Voracious Idols and Violent Hands

by Lee Palmer Wandel

This book takes up iconoclasm, that mode by which hundreds of ordinary people entered into "Reformation," in three important towns of the 1520s. It seeks to recover the agency of ordinary people in Reformation and to discern their theology in their acts. In part, its purpose is to suggest ways of excavating the meaning of the acts of those who did not have access to more protected and fixed forms of communication - that is, printed texts and images. In part, it illuminates the meaning of images for ordinary Christians in the sixteenth century. Voracious Idols and Violent Hands posits a vision of "Reformation" as a dialogue in which different persons "spoke" through different forms, according to their education and social and political place. Each brought his or her vision of true Christianity to that dialogue, and articulated that vision in the cultural form he or she found most accessible: theologians in sermons and treatises, magistrates in laws and their enforcement, and ordinary pe