"Iconoclasm was the central sacrament of the reform," states Eamon Duffy. It is an assertion that is more provocative than strictly accurate, especially in its dismissive use of the term "sacrament" in association with the Anglican Church, but many historians have persuasively presented iconoclastic extremism as a defining factor in the English Reformation. The long struggle over "images" had broad and deep connections with the transformation of English society and the ideologies of selfhood, identity, gender, and sexuality that governed, or as Louis Althusser puts it, "interpelated", men and women into the grand narrative of their culture. Today, some may say the picture of the world advanced by the reformers was maybe no less false, the idolatry of the Word no less pernicious than the idolatry of the Image. Yet Aston confesses that while she believes that historians are "not supposed to take sides," she finds it hard to "sympathize with the reformer's zeal for destruction. Doing without images is one thing, annihilating them is another. Destruction may be exhilarating, but it has an eventual fall-out which is the opposite of life-enhancing."
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Gary Waller, “The Virgin Mary in Late Medieval and Early Modern English Literature and Popular Culture”, Cambridge University Press, (Jan 20, 2011), p. 4
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Protestant_Reformation
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Protestant Reformation
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