4 - John Capgrave's material memorials

Summary

Inhabited by the uncanniness that it seeks, history imposes its law upon the faraway places that it conquers when it fosters the illusion that it is bringing them back to life.

Michel de Certeau, The Writing of History

Thus far, the Lollard charge that improper veneration of Christian images is a form of idolatry has remained largely in the background of my discussion of fifteenth-century reformations of the image. Discussions of idolatry in the fifteenth century are often limited to either the ancient idolaters of history, hagiography, and sermon exempla, or the foreign idolaters of romance and travel narratives. Idolatry is thus temporally or spatially removed, and the idolater is necessarily the other. Whereas these discussions of idolatry often attempt to draw strict lines between pagan idols and Christian images so as to avoid any confusion, John Capgrave's writing suggests that these lines are much finer and more fluid than many of his orthodox contemporaries represented them to be. Although Capgrave never directly addresses the charge that Christian image veneration may be idolatry, his representation of the ancient veneration of idols raises a host of related questions: What is the relationship between Christian images and idols? If Christian images are to be read as libri laicorum, then how should pre-Christian images be interpreted? Are idols ontologically different from images? Are they “books of error” (as one Lollard claims of images)? Or are they simply “nothing” (as orthodox and heterodox alike suggest)?