Understanding
- Question: How did visual representations of religious institutions shift between 1651 and 1714?
- Answer: British printed images moved from Protestant attacks to more accepted diversity. Religious attacks and satires shifted from sectarian focus to personal caricature.
- Method: Champion analyzes a succession of title-pages, especially Hobbes', and satires for their emblems and narrative structure.
- Assumptions: Hobbes responds to a scholarly tradition that identifies "fear of popery" in early modern discourse.
- Sententiae: "Recovering, historically, this sense of meaning manifest in print is complex but involves reconstructing the readers' capacity for interpreting the relation of iconic components. The scribal 'Instructions' [Anthony Cooper, 3rd Earl] Shaftesbury prepared (for circulation to printers and others) allow unfamiliar readers (past and present) to decode the prints." (269)
Overstanding
- Assessment: It's slightly misleading to identify this as an essay on Hobbes, as the title does. But Champion nevertheless makes a bold (if not entirely convincing) argument for evidence of tolerance in the age of the Popish Plot, the Glorious Revolution, etc.
- Synthesis: Champion's argument is orthagonal with Pierce's account of Whiggish satire. Both parties recognize the development of anti-Tory caricature and satire, but Pierce attributes this to continued Protestantism that was amplified by emergent Parliamentary politics, whereas Champion sees tolerance and diversity in counter-Republican philosophy promoted by Hobbes.
- Application: The real issue at stake between Pierce and Champion is whether the prominence printed image corresponds with increased Parliamentary discord, and such an effect might be observed in the late Carolignian period--a worthy task both for expanding the range of inquiry and for resolving the Pierce-Champion dispute.
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