Introduction

This chapter introduces the book as a whole, tracing the history of protestant iconoclasm and ruin creation across the long reformation, from the dissolution of the monasteries in the 1530s to the disestablishment of the English protestant church in the 1650s. It focuses attention on the poet George Herbert, whose poems, in The Temple (1633), on aspects of church interiors bear witness to the sanctioned iconoclasm of successive Tudor governments—iconoclasm that had broken altars, upended statues, and whitewashed church walls. Herbert was a protestant minister whose poetry celebrates the church established under Elizabeth I, defining its reformed appearance as a middle ground—‘Neither too mean, nor yet too gay’—between Genevan Calvinism and Roman catholicism. But Herbert’s poetry also reveals anxieties about the future of English protestantism—besieged not only by catholic plots but also by puritan and presbyterian clamours for further church reform. Herbert’s anxieties over this twofold threat to the English church are at once anti-catholic and anti-iconoclastic. Although Herbert celebrates the protestant reforms that had dissolved monasteries and destroyed catholic shrines, his poetry also attacks puritans, whose dissatisfaction with the half-hearted reforms of the Elizabethan settlement sought in Herbert’s eyes to ruin the church from within. Herbert’s paranoid poetry provides a keynote for this study’s exploration of the ruined churches and monasteries represented in early modern English literature—ruins, the study argues, that betray similar anxieties about the consequences of catholic plots and puritan iconoclasm for the fate of the English church in its formative century.