We found a match
Your institution may have access to this item. Find your institution then sign in to continue.
- Title
'Fiction of the Mind': Imagination and Idolatry in Early Modern England.
- Authors
Reiter, Barret
- Abstract
This chapter examines the conceptualization of Catholic liturgical practices within the Protestant anti-Catholic polemics of early modern England. I argue that, insofar as Protestants typically glossed such practices as 'idolatry', and thus, as the worship of a false god, Protestants explicitly accused Catholics of falling victim to the deceptive tendencies of their imaginations. Hence, for English Protestants, Catholics were responsible for transforming the good news of the Gospel into a mere fiction of their own making. More than a mere rhetorical posture — though of course it was also that — it is here argued that Protestant anti-Catholic polemic encodes a more generalized anxiety about the role of imagination within religious, social and political life, and thus serves as a microcosm of larger-scale transformations within the intellectual and political discourse of early modern England. Most obviously, the emphasis on the imagination, in particular within Protestant polemics, indicates a new context into which traditional scholastic psychological categories were forced in order to accommodate confessional differentiation and the new political realities of a post-Reformation world. Thus, by understanding just what Protestant polemicists meant by fictions, we can open up deeper continuities across the intellectual and political discourse of the period.
- Subjects
IMAGINATION; IDOLATRY; CATHOLIC Church; PROTESTANTISM; ANTI-Catholicism; POLEMICS; EARLY modern history; BRITISH history
- Publication
Past & Present, 2022, Vol 256, p201
- ISSN
0031-2746
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1093/pastj/gtac034