7 - Dolls and Idols in the English Reformation

Summary

This chapter begins with a sermon from the 1530s that describes the iconoclastic practice of giving formerly sacred objects to children, in order to desacralise them. It shows that this was a widespread activity during the Reformation, and relates this practice of iconoclastic child’s play to the common polemical tactic of comparing traditional Roman Catholic religion to the inane playing of children. It then argues, however, that the actual transformation of such objects into playthings is more complex than this polemical elision, and shows that, when related to broader Christian traditions, the implicit claim that playing with an object is necessarily to demean it becomes far less clear. Play could be a way of accessing or reflecting the divine, not trivialising it. The object of iconoclastic child’s play, suspended between idol and doll, does not therefore clearly lack value, but becomes a potent and unstable object upon which competing conceptions and valuations converge, and within which they can co-exist.