Iconoclasm, Protestant Aesthetics, and the Meaning of Making in Early Modern England, 1550–1600
type: CreativeWork
description: This thesis is about making in post-Reformation England. Roughly covering the period between 1550 and 1600, it explores the English cultural contexts of Protestant and Calvinist discourses in the sixteenth century. But equally, it is a thesis about the *meaning* of making. Scholarship abounds on the procedures and dynamics of “meaning-making” in a specific field, department, or discipline. Yet, there has been a consistent lack of attention paid to the reverse form of this designation; what does it mean to make? How does it produce meaning within social, cultural, and intellectual contexts? Making, this thesis argues, has too easily been taken for granted. Culturally and intellectually expansive, rich, and complex in implication, making, as action and phenomenon, permeates the lifeworld of historical experience. In so far as creative production, conceptual engineering, and material fashioning all remain a staple of multiple spheres of meaning, the focus and identity of this thesis resides at the tangencies between intellectual and cultural history, as well as the history of art. In particular, these are fields of singular interdisciplinary relevance with regard to research into early modernity. Furthermore, they have all in different ways concerned themselves with visual and material culture, not least how problems of aesthetics, philosophy, literature, and religion are entrenched in and expressed in material contexts. Sixteenth-century Europe remain a *nexus classicus* of such intellectual and historical ambulation; it was arguably the setting for the most distressing social and religious ordeal on the continent since the Black Death. Reformation England was no exception, as our exploration of figures like William Tyndale, Thomas Cranmer, John Calvin, John Jewel and William Perkins will demonstrate. By teasing out tensions in the post-Reformation debates surrounding the act of artistic making in a religious framework, the thesis provides a framework for how these pl…
abstract: This thesis is about making in post-Reformation England. Roughly covering the period between 1550 and 1600, it explores the English cultural contexts of Protestant and Calvinist discourses in the sixteenth century. But equally, it is a thesis about the *meaning* of making. Scholarship abounds on the procedures and dynamics of “meaning-making” in a specific field, department, or discipline. Yet, there has been a consistent lack of attention paid to the reverse form of this designation; what does it mean to make? How does it produce meaning within social, cultural, and intellectual contexts? Making, this thesis argues, has too easily been taken for granted. Culturally and intellectually expansive, rich, and complex in implication, making, as action and phenomenon, permeates the lifeworld of historical experience. In so far as creative production, conceptual engineering, and material fashioning all remain a staple of multiple spheres of meaning, the focus and identity of this thesis resides at the tangencies between intellectual and cultural history, as well as the history of art. In particular, these are fields of singular interdisciplinary relevance with regard to research into early modernity. Furthermore, they have all in different ways concerned themselves with visual and material culture, not least how problems of aesthetics, philosophy, literature, and religion are entrenched in and expressed in material contexts. Sixteenth-century Europe remain a *nexus classicus* of such intellectual and historical ambulation; it was arguably the setting for the most distressing social and religious ordeal on the continent since the Black Death. Reformation England was no exception, as our exploration of figures like William Tyndale, Thomas Cranmer, John Calvin, John Jewel and William Perkins will demonstrate. By teasing out tensions in the post-Reformation debates surrounding the act of artistic making in a religious framework, the thesis provides a framework for how these pl…
author: Kallevik Nielsen, Simen
language: eng
keywords: Aesthetics, Early Modern England, Iconoclasm, Making, Protestantism
license: https://apollo8-f-pro.lib.cam.ac.uk/bitstreams/2b4ed7a0-f8d7-4ed0-8c70-f3cb8f03d1a1/download
license: https://www.rioxx.net/licenses/all-rights-reserved/
date published: 2023-04-30
date modified: 2026-07-22T22:24:10Z
provider: Cambridge University
publisher: Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations
type: WebPage
source organization: University of Cambridge

PropertyValue
property ID: DOI
value: 10.17863/CAM.106150