Journal of Research & Scholarly Output 2006 - Grimsby Institute of ...

Luther did admit that representational
imagery from the Bible could serve a useful
teaching purpose, but it is this indifference
(taken in extremis by subsequent followers –
including Archbishop Cranmer et al. in
England) that eradicated familiar, traditional
methods of relaying passages from the
Bible to the non-literate majority. Because of
the events of the Reformation, England
crucially moved from an image-based to a
text-based religious culture earlier than the
rest of mainland Europe that began its
Catholic recovery in Spain and particularly
France, where Napoleon’s ‘concordat’ with
the Holy Church of Rome brought
Catholicism back as the state religion.
Similarly, events in Belgium, the
Netherlands, Germany and France allowed
these countries a continuity of image-based
narrative far stronger than ours. The fact
that it remained within the confines of the
Church and the introduction of the printing
press for religious and non-religious works
was developed in mainland Europe is not
important – the majority of these European
cultures were regular Church-goers, so their
exposure to religious iconography
continued unchallenged for a considerable
time to come.
While the English slowly lost their reliance
on sequential art to educate and inform
them, the skills required to read and
understand image-based communications
(in the form of single paintings or
sequentially presented texts) did not
completely disappear. The Reformation did
not destroy our ability to understand Comic
Books and this move to a text-based culture
did not benefit the masses one bit, as it was
not in the interests of the ruling classes to
have an educated workforce. From that
perspective there was very little difference
to the situation maintained by the Catholic
Church, but this removal of iconography did
heavily influence our attitude towards
imagery. The suppression of sequential
visual communication by the State was one
crucial aspect contributing to the unease
and distrust of contemporary British
readers, but this is not the whole story.
There was a later development in imagebased
communication, this time from a
popular culture perspective, that would add
the negative dimension of confusion to the
English perception of comic books – the
invention of the cartoon.
Despite the move away from sequential
works in England due to their connotations
with the Catholic Church, the work of
William Hogarth (1697-1764) would seem to
be an exception to the rule – and suggests
that the visual literacy of his audience was
still relatively high despite the break in
continuity caused by the Reformation. His
hugely popular series of engravings such as
‘The Harlot’s Progress’ and ‘The Rake’s
Progress’ were expressly designed to
convey a narrative in a strict order, and as
such illustrated the appetite for imagebased
sequential entertainment in this
country.
‘Moll as a Prostitute’, Plate 3 of 6 from The
Harlot’s Progress, William Hogarth, 1732 (c)
FOCUS Page Page 77