader issues of ideology, principle, and belief. At the same time, newer, revisionist views of the English Reformation are more conflicted, complex, and pluralistic. Older notions of a progressively secular Protestant ascendancy have been replaced by a sequence of erratic and precarious "reformations."1 The English church gradually dismantled much of the sacramental system of traditional religion, attacking what John Calvin called "carnal fancies" of "a local presence that the papists dream about."2 Nevertheless, though it eliminated the Mass, the Elizabethan religious settlement was denounced by many reformers as a "cloaked papistry or mingle-mangle," and it remained haunted, in the words of Diarmaid MacCulloch by the "ghost ... of an older world of Catholic authority and devotional practice."3 Subsequent Stuart claims to divine right authority combined with Archbishop Laud's devotion to liturgical decorum to form what Debora Shuger describes as a "concerted effort to 'remystify' church, state, and the social order."4 Indeed, the Laudian emphasis on the sacrament and the altar as the site of "God's more especial presence," was denounced in the Root and Branch Petition in 1640 as an attempt at "putting holiness" back in churches and "a plain device to usher in the Mass."5 Puritan opposition eventually erupted in the Civil War. Yet, while King Charles lost the war and his head, his execution in 1649 enveloped him in an aura of sanctity. Works like the Eikon Basilike revived older notions of sacred kingship alongside an image of Charles the Martyr, and such beliefs were certainly a factor in the restoration of Charles II.

In the summer of 1998, sixteen college teachers gathered at the Folger Shakespeare Library for a collaborative investigation of these conflicted histories of the Reformation in England. The National Endowment for the Humanities generously sponsored the program, which also included a visiting faculty of twelve senior scholars. The Institute began with the premise that the texts of the period—the plays of Shakespeare, the poetry of Donne and Milton, the polemical tracts of the English civil war, the published and unpublished works by women—could not be taught successfully without a working knowledge of the religions beliefs and controversies of the period and an array of strategies for bringing that material to life in the classroom. To that end, the teacher participants culled the images posted here from the Folger Library's rich collections so that they might share with their classes examples of the lived experience of religion in the early modern period.

Those examples include some of the many books, manuscripts, and images reviewed in the summer institute that bear clear traces of the intense religious struggles under discussion. These traces include the mutilated books of hours and early prayer books, such as the Folger copy in which references to Thomas Becket, other saints, and popes are crossed out. The iconoclastic assault on ecclesiastical structures can also be traced in church wardens' accounts, detailing as one Folger manuscript does, declining payments for wax and a large-scale repainting of the inside of the church, covering over the medieval wall paintings. Such attacks reflect what Patrick Collinson has called the iconophobia of the English Reformation.

At the same time, other works entail what John Bossy calls "a migration of the holy" in which notions of the sacred shift from the church and its sacraments "to the rituals of monarchy and of secular community."6 In works printed after the break with Rome, older images of Mary and the saints are replaced by icons of royalty. Henry VIII appears on the title pages of the "Great Bible" as the church's supreme head seated below Christ and distributing the word of God to both the clergy and the laity, and Edward VI and Elizabeth I are portrayed in a comparably evangelical role. What John King calls "the triumph of the regal crown over the papal tiara" recurs throughout Foxe's Acts and Monuments as do those memorably searing images of Protestant martyrs burned at the stake. 7 Counter Reformation iconography matches these scenes of martyrdom with equally dramatic pictures of the grisly ends of Archbishop Fisher and the Jesuit Edmund Campion. Mementos of Catholic martyrs like the prayer roll with a copy of Sir Thomas More's last devotion are also preserved in the Folger's manuscript collection. Its simple style persists in the illustrations of traditional Shepherds' Calendars later in Elizabeth's reign. At the same time, Catholics also showed an enthusiasm for mutilation of texts. One of the most striking traces of the Counter Reformation, unique to the Folger collection, is the second folio of Shakespeare's works owned by the director of the English seminary in Valladolid, Spain, who was authorized by the Inquisition to censor its contents. In addition to crossing out every reference to Cranmer and Elizabeth, he simply excised the entire text of Measure for Measure.

The conflict between iconoclasm and more incarnate ideas of the sacred persists throughout the period, and it is never entirely resolved. John Milton's attacks on both religious and civil idolatry in the aptly named Eikonoklastes seeks to expose what he calls the "Stage-work" of the Eikon Basilike. Indeed, he insists that the "quaint Emblems and devices" borrowed from masques at Whitehall "will doe but ill to make a saint or Martyr"8 Yet, paradoxically, the artistry of many Renaissance poets, playwrights, and painters often proves more effective than theology or liturgy at preserving a sense of prophetic authority and religious mystery. Milton's own Paradise Lost stands as the climactic, epic expression of this conflict, evoking the most awesome sense of God's majestic power and distance. After his fall, Adam comes to accept that he must now "love with fear the only God,/. . . [and] walk/ As in his presence" (12.562-563).

Ranging from works of private devotion to polemical contestation, these images and their annotations reflect the concerns of the institute. The images are designed for use in the classroom. By posting a selection of them here, together with other materials from the institute, we are pleased to think that others will make use of and build upon the work done in the institute. We will have succeeded if, with our colleagues and our students, we continue to start conversations and to complicate assumptions in order to broaden our collective understanding of devotional exercise and sectarian polemic--the material culture and the metaphysical aspirations--of early modern England.

1 See Christopher Haigh, English Reformations: Religion, Politics, and Society under the Tudors (Oxford: Clarendon P, 1993)
2 Cited in Jaroslav Pelikan, Reformation of Church and Dogma (1300-1700): The Christian Tradition: A History of the Development of Doctrine (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1984), 186.
3 Diarmaid MacCulloch, The Later Reformation in England (New York: St. Martin's, 1990), 6.
4 Debora Kuller Shuger, Habits of Thought in the English Renaissance: Religion, Politics, and the Dominant Culture (Berkeley: U of California P, 1990), 124.
5 Constitutional Documents of the Puritan Revolution, 1625-1660. ed. Samuel Rawson Gardiner (3rd ed., Oxford: Clarendon P, 1902), 140-141.
6 John Bossy, Christianity in the West: 1400-1700 (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1985), 145 and "The Mass as a Social Institution, 1200-1700," Past and Present, 100 (1983), 59.
7 John King, Tudor Royal Iconography: Literature and Art in an Age of Religious Crisis (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1989), 117.
8 John Miton, "Eikonoklastes" in The Complete Prose Works, Don M. Wolfe, ed. (New Haven: Yale UP, 1952), 3.530 and 343.