"Symbols of Conversion" by Margaret Aston

CITATION:Aston, Margaret. "Symbols of Conversion: Properties of the Page in Reformation England." Printed Images in Early Modern Britain. Ed. Michael Hunter. Burlington: Ashgate Press, 2010. 23-42. Print.
Understanding

• Question: How did English Protestants visually represent God?
• Answer: They drew on the Continental tradition of the tetragammaton, rather than the Christogram.
• Method: Aston draws on Ingram and Luborksy's Guide to review illustrated Bible title-pages, and compares reactions to the adoption of anthropomorphic images, the tetragammaton, and the Christogram.
• Assumptions: Aston announces that the tetragammaton appeared in German print six years before the Coverdale Bible (24), with the assumption that Hans Holbein could have encountered these prints in that (relatively short) time--not mentioning manuscript precursors to the German prints.
• Sententiae: "This title-page [for the 1641 edition of Acts and Monuments] became an issue at Archbishop Laud's trial. He turned to it with an attack that seemed to bolster his own defense, in responding to charges about his restored imagery in the chapel windows at Lambeth...  It is quite likely that Laude was in effect saying, why should I be deemed guilty of restoring an old image of Christ when the new edition of the Acts and Monuments holds just such an image? This would have been extremely apropos, to say the least, at a time when imagery of Christ was being attacked and broken, on a scale comparable... to what had taken place a hundred years earlier." (37-38)

Overstanding

• Assessment: One thing I'd like to see addressed that was missing was the nature of the tetragammaton as xylography: was the tetragammaton inserted with drop-caps, as Evenden and Freeman observe regarding many of the martyrs' names, or was it xylographic, eliminating the need for costly Hebrew type? I suspect the latter.
• Synthesis: Aston curiously collapses the layers of representation for the cover of the Great Bible, arguing that Henry VIII represents the Heavenly Father, rather than a Solomonic divine ruler (as King would argue [and as Aston argued with Evenden]).
• Application: There are interesting formal and political offshoots from this. On the one hand, if the tetragammaton was composed xylographically out of economic necessity, then this may point to a reading of early modern image-texts as not necessarily more expensive, but possibly cheaper, forms of printing. On the other hand, Aston's reference to Laud is fascinating, indicating the degree to which title-pages served as popular propaganda in the Early Modern period.