Popery, Monstrosity, and the Body

In the reading for this week, Peter Lake provides us with a brief explanation of popery: 'for Protestants popery had allowed merely human authorities, traditions and practices to take over the Church. the most obvious of these was the pope's usurpation of Chritst's role as the head of the Church. Once established, the authority of the pope was used to set up and confirm in the Church a whole series of ceremonies, forms of worship and beliefs which were of entirely human origin.' (p. 74)

Anti-popery and anti-Catholic sentiment were well served by the press. In the 1570 edition of Acts and Monuments, John Foxe writes:

'Printing came of God [...] that either the Pope is Antichrist, or else that Antichrist is near cousin to the Pope, and all this doth, and will hereafter more and more appear, by printing'.  

Below are some examples of how printing and especially images were enlisted in the Protestant cause. Reading these examples next to material for this week, you might want to consider how the body became the site for religious disputation.

Samuel Clarke's A Generall Martyrology was first published in 1651 and was very much written in the style of John Foxe's Acts and Monuments (1563). Clarke's tract included images of the types of torture that those persecuted by Catholicism had to endure. The full tract and more images are available on EEBO.

In the years following the Reformation, Rome was often alluded to in print as the Whore of Babylon (see for instance Thomas Dekker's play) and was depicted as a monstrous female figure.

Albrecht Dürer,  The Whore of Babylon, from The Apocalypse, 1498

"Albrecht Dürer: The Whore of Babylon (18.65.8)". In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2000–. http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/works-of-art/18.65.8 (October 2006)

from Hugh Broughton's A Concent of Scripture (1590)

Anon, The Popes Pyramides (1624)



Here is a comment on the first engraving:

'Dürer's representation of the Whore of Babylon inscribes political and religious differences in and through particular bodies: female, monstrous, angelic, heroic. The body of the Whore is itself an allegorical text to be deciphered and read. Her lavish clothing, jewelry, and gem-crusted crown mark her as a prostitute , one who has enriched herself on the trade and exchange of others: the elaborate chalice that she holds aloft conceals the wine of her (economic) fornication. The true monstrousness of the seemingly beautiful woman is revealed by the beast upon which she rides, with its grotesque heads of goats, asses, and birds, its monstrously scaly skin, its distended claw-feet, and its twisting tail... In the Dürer engraving, female and bestial bodies emblematize the corruption of pagan Rome.’

Laura Lunger Knoppers, '"The Antichrist, the Babilon, the great dragon": Oliver Cromwell, Andrew Marvell, and the Apocalyptic Monstrous' in Monstrous Bodies/ Political Monstrosities in Early Modern Europe, ed. by Laura Lunger Knoppers and Joan B. Landes (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004), pp. 93-126 (p.104)