Fourteenth International Conference on The Image

Abstract

The preference for a partial or total symbolization of the Eucharist in the English Protestant Reformation is a well-known fact, as it was for continental Europe. However, that the English word for “symbol” was born not out of sacramental discourse but of iconoclastic ideology is not. This paper tracks the birth of the English literary symbol through early modern religious texts that are at once iconophobic and iconophilic, expressing a desire for a licit, godly, and therefore impossible image. Although it is Calvin who, in his notoriously bitter distaste for the image, first distinguishes between symbola and verisimilar visibilia in continental Protestant thought, it is William Alley who first introduces the symbol into mainstream English theological and rhetorical discourse, likening its “secret” function to that of allegory. It is unlikely Edmund Spenser read or knew of Alley, and yet it is a spectacular synchronicity that England’s great allegorical poet would be the first English writer to include “symbol” in a literary work: The Faerie Queen. Indeed, it is the Palmer who tells Spenser’s iconoclastic knight par excellence, Guyon, to treat the bloody hands of a babe as a sacred symbol of eternal revenge. This paper concludes by contending that Samuel Taylor Colerdige’s notorious conception of the symbol, and his iconoclastic attack against allegory, hearkens back to his literary predecessor, particularly through the glorious and symbolic image on Guyon’s shield.