Barret Reiter A Fiction of The Mind

A ‘FICTION OF THE MIND’: IMAGINATION
AND IDOLATRY IN EARLY MODERN

ENGLAND
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In a polemic republished at least three times over the seventeenth
century, the preacher to the Inner and Middle Temples in London,
William Crashawe (1572–1625/6) targets a figure who was regularly
the subject of English Protestant anxieties: the Jesuit.1 Crashawe par-
ticularly targets a poem written by a Jesuit, Carolus Scribanius (1561–
1629), which venerates the miraculous Virgin of Halle, in Belgium.
Such veneration, Crashawe argues, invoking a typical Protestant
charge against Catholicism, sets Mary ‘in comparison with God or
Jesus Christ... thereby ecclipsing the glory of Gods mercy and the wor-
thynesse of Christs satisfaction’.2 In particular, Crashawe contends that
the miracles which Scribanius and other members of his order have
attributed to the Virgin of Halle are false; they are ‘lyinge Wonders and
no true miracles’. Crashawe specifically suggests that miracles have
been invented by the Jesuits in an effort ‘to delude the common peo-
ple’, and that ‘there scarce passeth a month wherin some new Image
of our Lady is not found, or some strange miracle and wonders heard
of ’.3 By presenting God, in the form of the second person, Crashawe
contends, as someone whose abilities are conditioned, limited or even
equal to a mere created being, namely the Virgin Mary, or another
saint, Catholic theology fails to accurately understand the nature
of God, and therefore worships something other than God. Instead,
Catholics worship a false god invented out of their own imaginations.
The ‘Romish Church’, Crashawe remarks, has ‘not true Christ left
1
On contemporary polemics against the Jesuits, see Alexandra Walsham, ‘ “This
Newe Army of Satan”: The Jesuit Mission and the Formation of Public Opinion in
Elizabethan England’, in David Lemmings and Claire Walker (eds.), Moral Panics,
the Media and the Law in Early Modern England (Basingstoke, 2009), 41–62.
2
William Crashawe, The Jesuites Gospel (London, 1610, STC 6016), 17; repub-
lished as The Bespotted Jesuite (London, 1642); Loyola’s Disloyalty; or, the Jesuites
Open Rebellion (London, 1643). All italics in quotes are present in original unless
otherwise stated.
3
Crashawe, Jesuites Gospel, 18–19.
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202 PAST AND PRESENT SUPPLEMENT 16
amongst them, but an Idoll of their owne rearing, erected in their own
carnall fancies’. Crashawe is quite clear, too, ‘that this is no slaunder,
no cavill, no hybolicall [sic] nor figurative speech’, because, he elabo-
rates, ‘the Christ of God and of his Church, is God equall to the father,

and can do all things himselfe: the Christ of the Romish church is a
childe inferiour to his mother and may deny her nothing’.4 Crashawe
thus asserts that the religion of Rome is oriented not towards the true
God, but rather to a false god, what the Elizabethan preacher, William
Perkins (1558–1602), whom Crashawe cites and whose works he
edited, called a ‘fiction or idol of the braine’.5
The clash of confessions left early modern Europe rife with com-
peting truth-claims, as the spread of print facilitated the widespread
diffusion of polemic, slander and declarations of revelatory truth.6
In England, changes in religion between Queen Mary and Queen
Elizabeth served to create a culture of religious instability and a
preoccupation with the infiltration of Catholicism into the nascent
Protestant nation.7 It is, therefore, hardly surprising to witness con-
demnations of Catholicism, and a characterization of its liturgical prac-
tices as idolatrous. Particularly striking, however, is the specific claim
of both Crashawe and his predecessor Perkins, that Catholic idolatry
is a fictitious product of the imagination. While other contributors to
4
Ibid., 66.
5
William Perkins, A Warning Against the Idolatrie of the Last Times (Cambridge,
1601, STC 19764), 4; Crashawe refers to this work in the margin, Jesuits Gospel, 17.
6
On these themes see, inter alia, Miriam Eliav-Feldon and Tamar Herzig (eds.),
Dissimulation and Deceit in Early Modern Europe (Basingstoke, 2015); Lemmings
and Walker (eds.), Moral Panics, the Media and the Law; M. Lindsay Kaplan, The
Culture of Slander in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 1997); Alexander Halasz,
The Marketplace of Print: Pamphlets and the Public Sphere in Early Modern England
(Cambridge, 1997).
7
The literature on anti-Catholicism in England is vast, along with the works
cited below: see, inter alia, Peter Lake and Michael Questier, ‘Puritans, Papists,
and the “Public Sphere” in Early Modern England: The Edmund Campion Affair
in Context’, Journal of Modern History, lxxii (2000), 587–627; Alexandra Walsham,
Church Papists: Catholicism, Casuistry and Confessional Polemic in Early Modern England
(Woodbridge, 1999); Peter Lake, ‘Anti-Popery: The Structure of a Prejudice’, in
Richard Crust and Ann Hughes (eds.), Conflict in Early Stuart England: Studies in
Religion and Politics 1603–1642 (Abingdon, 1989), 72–106; Robin Clifton, ‘Fear of
Popery’, in Conrad Russell (ed.), The Origins of the English Civil War (New York,
1973), 144–67; Carol Z. Wiener, ‘The Beleaguered Isle: A Study of Elizabethan
and Early Jacobean Anticatholicism’, Past & Present, no. 51 (May 1971), 27–62;
Robin Clifton, ‘The Popular Fear of Catholics during the English Revolution’, Past
& Present, no. 52 (1971), 23–55.
A ‘FICTION OF THE MIND’ 203
this volume have examined the transmission of various forms of dis-
information, this chapter concentrates specifically on how information
was conceptualized as false. That is, it explores what, exactly, is meant
when a piece of information is declared to be ‘fake news’. It argues that

such a charge amounts primarily to a moral claim, more than just an
epistemic one. Insofar as certain parties label misrepresentations false,
fictitious or, as in this case, imaginary, they mean primarily to contest
the orientation of that particular representation — that such represen-
tations vindicate the objectives of their opponents. Rather than object-
ing to their characterization of the ‘facts’, charges of fake news, it is
here argued, are charges, at once, of something being both false and
morally wrong. Thus, as this chapter endeavours to elucidate, when
Protestants in early modern England accused Catholics of worship-
ping idols, they are especially concerned with the fact of their actions
being oriented towards something other than God.
That Protestants in England, from separating presbyterian to estab-
lishment zealot, all described Catholicism and its theology as fake and
fictitious will come as no surprise. Yet, these claims were more than
slander or mere mudslinging. In essence, English Protestants, draw-
ing on a scriptural link between idolatry and the imagination, specif-
ically employed the categories of Aristotelian scholastic psychology
to deride Catholic theology as fictitious; as naught, but an invention
of their imaginations. As shown below, the imagination was invoked
by early modern authors, both Catholic and Protestant, to expli-
cate how fictitious entities were created — entities which are clearly
epistemically false, in the sense of either not really existing (such as
golden mountains), or metaphysically impossible, that is, not ever
existing (such as chimeras, centaurs or tragelaphs). Protestant polem-
icists clearly describe Catholic idolatry as false in this sense — and
this is hardly surprising; indeed, characterization of Catholic liturgical
practices as imaginative was a trope of the Reformed tradition which
dominated English Protestant theology from the reign of Edward VI.
However, Protestants also invoke a different sense of the imagination
in describing Catholic idolatry, one closely bound up with contem-
porary theories of psychology. According to these theories, all human
actions respond to mental images which we construct on the basis of
sense-perception. Thus, to act is, in some sense, to be oriented towards
some particular image, as an end or goal. Morally upright acts are
those that aim at some right or true end, while morally abhorrent acts
aim at false ends. On this theory, Catholic idolatry is again imaginative,
being oriented towards false mental images — incorrect imaginations
of God — rather than true ends. But the story does not end there. For
a further commonplace has it that all our actions ought to be aimed at

God, rather than at mere temporal ends. Thus, idolatry could prove a
surprisingly capacious category capable of absorbing nearly all morally
abhorrent acts, for all acts which aim at some end other than God are

in that sense idolatrous — they grant something which belongs to God
to something which is not God. And, indeed, as we shall see, English
Protestants did indeed employ the category of idolatry in exactly this
capacious way. Ultimately, this allowed them the scope to hurl accu-
sations of ‘idolatry’ just as widely as certain politicians are capable of
hurling accusations of fake news.
While both literary scholars and historians have discussed the
argumentative strategies of anti-Catholic polemics, including the
ways in which English Protestants imagined Catholics as violent
disrupters of the established order, as well as the construction of
the pope as Anti-Christ, there has been little attention to the philo-
sophical dimensions of these critiques, including their explicitly psy-
chological register.8 Attending to these dimensions, as this chapter
shows, opens up the multifarious ways in which English Protestants
employed a consistent, scholastic psychology across genre, connect-
ing their polemics against Catholics to those launched against the
arts. Ever since Perry Miller’s ground-breaking The New England
Mind (1939), scholars have been aware that English Protestant psy-
chology relied on traditional scholastic categories.9 Nevertheless,
8
Arthur F. Marotti, Religious Ideology and Cultural Fantasy: Catholic and Anti-
Catholic Discourses in Early Modern England (Notre Dame, IN, 2005); Helen L.
Parish, Monks, Miracles and Magic: Reformation Representations of the Medieval Church
(Abingdon, 2005); Christopher Hill, Antichrist in Seventeenth-Century England,
rev. edn (London, 1990; first pubd Oxford, 1971); Anthony Milton, Catholic and
Reformed: The Roman and Protestant Churches in English Protestant Thought, 1600–
1640 (Cambridge, 1995); Peter Lake, ‘Calvinism and the English Church 1570–
1635’, Past & Present, no. 114 (Feb. 1987); Peter Lake, ‘The Significance of the
Elizabethan Identification of the Pope as Antichrist’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History,
xxxi (1980), 161–78.
9
Perry Miller, The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century (New York,
1939), 240–8; more recent discussion of English Protestant reliance on Aristotelian
psychology can be found in John Morgan, Godly Learning: Puritan Attitudes towards
Reason, Learning, and Education, 1560–1640 (Cambridge, 1986), 46–7; on faculty
psychology in Calvin, see Richard A. Muller, Post-Reformation Reformed Dogmatics:
The Rise and Development of Reformed Orthodoxy, c.1520 to c.1725, i, Prolegomena to
Theology, 2nd edn (Grand Rapids, 2003; first pubd 1987), 355; Richard A. Muller,
The Unaccommodated Calvin: Studies in the Foundation of a Theological Tradition
(Oxford, 2000), 165.
contemporary disciplinary divisions have tended to reinforce the
Catholic view that Protestants sharply divided philosophical from
theological concerns. Instead, as discussed below, the English
Protestant critique of Catholicism was more than polemical invec-

tive. Rather, Protestant charges emerge as regular, consistent con-
clusions drawn from their worries about the potential misuse of
the imagination. Though employing a vocabulary originating in an
academic context, the scholastic theory of fictions and the imagina-
tion moved well into the mainstream, and this chapter’s claims to its
ubiquity are substantiated with reference to a variety of vernacular
works. Even the term atheism, which has sometimes been viewed
as a flexible, near-meaningless charge, in fact possessed a relatively
fixed meaning determined by Protestant conceptions of scholastic
psychology. The chapter aims to show, more generally, how the cat-
egories of scholastic psychology themselves functioned as a lens for
the interpretation of scripture.
This thesis is elaborated in three main sections. Section I intro-
duces the main themes of the Protestant critique of Catholic images,
drawing on two of the key texts of the Elizabethan Settlement. It also
indicates the scriptural and theological sources for the connection
of idols and the imagination. The second section turns to philoso-
phy, considering the dependence of Protestant theologians on the
categories of scholastic psychology, especially its conception of the
imagination. It suggests that two features of the scholastic imagina-
tion are implicated in the Protestant critique of idolatry: its image-
and fiction-making capabilities, as well as the motive and orienting
role it plays in Aristotelian theories of action. Finally, the discussion
returns to the consideration of Catholic idolatry, showing how these
scholastic categories were implicated in the influential account of the
Elizabethan theologian William Perkins. It is argued that the connec-
tion of idolatry and the imagination played a central and determining
role in the Protestant conception of Catholic idolatry, and, indeed,
of sin more broadly. Ultimately, Protestant worries about idolatry
extend into a larger, more general anxiety concerning fiction and
imagination evident across the intellectual landscape of early modern
England.
I
THEOLOGICAL IMAGINATIONS
By the time of Crashawe’s anti-Jesuit work (1610), anti-Catholic
polemic was an established genre of English religious writing, while
accusations of idolatry had motivated two waves of iconoclasm.10

This section considers some earlier examples of anti-Catholic writ-
ing, beginning with two of the central texts defending the new
Protestant regime established with the accession of Queen Elizabeth.

Theoretically, it highlights the creative tension between idolatry’s
internal imaginative origins and its seemingly superfluous, external
manifestations. As we shall see in section III below, although the claim
that idolatry began in the imagination became more pronounced by
the late-Elizabethan period, and was virtually ubiquitous in English
writing by the start of the seventeenth century, the claim originated
earlier. Indeed, it drew directly on the words of scripture and on the
works of continental theologians.
Crashawe’s characterization of the idolatry of the Catholic Church
contains two interrelated charges. On the one hand, he suggests that
such idols are false, that is, they are untrue — this includes the fake
miracles attributed to the Virgin. On the other, they are also false in
the sense of being not normatively correct — they are oriented to
something other than God, that is, they have an improper end or goal.
Thus, Catholicism is both wrong and not right. Both of these senses
of Catholic idolatry were presented in earlier English Protestant writ-
ing. Indeed, the polemical construction of Catholicism as false and
set against the true and right doctrines of the established, English
Protestant church was an essential feature of the defence of the new
religious regime after Queen Elizabeth’s ascension to the throne upon
the death of her Catholic sister Mary in 1558.11 Among the founda-
tional texts of the new, Protestant Elizabethan Settlement, Bishop of
Salisbury John Jewel’s (1522–1571) Apology of the Church of England
(1562) takes a specifically defensive posture against Roman Catholic
opponents. In the English translation, which appeared in the same year
10
On anti-Catholic writing see n. 7 above; on iconoclasm, see Felicity Heal,
‘Art and Iconoclasm’, in Anthony Milton (ed.), The Oxford History of Anglicanism,
Volume 1: Reformation and Identity c.1520–1662 (Oxford, 2017); Margaret Aston,
Broken Idols of the English Reformation (Cambridge, 2014); Margaret Aston,
England’s Iconoclasts, i, Laws against Images (Oxford, 1988); John Phillips, The
Reformation of Images: Destruction of Art in England, 1535–1660 (Berkeley, 1973).
11
For two brief summaries of the trajectory of the English Reformation over the
sixteenth century, see Peter Marshall, ‘Settlement Patterns: The Church of England,
1553–1603’, in Milton (ed.), Oxford History of Anglicanism,Volume 1: Reformation and
Identity, 45–61; Alec Ryrie, ‘The Reformation in Anglicanism’, in Mark Chapman,
Sathianathan Clarke and Martyn Percy (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Anglican
Studies (Oxford, 2015), 34–44.
as the Latin original, Jewel explicitly argues against the Catholic claim
that Protestants ‘sowe abroad newe sects and furious fansies, that
never before were hearde of’. Central to Jewel’s response, and echoed
in virtually all subsequent critiques of Catholicism, is a reversal of this

division. Instead, for Jewel, it is Protestantism which is grounded in
naught, but ‘the holy Scriptures’ as opposed to ‘all things that may be
devised by manne’.12
Like Crashawe, Jewel is insistent that much of Catholicism’s ‘grosse
imaginacions’, including the ‘ydolatrous’ doctrine of transubstantia-
tion, ‘should serve for nothinge els but to feede mens eies with fooly-
she sightes and wanton boyes games’.13 The force of Jewel’s objection
here is that, insofar as Catholicism is deceptive, it is false; by con-
trast, a religion based on the words of scripture, as Protestantism is, is
true. He repeats this basic formula several times throughout the work,
arguing that Catholics ‘deceive the simple with a vaine apparance of
gay thinges’, their doctrines are but ‘dreames and lies’ and, generally,
that theirs is a religion of ‘ignorance, error, superstition, worshipping
of Idols, mans inventions’, and various things ‘contrary to the holy
Scriptures’.14 The meaning of Jewel’s references to the imagination is
underdeveloped; he claims that Catholic innovations from patristic or
apostolic practice are ‘by imagination’ or ‘imagined’ in the sense of
being made-up, of deviating from scripture. He puts this most plainly
in his later Defence of the Apologie of the Churche of Englande (1567).
Catholicism, he writes there, ‘attemptest with humaine imaginations,
to treate of those thinges, whiche are attained by an onely, pure, and
exquisite Faithe’.15 Here, too, he links the imagination directly to the
issue of idolatry: ‘in your imagination, of the Sainctes of God have
made Idolles’. Specifically, he claims that the sheer number of saints is
indicative that they have simply been made up, rather than grounded
in anything true.16
The definitive statement on idolatry for the early Elizabethan
Church was the ‘Homily against perill of idolatrie and superfluous
12
John Jewel, An Apologie, or Aunswer in Defence of the Church of England
Concerninge the State of Religion vsed in the Same (London, 1562, STC 14590), sig.
A5r, C1r.
13
Ibid., sig. D3v, D4r.
14
Ibid., sig. H3v, I1r, K3v.
15
John Jewel, A Defence of the Apologie of the Churche of Englande (London, 1567,
STC 14600.5), 278.
16
Ibid.
decking of Churches’ printed in the second volume (1563) of the offi-

cially sanctioned Book of Homilies meant to be read out by clergy who
were not licensed to preach. The ‘Homily against Idolatry’ is the lon-
gest in the entire collection and has traditionally been attributed to

Jewel’s own hand.17 Falling into three sections, the Homily opens with
a juxtaposition largely parallelling the one we have seen mobilized
in Jewel’s Apology. The ‘true ornaments’ of a church, public prayer
and the right administration of the sacraments, are opposed to ‘out-
warde ceremonies’ explicitly described as ‘contrarie to the... doctrine
of the scriptures, and... to the usage of the primitive Church’. It is ‘the
corruption of these latter dayes’, the homilist suggests, which ‘hath
brought into the Churche infinite multitudes of images’. While the
homilist does not elaborate on this point, he does mention that it has
been our ‘phantasyng untruely... that all people should be the more
moved to the due reverence’ of church buildings ‘if all corners thereof
were glorious, and glistering with godle and pretious stones’.18 But it
is, in fact, the homilist repeats throughout the work, these very same
decorations which have actively encouraged people to commit idola-
try. The homilist specifically suggests that the ‘cunnyng’ and ‘beawty’
of the decorations ‘deceaved’ the people, leading them ultimately ‘to
erre from the knowledge of God’.19 After an extended historical dis-
cussion of biblical and patristic rejections of idolatry in the homily’s
second section, the homilist introduces a central point in the third
section: ‘the nature of man is none otherwyse bent to worshipping
of images (if he maye have them and see them) then it is bent to
whoredome and adultrie in the company of harlots’. That is, the hom-
ilist suggests here that it is the sensual nature of human beings that
inclines them to idolatry. Even if they are suitably warned against the
worship of church images, human nature ensures that idolatry will,
nevertheless, proliferate.
The ‘Homily against Idolatry’ advances beyond the simple claim
that Catholicism is false and deceptive; the Homily suggests that
17
On the homily, see Heal, ‘Art and Iconoclasm’, in Milton (ed.), Oxford History
of Anglicanism, Volume 1: Reformation and Identity, 187–8; Stephen Buick, ‘ “Little
children, beware of images”: “Homily against Peril of Idolatry” and the quest for
“Pure religion” in the early Elizabethan Church’, Reformation, ii (1997).
18
The second tome of homilees of such matters as were promised, and intituled in the
former part of homilees. Set out by the aucthoritie of the Queenes Maiestie: and to be read
in every parishe church agreeably (London, 1571, STC 13669), 26.
19
Ibid., 33–4.
idolatry itself is both wrong and inherent to the human condition. In
much writing, earlier and later, this innate human predisposition to
idolatry is linked to the imagination, a faculty assumed to be a nec-
essary feature of human beings, as we shall see in the next section.

For English Protestants, reference to the imagination in this context
was relevant because of its appearance within scripture itself. For St
Paul, despite being an actual, physical entity, ‘an Idol is nothing’ (1
Cor. 8:4). Paul gives his fullest account of the origins of idolatry in
the opening chapter of his Epistle to the Romans, influentially trans-
lated by William Tyndale (c.1494–c.1536) in 1526 at the outset of the
Reformation in England. Paul writes of those ‘without excuse’, who
‘in as moche as when they knewe god/ they glorified him not as God/
nether were thankfull/ but wexed full of vanities in their imaginacions/
and their folisshe hertes were blynded’. Though, Paul continues, ‘they
counted them selves wyse’, nonetheless, ‘they became foles and turned
the glory of the immortall god/ unto the similitude of the ymage of
mortall man’ (Rom. 1:21–3).20 Here, Paul’s account of idolatry, like
the charge levelled by Crashawe against the Catholics, is a theory of
a falsely represented deity. Human imagination, on Paul’s account,
renders God as other than he is. Tyndale’s own writings also convey
this internalist theory of idolatry. ‘Mans wisdome is playne ydolatry’,
Tyndale writes, ‘nether is there any other ydolatry then to imagen of
God after mans wisdome. God is not mans imaginacion’, rather, ‘God
is but his worde’.21
While this internal version of idolatry as ‘mans wisdom’ seems far
removed from the superfluous and non-prescribed externalities con-
demned by Jewel, scripture makes clear elsewhere that idolatry is both
internal and external. In Acts, Paul tells the Athenians, ‘we ought not
to thynke that the godhed is lyke unto golde/ silver or stone/ graven
by crafte and ymaginacion of man’ (17:29). That idolatry begins
internally and culminates in images of gold, silver and stone crafted
by human hand is put memorably in the English translation of John
Calvin’s (1509–1564) Institutes: ‘the minde begetteth the idoll, and the
20
I have followed the text of William Tyndale, The Newe Testament dylygently cor-
rected and compared with the Greke (Antwerp, 1534, STC 2826), sig. ciiiiv. Most other
early English versions are comparable in using the term ‘imaginations’; the Douai-
Rheims is the exception using, ‘but are become vaine in their cogitations’, The New
Testament (Rheims, 1582, STC 2884), 346.
21
William Tyndale, The Obedience of a Christen Man (Antwerp, 1528, STC
24446), fo. xixv.
hand bringeth it foorth’.22 Although Calvin’s own quotations of the

passage from Romans, in both Latin and French, do not invoke the
imagination directly as in Tyndale’s translation, his commentaries on
the passage do, informing a remark in the margin of the English trans-

lation of his commentary on the book: ‘It hath beene a common faulte
in all ages, that men trusting to their owne wit, have imagined of God
and his worship according to their owne phantasies’.23
But what exactly did these theologians mean by phantasy, fancy or
imagination? The Italian Calvinist, and later transplant to England,
Peter Martyr Vermigli (1499–1562) noticed that the vain ‘imagina-
tions’ of Rom. 1:21, ‘cogitationibus’ in the Latin, and ‘διαλογισμοί’
(dialogismoí) in the original Greek, are ‘turned into English, imagi-
nations, or cogitations, [they] are reasonings or disputations, which
are done wyth great pesing [sic], and depe judgement’.24 Thus, for
Vermigli, imagination is simply an English synonym for thinking. The
writings of English Protestants occasionally point to this as well. For
instance, the aforementioned William Perkins, the single bestselling
theologian of the late-Elizabethan and Jacobean period, who is dis-
cussed more fully in section III below, defines ‘Imagination’ as ‘the nat-
ural disposition of the understanding after the fall of man’.25 However,
as shown in more detail in section II below, by invoking the imagina-
tion in particular, English theologians were doing more than merely
employing a synonym for thought. Instead, they were concerned to
claim that idols emerged from the process of thinking in co-operation
with imagination, or thinking relying on imagination. And, furthermore,
these theologians took this process, although problematic, to be a nat-
ural and innate tendency of the human mind —thus inclining human
beings to idolatry by default.
22
John Calvin, The Institution of Christian Religion, trans. Thomas Norton
(London, 1599, STC 4423), fo. 20v (I.11.8).
23
John Calvin, A Commentarie upon the Epistle of Saint Paul to the Romanes, trans.
Christopher Rosdell (London, 1583, STC 4399), fo. 14r; cf. Calvin, Exposition sur
l’Epistre de Sainct Paul aux Romains (Geneva, 1543), 19, 21; Calvin, Commentarius in
Epistolam Pauli ad Romanos (Strasbourg, 1540), 30.
24
Peter Martyr Vermigli, A Most Learned and Fruitful Commentary upon the Epistle
of St. Paul to the Romans, trans. Sir Henry Billingsley (London, 1568, STC 24672),
fo. 23v.
25
William Perkins, A Treatise of Mans Imagination (Cambridge, 1607, STC
19751), 20. For Perkins as bestselling author, see Ian Green, Print and Protestantism
in Early Modern England (Oxford, 2000), Appendix 1, 591–672.
II
SCHOLASTIC FICTIONS
Previous scholarship has noticed the claim that, as the Book of
Homilies put it, ‘idolatrie standeth cheefely in the minde’.26 Despite

the occasional provocative assertion, however, there has been lit-
tle concentrated attention to the theme.27 This section argues that
theologians who postulated an internal origin for idolatry were con-
cerned to link it specifically with the faculty of imagination. As the
non-conformist and Westminster Assembly divine Thomas Goodwin
(1600–1680) described it in a sermon published in 1638, he was
concerned with that ‘which the understanding by the helpe of fancy
frames within it selfe of things’.28 This mode of expression, that of the
understanding in co-operation with imagination, or fancy, is precisely
how fictions were understood within the scholastic, Aristotelian phi-
losophy which dominated European intellectual life throughout the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The idea of a Protestantism
utterly opposed to the use of scholastic categories has been radically
modified in contemporary historiography.29 It is now widely accepted
that recourse to the more highly refined metaphysical and psycho-
logical categories of scholasticism allowed Protestants to pen highly
specific attacks on Catholic doctrine. Indeed, Protestant theologians
show considerably less anxiety than might be expected in borrowing
from both pre-Reformation philosopher-theologians such as Thomas
Aquinas and Duns Scotus, and from contemporary Catholic thinkers
such as the influential Spanish Jesuit, Francisco Suárez (1548–1617).
Although certain key aspects of the latter’s metaphysics did occasion
debate in some Reformed circles, scholastic treatments of fiction and
26
The second tome of homilees, 98.
27
For discussion, see Aston, England’s Iconoclasts, 2, 452–60; Sergiusz Michalski,
The Reformation and the Visual Arts: The Protestant Image Question in Western and
Eastern Europe (London and New York, 1993), 182; both follow the earlier, Frances
A. Yates, The Art of Memory (London, 2014; first pubd 1966), 231, 260–9. See also
Barret Reiter, ‘William Perkins, the Imagination in Calvinist Theology and “Inner
Iconoclasm” after FrancesYates’, Intellectual History Review, (2021), <https://doi.org/
10.1080/17496977.2021.1981695> (accessed 14 July 2022).
28
Thomas Goodwin, The Vanity of Thoughts Discovered with their Dangers and Cure
(London, 1638, STC 12044), 13.
29
For discussion see, inter alia, Richard A. Muller, After Calvin: Studies in
the Development of a Theological Tradition (Oxford, 2003), 3–22; Jordan J. Ballor,
‘Deformation and Reformation: Thomas Aquinas and the Rise of Protestant
Scholasticism’, in Manfred Svensson and David Van Drunen (eds.), Aquinas Among
the Protestants, (Oxford, 2018).
the imagination were embraced by both Catholics and Protestants.30

In particular, the imagination was taken to be implicated in both
the objections to idolatry discussed above. That is, the imagination
was taken both to be the agency responsible for creating new and

unprecedented things, that is, for making things up. And, the imagi-
nation was also importantly responsible for orienting human actions:
I have an image in my mind, and thereafter pursue it. Idolatry, as we
have seen, was taken to be implicated in both these senses. On the
one hand, idols are false; they are imaginative projections rather than
the real God. On the other hand, idolatry is an orientation; it points
towards something other than God.
Both of these senses of idolatry, together with connection to the
imagination, appear in the influential treatise Of True Theology (1592),
by the continental Reformed theologian Franciscus Junius (1545–
1602). Junius describes what he calls the ‘false theology’ by which our
‘imagination’ engages in ‘fashioning unalloyed dreams and games in
place of the truth, and idols and tragelaphs in place of the true God’.31
The Herborn encyclopaedist and Calvinist, Johann Heinrich Alsted
(1588–1638), employs the same formulation in his Preconceptions of
Theology (1614).32 The significance here, apart from the invocation
of the imagination, lies in the equation of the fictitious tragelaph, the
half-goat, half-stag identified with artistic creation in Plato’s Republic
(488a), with idols.33 For the Portuguese, Jesuit Pedro da Fonseca
(1528–1599), the tragelaph serves as a paradigm example of what he
30
For one particular debate concerning the reception of Suárez, see J. A. van
Ruler, ‘Franco Petri Burgerdijk and the Case of Calvinism within the Neo-Scholastic
Tradition’, in Theo Verbeek, E. P. Bos and H. A. Krop (eds.), Franco Burgersdijk
(1590–1635): Neo-Aristotelianism in Leiden (Amsterdam, 1993); on the use of
Suárez in Protestant theology, see John Kronen, ‘Suárez’s Influence on Protestant
Scholasticism: The Cases of Hollaz and Turretin’, in Victor M. Salas and Robert L.
Fastiggi (eds.), A Companion to Francisco Suárez (Leiden, 2015).
31
‘Opinabilem vero, quia opinione solum consistit (si quidem illud est consis-
tere) in mente et imaginatione nostra, somnia mera atque ludibria pro veritate, et
idola atque tragelaphos pro Deo vero confingente’. Franciscus Junius, De theologia
vera (Leiden, 1594), 22 (Ch. 1, Th. 3); cf. trans. David C. Noe, A Treatise on True
Theology (Grand Rapids, 2014), 95.
32
Johann Heinrich Alsted, Praecognitorum Theologicorum libri duo [Preconceptions
of Theology in Two Books] (Frankfurt, 1614), 10 (Bk. 1, Ch. 3).
33
See Plato, The Republic, 2nd edn, trans. Allan Bloom (New York, 1991), 168
(Book VI); cf. Aristotle, Physics, trans. C. D. C. Reeve (Indianapolis, 2018), 55
(Book IV, Ch. 1, 208a30).
calls an ens fictum, a fictional being. Such a fiction, he argues, ‘is a being
whose being depends on the operation of intellect, as can be said of no
real being; of which kind are the Chimera, the Tragelaph and other fic-
tions’.34 That is, fictions, Fonseca argues, are wholly dependent upon

the intellect for their existence; their essence explicitly renders any
form of real existence impossible. The chimera and the tragelaph are
impossible entities insofar as they are combinatorial — the essence of
a goat and the essence of a stag positively precludes their being each
other. While Fonseca distinguishes fictional beings from other ‘beings
of reason’ (entia rationis), whose existence within the intellect is not so
categorically different from the being of real entities, Suárez instead
groups fictions and beings of reason together insofar as all are depen-
dent upon the intellect for their instantiation.35 However, for Suárez,
the intellect is not the sole possible cause for the generation of fictitious
beings of reason. Instead, he recognizes the possibility that the imagi-
nation, like intellect,
sometimes fashions certain beings which in fact never exist, nor even
can exist, by composing them from those beings which are sensed —
as when it fashions a golden mountain, which does not exist, although
it is possible, and is able in the same way to fashion an impossible
thing, such as a chimera.36
In the Protestant philosophical tradition, too, there were discussions

of what the Polish Calvinist, Bartholomaeus Keckermann (1572–
1608), calls ‘apparent being, or the image of being’, namely, ‘a being
of reason’ (ens rationis).37 Though far from as technical as Suárez’s
34
‘Ens fictum quatenus tale est, est ens, cuius esse ita pendet ab operatione
intellectus, ut de nullo ente reali dici possit; cuiusmodi sunt Chimaera, Tragelaphus,
et alia fictitia’. Pedro da Fonseca, Commentariorum Petri Fonsecae... in libros
Metaphysicorum Aristotelis Stagiritae [Commentary of Pedro Fonseca... on the Books of
Metaphysics of Aristotle of Stagira], 2 vols. (Rome, 1589), ii, 407.
35
Francisco Suárez, On Beings of Reason (De Entibus Rationis), Metaphysical
Disputation LIV, trans. John P. Doyle (Milwaukee, 1995), 63 (S1, P5).
36
Ibid., 79 (S2, P18). For further discussion of Suárez’s treatment of beings
of reason, see John P. Doyle, ‘Beings of Reason and Imagination’, in Victor M.
Salas (ed.), On the Borders of Being and Knowing: Some Late Scholastic Thoughts on
Supertranscendental Being (Leuven, 2012); Daniel D. Novotný, Ens rationis from
Suárez to Caramuel: A Study in Scholasticism of the Baroque Era (New York, 2013).
37
Bartholomaeus Keckermann, Scientiae metaphysicae compendiosum systema
[Compendious System of the Science of Metaphysics] (Hanau, 1609), 105 (Bk. 2, Ch. 4).
treatment, Keckermann uses the concept to group together such dis-

parate items as the appearance of rainbows in the clouds, mirrors,
logical concepts, rhetorical imagery and, finally, the ‘indirect image,
something which does not correspond to things, but nevertheless is

used effectively to represent something’. Under this category he men-
tions the ‘good fantasies of poets, the stories of Aesop, and other use-
ful figments of this kind’.38
For Keckermann, as for Suárez and the scholastic tradition more
generally, the imagination which gives rise to these fictitious entities is
a power of the soul distinct from the immaterial operations of the intel-
lect. As the example of the golden mountain — standard in scholastic
accounts of the imagination since at least Aquinas — is meant to show,
the imagination combines two prior sense experiences, such as that of
gold and a mountain, to create a new, previously unperceived entity.
Chimeras and tragelaphs take this process one step further in that,
unlike golden mountains, chimeras and tragelaphs are impossible enti-
ties — yet, they are nevertheless formed on the basis of a combination
of previous perceptions. The intellect, by contrast, thinks abstractly,
considering only the universals to which all perceived particulars refer.
Different philosophers made these aspects of the imagination more
or less obvious. The German Calvinist philosopher, Johannes Thomas
Freigius (1543–83), for example, explicitly refers to the imagination
itself as ‘Fictio’, while another, Otto Casmann (1562–1607), defines
one of its functions as the formation of ‘impossibilia’.39
Thus, the imagination is implicated in idolatry, firstly, through its
combinatory status: it combines different aspects of things to form
38
‘Indirecta imago est, quae quidem rebus non correspondet, sed tamen utiliter
adhibetur ad aliquid repraesentandum./ Ut, sunt bonae phantasiae Poetarum, fabule
Aesopi, et alia eiusmodi figmenta utilia’, Ibid., 108. For other Reformed philosophi-
cal treatments of beings of reason, see Rodolph Goclenius, Isagoge in Peripateticorum
et Scholasticorum Primam Philosophiam, quae dici consuevit Metaphysica [Introduction
to the First Philosophy of the Peripatetics and Scholastics, which is Customarily called
Metaphysics] (Frankfurt, 1598), 16–7; Clemens Timpler, Metaphysicae systema
methodicum [Methodical System of Metaphysics] (Hanau, 1616), 27; Gilbert Jaccheus,
Primae philosophiae institutiones [Institutions of First Philosophy] (Leiden, 1616),
352; Franco Burgersdijk, Institutionum metaphysicarum [Institutions of Metaphysics]
(Leiden, 1640), 30–4.
39
Joannes Thomas Freigius, Quaestiones physicae [Natural Philosophic Questions]
(Basel, 1579), 766; Otto Casmann, Psychologia Anthropologica; sive Animae Humanae
Doctrina [Psychological Anthropology; Or, the Doctrine of the Human Soul] (Hanau,
1594), 364.
new entities which do not exist — false images, instead of the true
God. But idolatry consists also in granting such false images wor-
ship; that is, idolatry has a behavioural as well as an epistemological
basis. To understand the role of the imagination in this behavioural

aspect, we need to appreciate the close association of the imagination
to the external sensory powers, seeing, smelling, etc. This association
is clear enough from the conventional scholastic vocabulary which
describes the imagination as one of the ‘internal senses’, by which
the sensible material acquired through the external senses is rendered
suitable for intellection, and is stored for later use.40 Typically, these
internal senses also include operations such as memory and com-
mon sense, the ‘common’ meeting point of the five external senses.
Fundamentally a physiological power, for Suárez and his scholastic
contemporaries, the imagination, along with other internal senses, is
based within the physical structure of the brain, and can thus become
damaged or defective if the brain is injured externally or flooded with
the melancholy humour.41 As the name ‘sense’ indicates, for scholastic
philosophers, the operations of the imagination were far removed from
the abstractive and universalistic activities associated with intellect.
Indeed, the capacities of the imagination for processing, storing and
judging the sensory data acquired through the external senses were
conventionally thought to be a feature of both human and animal psy-
chology.42 The imagination’s ability for judgement, in particular, was
thought to be an animal’s highest quasi-cognitive capacity. Suárez’s
fellow Jesuit, Rodrigo Arriaga (1592–1667), went further than this,
claiming that animals were even capable of the formation of fictitious
40
Francisco Suárez, Commentaria una cum quaestionibus in libros Aristotelis
de anima [A Commentary by Questions on the Books of Aristotle’s On the Soul], ed.
Salvador Castellote, 3 vols. (Madrid, 1991), iii, 12–60 (Disp. 8, Q. 1–2); for analy-
sis, see James B. South, ‘Francisco Suárez on Imagination’, Vivarium, xxxix (2009);
Daniel Heider, ‘The Internal Sense(s) in Early Jesuit Scholasticism’, Filosofický časo-
pis, ii (2017), 89–92.
41
For a brief overview of scholastic faculty psychology in the early modern
period, see Katharine Park, ‘Psychology: The Organic Soul’, in Charles B. Schmitt et
al. (eds.), The Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy (Cambridge, 1988), 464–
84; and on the soul more generally, Dennis Des Chene, Life’s Form: Late Aristotelian
Theories of the Soul (Ithaca, 2000).
42
For a discussion of Aristotelian theories of animal behaviour, see chapters
one, four and five in Peter Adamson and G. Fay Edwards (eds.), Animals: A History
(Oxford, 2018).
beings of reason.43 But this was unusual; most scholastics claimed, as

Suárez did, that the ability of the imagination to form fictions is ‘per-
haps never... without the co-operation of reason’.44
It is the role of the imagination in animal psychology, however,

which best serves to illustrate its role in behaviour. Animals, lacking
the rational faculties associated by scholastic philosophers with human
beings, are primarily motivated by the imagination. Keckermann, in a
set of Philosophical Disputations (1604), describes an eleven-step motive
process beginning from the perception of an external object. In the
fourth step, after apprehension by the common sense, the imagination
‘decides whether [the perceived object] is good, bad; useful or useless’.
This judgement stimulates the blood and spirits which, in turn, move
the muscles of the body.45 Positing an additional judgement of reason,
along with the co-operation of the will, would indicate the trajectory
of motion for human beings. Of course, as was acknowledged by the
scholastics, human beings do not always engage reason when initiating
motion. Thus, the imagination stands as the de facto motivator of what
we might think of as our subconscious, unthinking or instinctual reac-
tions to sensory stimuli.
This scholastic psychology, which viewed the imagination as an
internal sense housed within the brain, distinguished from the intellect
by its limitation to sensory particulars and the primary motivator of
non-rational actions, was, though originally articulated in academic
contexts, near-ubiquitous in early modern England. In his poem Nosce
Teipsum (1599), or Know Thyself, John Davies (1569–1626) offers what
is, effectively, a verse-rendering of scholastic psychology. Delineating
the duties of the external and internal senses, Davies writes, ‘Those
outward Organs present things receive,/ This inward Sense doth absent
things retaine;/ Yet straight transmits all formes she doth perceive,/
Unto a higher region of the braine’.46 Robert Burton (1577–1640),
43
Doyle, ‘Beings of Reason and Imagination’, in Salas (ed.), On the Borders of
Being and Knowing, 162; the augmented scope Arriaga attributes to the imagination
here has echoes in some of his other theories: ‘Arriaga seems to have accorded a
greater role to the imagination in his account [of imaginary time] than many other
Jesuit commentators’. Michael Edwards, Time and the Science of the Soul in Early
Modern Philosophy (Leiden, 2013), 32.
44
Suárez, On Beings of Reason, trans. Doyle, 79.
45
‘Phantasia diiudicat bonum ne fit, an malum, utile an inutile’. Bartholomæus
Keckermann, Disputationes philosophicae (Hanau, 1604), 283.
46
John Davies, Nosce Teipsum: This Oracle Expounded in Two Elegies (London,
1599, STC 6355), 46.
too, in his Anatomy of Melancholy (1621; last rev. edn 1651) describes
a brain ‘distinguished by certaine ventricles’, within which he locates
common sense, memory and ‘Phantasie, or Imagination’.47 Much as
the scholastics, for Burton, the imagination, ‘In men... is subject and

governed by Reason, or at least should be, but in Brutes it hath no
superior, and is... all the reason they have’.48 Some English authors of
psychological works even linked the internal senses to the generation
of entia rationis just as Suárez had. Not only did Latin works of philos-
ophy, such as the Hypomnemata (pubd 1650) by Oxford theologian,
John Prideaux (1578–1650), invoke the subject, but so did works in the
vernacular.49 The English Royalist, Nicholas Mosley (c.1611–72), for
instance, in his work Psychosophia, or, Natural and Divine Contemplations
of the Passions and Faculties of the Soul of Man (1653), describes inter-
nal senses of memory, common sense and imagination, which he calls
‘phantasie’.50 Like Burton, Mosley describes the imagination as ‘the
highest faculty that any brute or irrational creature is capable of’; its
operation, he writes, ‘is more exactly to weigh, and diligently to exam-
ine those forms and similitudes received in the Common Sense’. He
goes on to distinguish the imagination from common sense, suggesting
that the former,
retains not onely those things which are, or were the objects of the
External Senses... but those things also which never were, nor ever
will be the objects of Sense, being entiâ rationis, non entiâ rei [beings
of reason, not beings of things], chimaeraes, figments of the Brain,
having no existence in nature, only a notionary, imaginary existence.
Such entia rationis, Mosley writes, include ‘the representation of

Centaures and other Monsters, which Poets and Painters have feigned
and painted, which are not, nor indeed have any existence in nature,
but are a meer imagination of the Brain’. But, having just affirmed
imagination as the highest power of irrational animals, Mosley denies
47
Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy What it is.With all the Kindes, Causes,
Symptomes, Prognostickes, and Seuerall Cures of it (Oxford, 1621, STC 4159), 29, 34;
for discussion of Burton’s physiological sources, see Angus Gowland, The Worlds of
Renaissance Melancholy: Robert Burton in Context (Cambridge, 2006), 33–97.
48
Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy What it is, 34–5.
49
John Prideaux, Hypomnemata (Oxford, 1650), 252–4.
50
Nicholas Mosley, Psychosophia or, Natural and Divine Contemplations of the
Passions and Faculties of the Soul of Man (London, 1653), 72–85 (Ch. VII).
the formation of beings of reason to animal imagination, attributing

it instead to ‘the Intellectual Phantasie... which is proper to Man, not
common with Beasts’.51
Such faculty psychology, dividing the various psychological oper-

ations of human beings into disparate internal senses was also used
by Calvinist theologians. In his Institutes, for example, Calvin himself
refers to the process of perception whereby, from the external senses,
‘al objectes are powred into Common sense, as into a place of receit:
then followeth Phantasie, which judgeth of those thinges one from
other that Common sense hath conceived’. Though, even as Calvin
suggests that such divisions ‘entangle us with obscurenes’, never-
theless, he writes, ‘I am not much against it, neither will I confute
this opinion’.52 A more extended discussion appears in the work of
Calvin’s contemporary, the Heidelberg theologian, Girolamo Zanchi
(1516–90).53 The preacher, William Perkins, too, mentions ‘the out-
ward senses... of sight, hearing, tasting, touching, smelling... also... the
inward... imagination, memorie, etc.... done by the braine, and the
parts of the braine’.54 Meanwhile, Perkins’s contemporary anti-Cath-
olic polemicist, Andrew Willet (1562–1621), in a sermon preached in
1592, explicitly suggests that ‘we read in the scripture’ of ‘the three fac-
ulties of the soule... the outwarde and externall sense, the inward and
internall, called the phantasie, and the intellectuall and understand-
ing part’.55 Willet’s obvious engagement with scholasticism is evident
elsewhere, too, for instance he refers to an ‘ens rationis’ in an anti-Je-
suit work of 1603.56 The scholastic theory of the internal senses was
still being referred to in theological writing decades later, for exam-
ple, the preacher, John Bisco (1605/6–79), defines the imagination, or
51
Ibid., 74–5.
52
Calvin, Institution of Christian Religion, trans. Norton, fo. 44r–v (I.15.6).
53
Girolamo Zanchi, Operum theologicorum [Works of theology], 8 vols. (Geneva,
1649), iii, 547–8 (P.3, Bk.2, C.VII).
54
William Perkins, The Whole Treatise of the Cases of Conscience Distinguished into
Three Bookes, ed. Thomas Pickering (Cambridge, 1606, STC 19669), 189.
55
Andrew Willet, A fruitfull and godly sermon preached at Paules crosse...Vpon the 5.
chapter of the prophesie of Zacharie (London, 1592, STC 24899), sig. A6v.
56
Andrew Willet, An Antilogie or counterplea to An apologicall... epistle (London,
1603, STC 25672), 104; on Willet’s anti-Catholic writings, see Milton, Catholic and
Reformed, 13–27. His engagement with scholastic psychology went far beyond what
can be discussed in this article: see his contribution to the genre, Andrew Willet, De
animae natura et viribus quaestiones quaedam [Some Questions on the Nature and Powers
of the Soul] (Cambridge, 1585, STC 25674).
‘fancy’, in a work of 1655, as ‘an inferior power of the soule, which is
placed in the middle of the interior senses, and bordereth between the
senses and the understanding. This fancy is the former of many strange
notions and conceits’.57 As is alluded to above, this scholastic psychol-

ogy would prove essential to the conception of idolatry articulated by
English Protestants. Both the combinatory character of the imagina-
tion and its motive, behavioural aspect, were employed in the critique
of idolatry, and it is to this application that we now turn.
III
IDOLATRY AND THE IMAGINATION
As we have seen, Protestants objected to Catholic idolatry on two
grounds. First, they objected to it because it was false; it constituted
a claim about the nature of God which was incorrect. Second, they
objected to it because it was wrong, in the sense of being morally abhor-
rent. That is, as an action (worship) it could only rightly be directed
at God. In this section, I want to turn to elaborating these two claims
and by showing how Protestants employed the category of imagination
to explain them. I argue here that once the focus came to settle on the
imaginative quality of idolatry, accusations of something’s being idola-
trous easily moved beyond narrow liturgical concerns. Instead, idolatry
was re-conceptualized in moral terms as that which grants something
which belongs to God to something else. For if God is truly omniscient
and omnipotent, then all our actions should be conducted as if under
his watchful eye — for they are indeed so conducted. Therefore, any
action which is sinful in fact constitutes a wilful denial of some aspect
of God — such as his power or judgement. This claim, that idolatry
consists in any action which takes some external end, such as tempo-
ral pleasure, as the orienting goal of human activity, enabled English
Protestants to propagandize against a whole host of moral ills from
theatre and cosmetics to far more consequential subjects, including
politics and natural philosophy itself — all of which came to be catego-
rized as idols by various English writers.
Although we have seen that the imagination was employed already
by English Protestants as early as Tyndale, in this section I want to
focus especially on writings from the late Elizabethan period and later.
Particularly important is the preacher, William Perkins, typically con-
sidered a founding figure of the so-called ‘moderate puritan’ tradition.58
57
John Bisco, The Grand Triall of True Conversion. Or, Sanctifying grace appearing
and acting first and chiefly in the thoughts (London, 1655), 19.
58
See Peter Lake, Moderate Puritans and the Elizabethan Church (Cambridge,
1982).
Unlike earlier presbyterians, moderate puritans such as Perkins typi-

cally pressed for further reform from within the established Church.
This led Perkins to place a strong emphasis on the need for internal
reform and especially the cultivation of conscience. While some schol-

ars have argued that this internal focus was due to particular historical
circumstances, namely, the failure of institutionalized presbyterian-
ism, in fact the work of Perkins and the moderate puritans remained
influential for decades.59 In particular, Perkins’s account of idolatry
in his A Warning Against the Idolatrie of the Last Times (1601) was still
among the recommended works on that topic by 1646.60 In line with
the general charges against idolatry we have considered so far, Perkins
objected both to the fictional quality of Catholic idolatry, the fact that
it misrepresented God’s nature, and to its orientation, the fact that it
constituted an action directed to something other than God. Each is
discussed here in turn.
The general grievance against the Catholic use of images in wor-
ship was simple enough: their employment transgressed what, to the
Reformed, constituted God’s second commandment: ‘Thou shalt
make thee no graven image’ (Ex. 20:4; Deut. 5:8). Perkins gives a clear
delineation of this argument in his anti-Catholic polemic A Reformed
Catholike (1598): ‘for God may appeare in whatsoever forme it pleaseth
his majestie; yet doth it not followe, that man should therefore resem-
ble God in those formes: man having no libertie to resemble him in
any forme at all: unles he be commanded so to doe’.61 Here, Perkins
warns Catholics against citing biblical precedent to inform their depic-
tion, for example, of God as an old man based on his description as
the Ancient of Days (Dan. 7:9). Similarly, Perkins suggests, the inclu-
sion of decorative cherubim on the Tabernacle is no justification for
Catholic image-making insofar as those cherubim ‘were erected by
speciall commandement from God’.62 In his A Warning Against the
59
See Diarmaid MacCulloch, The Later Reformation in England, 1547–1603
(London, 1990), 56–61; cf. Patrick Collinson, ‘Ecclesiastical Vitriol: Religious Satire
in the 1590s and the Invention of Puritanism’, in John Guy (ed.), The Reign of
Elizabeth I: Court and Culture in the Last Decade (Cambridge, 1995).
60
John Wilkins, Ecclesiastes, or, A Discourse Concerning the Gift of Preaching
(London, 1651 [1646]), 115.
61
William Perkins, A Reformed Catholike: Or, A Declaration shewing how neere we
may come to the present Church of Rome in sundrie points of religion (Cambridge, 1598,
STC 19736), 178.
62
Ibid., 177.
Idolatrie of the Last Times, Perkins describes ‘Such images’ which ‘serve
to signifie the holy things of God’ as ‘only at the appointment of God’.63
These are ‘properly signes’, he argues, and constitute solely those
things at which God has explicitly ‘bound himselfe’. Perkins names the

cherubim, the brazen serpent and the sacraments among such lawful
signs.64 Thus, his argument against Catholic images, for example, of
crucifix scenes, martyred saints and much else, was that such images
had not been authorized by God. But, as we have seen already, English
Protestants hardly stopped at that. Instead, they insisted as Crashawe
did against the Jesuits, that the Catholic Church ‘has not true Christ
left amongst them’.
Perkins gives an elaborate typology of idolatry in his Warning, distin-
guishing between worship given to a false god, such as paganism, and
false worship given to the true God. Among the examples of this latter
phenomenon, Perkins itemizes various occasions in the Old Testament
in which the Israelites adopted the practices of their idolatrous neigh-
bours. Although Perkins creates this dichotomy which suggests the
possibility of improperly representing the true God, he almost imme-
diately undermines it. For, he argues, ‘when men present themselves
before Images, there to worship God, they worship not God, but either
a fained god, that can and wil be present and heare at images, or the
very images themselves’. Since God is beyond both human under-
standing and any possible sensory representation, whether physical or
mental, Perkins suggests, in forming an image of God, God himself is
re-defined; he is changed into something other than what he is. Perkins
writes, ‘So soone as God is represented in an image, he is deprived of
his glorie, and changed into a bodily, visible, circumscribed, and finite
Majestie’.65 That is, in taking God to be the kind of thing which can be
represented in an image, Catholics make a false claim about the sort
of thing God is. As he writes in A Reformed Catholike, ‘though in words
they honour Christ, yet in deede they turne him into a Pseudo-Christ
and an Idol of their owne braine’.66 In worshipping images, Catholics
assume that theirs is a god who is representable, and thus finite and
limited. In short, rather than conceive of God with reference to scrip-
ture, Catholics merely ‘content themselves with the light of blinde
63
Perkins, Warning Against the Idolatrie of the Last Times, 55.
64
Ibid., 18, 55.
65
66
Perkins, Reformed Catholike, sig. ¶2v.
nature, and frame God according to their own desires and affections’.67
The use of images unduly restricts God to the material realm, and thus
to ‘a phantasie of their own’, rather than the fullness of God’s nature
as revealed ‘in his creatures and word, and specially in Christ... the

ingraven image of the person of the father’.68 Idols, or images, there-
fore, are not simply examples of the wrong way to worship the right
God —rather, they are mere physical signifiers of the underlying falsity
of the conception of God from which they originate.
Just as a tragelaph is impossible because it combines the essence of
a goat with the essence of stag — both of which positively preclude the
essence of the other — so, too, is an idol impossible. An idol combines
the notion of God — an omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent being —
with a physical, material object and spatial location. Both of these defi-
nitions necessarily preclude the inclusion of the other: a physical object
simply cannot contain infinity. But orthodox Christianity defends a far
more specific notion of God than that of his omnipotence and omni-
science. For example, Perkins emphasizes the Triunity of God, writing
‘when the mind abstracts the godhead from the father, sonne, and holy
Ghost, god is transformed into an idol’. On these grounds Perkins dis-
misses ‘the Idol-god of the greatest nations of the world, of Turkes,
of Jewes; yea of many that pretend Christianitie, who upon ignorance
worship nothing but an Absolute God’.69 Concerning the second per-
son of the Trinity, in particular, Perkins adds that ‘he in one person is
perfect God and perfect man... And he which otherwise conceiveth of
him, turnes him into an idol or forged Christ’. Thus, Perkins declares
Catholic transubstantiation idolatrous, specifically because it fails to
attribute to Christ his full humanity. He writes, ‘if the bread be verely
transubstantiated into the bodie of Christ, this very bodie must needes
be made not onely of the substance of the virgin, but also of the sub-
stance of bread: nay it is made a very monstrous bodie’. Specifically,
he contends, it is monstrous because, physically, it is impossible for the
full extent of a material, human body to fit inside the small quantity
of bread.70 Christ is also defined as priest, prophet and king, Perkins
67
68
Perkins, Reformed Catholike, 342.
69
70
Ibid., 6; cf. Perkins, Reformed Catholike, 189, 340. This also informed a dis-
tinctively Reformed treatment of space, see Cees Leijenhorst, ‘Place, Space and
Matter in Calvinist Physics’, The Monist, lxxxiv (2001), 520–41; Giovanni Gellera,
‘Calvinist Metaphysics and the Eucharist in the Early Seventeenth Century’, British
Journal for the History of Philosophy, xxi (2013), 1091–110.
argues, and Catholic theology deviates from this conception in myriad
ways.71 In short, Catholicism ‘changeth and reverseth the doctrine that
Christ hath left to his Church specially in the books of the new testa-
ment by an heap of humane Traditions’.72

Thus far we have considered the first of the two objections against
Catholicism: its misrepresentation of the nature of God. For Perkins
and the moderate puritan tradition that drew on his works, follow-
ing the psychological model defended in scholastic philosophy, this
misrepresentation was built directly into the nature of human beings.
According to scripture, human beings do have a natural idea of the
Godhead, and thus are ‘without excuse’ (Rom. 1:20). Nevertheless,
we conjure up impossible ‘Idol-god[s]’, as Perkins describes them,
because ‘we see through a glass, darkly’ (1 Cor. 13:12). That is, our
natural idea of God is combined with our sensory perceptions, leading
us, necessarily, to form a false image of God. This idea is itself the
combination of two theories, the scholastic insistence that, as Aristotle
famously put it, ‘the soul never thinks without an image’, and the
Reformed doctrine of total depravity: the idea that original sin has not
just corrupted human nature, but that it has left human beings utterly
unable to achieve the good, without relying on the enlightening effects
of God’s grace.73 As Perkins puts it, ‘The minde and understanding
part of man is naturally so corrupt, that so soone as he can use reason:
he doth nothing but imagine that which is wicked, and against the
lawe of God’.74 But not only have our imaginations come to be wicked,
we have also come to be more reliant upon them. Richard Sibbes
(1577–1635), a moderate puritan of the generation after Perkins, puts
the point clearly: ‘the judgement it selfe since the fall... yeeldeth to our
imagination’.75 For Sibbes, this manifests itself in a misapprehension
of sensory reality. He argues, ‘the best things, if they bee attended with
sensible inconveniences, as want, disgrace in the world, and such like,
are misjudged for evill things; and the very worst things, if they bee
attended with respect in the world and sensible contentments, are imag-
ined to be the greatest good’.76 Sibbes puts this explicitly in terms of a
71
Perkins gives five ways Catholicism deviates from Christ’s priestly office and
two from his kingly office, Warning Against the Idolatrie of the Last Times, 6–11.
72
73
Aristotle, De anima, trans. Christopher Shields (Oxford, 2016), 63 (431a17).
74
Perkins, A Treatise of Mans Imagination, 21.
75
Richard Sibbes, The Soules Conflict with It Selfe, and Victory over It Self by Faith
(London, 1635, STC 22508), 176.
76
Ibid., 177.
criticism of Catholicism only a few pages later: ‘It marres all in religion,
when wee goe about heavenly things with earthly affections, and seeke
not CHRIST in Christ, but the world: What is Popery but an artificiall
frame of mans braine to please mens imaginations by outward state and

pompe of Ceremonies’.77
With Sibbes, therefore, we move from the first objection against idol-
atry to the second. Not only is idolatry fictitious in the sense of being
an impossible and false image of God, it also constitutes an improper
and wrong orientation on the world, a focus on the sensory, rather than
the salvific. It is this sensual inclination, the desire ‘to please mens
imaginations by outward state’ that has informed the physical signifi-
cation of our false conceptions of God. But these two conceptions of
idolatry pull simultaneously in both directions. That is, the wrong ori-
entation turns out to also be an example of misrepresenting God. We
can see this by considering the objections raised by Protestants against
Catholic images of saints or the Virgin, such as was condemned in the
work by Crashawe discussed at the outset of this article. Images of
the Virgin or the saints, too, Calvinist theologians argue, violate not
only the second commandment, but also represent idolatry in the same
way. That is, they too serve as examples of a falsely conceived god.
Crashawe reminds us of how this argument functions: saints and the
Virgin are mere creatures, even if they ought, rightly, to serve as moral
exemplars. By granting them veneration we raise them up to levels of
power possessed only by God, thereby construing God, wrongly, as
a being to whom others can equal. This is the theoretical import of
Crashawe’s critique of the Jesuit’s praise for Mary’s milk mixed with
Jesus’s blood — only Jesus’s blood is properly salvific.78 Perkins makes
the same argument with particular clarity in his Reformed Catholike. He
writes, ‘To praie unto Saints departed... is to ascribe that unto them
which is proper to God himselfe: namely, to know the heart, with the
inward desires and motions thereof: and to know the speaches and
behaviours of all men in all places upon earth at all times’. By this
doctrine, he continues, ‘the Saints are still made more then creatures;
because they are saide, to knowe the thoughts and all the doings of
all men at all times, which no created power can well comprehend at
once’. Ultimately, Perkins contends, this view of saintly power is little
more than ‘a forgerie of mans braine’.79
77
Ibid., 180.
78
Crashawe, Jesuites Gospel, 55–7.
79
Perkins, Reformed Catholike, 252–3.
Thus, the misrepresentation of God extends to even implicit claims
about his nature. But it also covers actions or orientations. As Perkins
summarizes in his Warning, any way ‘whereby that which is gods is
given to the creatures... thus they are transformed into idols’.80 Perkins

initially describes this entirely in terms of ‘worship’ granted to crea-
tures, but when he turns to itemizing the forms of that worship his
category of idolatry expands considerably. For, he argues, ‘all creatures
are made idols, when men give their hearts unto them, and fixe their
principall affections on them’. According to scholastic convention, to
be virtuous is, in some sense, to orient one’s actions towards God, and
thus to make God the proper end and goal of human existence. Thus,
for Perkins, any action, or series of actions, which would displace God
from this position as the orienting end of our entire existence, consti-
tutes an idol — for we are thereby directing our actions towards an
end which ought, rightly, to be occupied by God. And therefore, we
are attributing to something which is not God, an action which ought
properly to be given to God alone. Thus, he writes, ‘covetousnesse is
the worshipping of idols; because the covetous man puts his confidence
in his riches, for the preservation of his life’. That is, for a covetous
person, riches are ‘placed above God, or matched with him in regard
of obedience, feare, love, confidence, etc. it is made another god’.81
Idolatry, then, because it is, according to the formulation of these
English Protestants, an internal more than an external process, can
simply be defined as ‘placing somewhat that is not God in the roome
of the true God’.82 The later preacher, John Bisco, refers explicitly to
‘thought-Idolatry’, which he defines as, ‘When they think and imag-
ine some other thing besides the true God to be their chiefest good’.83
Non-conformist, Thomas Goodwin, echoes the point, writing that our
imagination can ‘hold up the images of those gods they create, which
the heart falls downe and worships; they present credit, riches, beauty,
till the heart hath worshipt them, and this when the things themselves
are absent’.84
This more expansive, and imaginative, idea of idolatry takes cen-
tral stage in Perkins’s posthumously published A Treatise of Mans
80
Perkins, Warning Against the Idolatrie of the Last Times, 35–6.
81
Ibid., 36–7.
82
83
Bisco, Grand Triall of True Conversion, 137; cf. Perkins, A Treatise of Mans
Imagination, 38.
84
Goodwin, Vanity of Thoughts Discovered, 28–9.
Imagination (1607). In this work, Perkins considers almost the entire

range of possible sinful actions to constitute examples of idolatry, that
is, as instances of a falsely conceived God. Thus, Perkins refers to ‘athe-
isme in practice’, or, ‘that sinne wherby men deny God in their deedes,

lives and conversations’.85 Perkins gives an exhaustive summary of the
various ways in which human actions betray our underlying convic-
tion that there is no god. For example, in sinning we may be ‘thinking
that God is not present in all places’.86 Or, in repeating a sinful action
we have previously engaged in, we deny the reality of God’s justice.87
‘What’, asks Perkins, ‘is the cause why men use oppression, and injus-
tice, deceit, and lying in their worldly affaires? Is it not because this
thought of Atheisme doth possesse their hearts, that God regardeth
not there outward things?’88 Just as the more recognizable form of
outward idolatry arises from humanity’s natural corruption, our ori-
entation towards the sensory world rather than towards God, so too,
Perkins suggests, such various forms of atheism arise from the darkness
of the human mind since the Fall. He writes that because ‘mans minde
by nature is full of darkness, he cannot without Gods speciall grace,
perceive the things of God, and so he judgeth the gospell foolishness,
and embraceth error, rather than the truth’.89 For Perkins, then, the
only way to overcome such psychological proclivity for falsity is, for
humanity to ‘reject his owne naturall reason, and stoppe up the eyes of
his naturall minde, like a blinde man, and suffer himselfe wholly to bee
guided by Gods spirite in the thinges of God, that thereby he may bee
made wise unto salvation’.90
This claim, that an idol could be anything to which is allocated
any action, or series of actions, which ought properly to be directed
at God, allowed Protestants to deploy the charge of idolatry against
any behaviour which they deemed to be immoral or improper. For
instance, the French Huguenot, Pierre Du Moulin (1568–1658), who
defines idolatry as transferring religious worship owed to God to a
mere created being, derides the use of cosmetics in precisely such
language.91 When women use cosmetics, Du Moulin claims, they are
85
86
Ibid., 35.
87
Ibid., 59.
88
Ibid., 58 [recto 56].
89
Ibid., 64 [recto 66].
90
Ibid., 71–2.
91
For his definition of idolatry, see Pierre Du Moulin, Thesaurus disputationum
theologicarum in alma Sedanensi Academia [Treasury of Theological Disputations at
Sedan Academy] (Geneva, 1661), 256.
‘Idolatrizing their owne bodies’.92 Du Moulin reaches hyperbolic levels
of Augustinianism, too, when he proclaims that ‘the love and respect
which [children] give to their poppets are eminent seeds of Idolatry’.93
John Milton, too, expands the polemical use of idolatry. In his De

Doctrina Christiana (c.1660), he characterizes idolatry as the result of
substituting some human-derived affectivity for those willed by God.
In the work’s second chapter, he writes, employing a technical Greek
term, ‘It is better, therefore, to contemplate and to mentally grasp
God not anthropopathically (ἀνθρωποπαθῶϛ), i.e., in the manner of
humans, who make no limit of inventing subtilties concerning God,
but in the manner of scripture, i.e., in the way he has offered himself
to be contemplated’.94 Later in the same work he describes the ‘idolol-
atrica’, whereby we grant ‘gratitude toward idols or else created things
in preference to God’.95 The expansiveness of his account of idola-
try appears especially in his earlier polemic against the late Charles
I’s autobiographical apologia. Milton invokes an explicitly iconoclas-
tic response to the king’s book through his title, Eikonoklastes (1649),
while decrying monarchy itself as ‘a civil kinde of idolatry’.96
That Du Moulin, theologian, and Milton, author of a theologi-
cal tract, relate their concerns with moral and political topics to the
religious language of idolatry, may be no surprise. However, anxiet-
ies about the fictitious character of Catholic liturgical practices were
expressed across the intellectual landscape — including by the phi-
losopher, Francis Bacon. In his Advancement of Learning (1605),
Bacon suggests that Catholics ‘hath too easily receiued... narrations
of Miracles wrought by Martyrs, Hermits, or Monkes of the desert,
and other holy men’. Ultimately, such ‘impostures of the Cleargie,
illusions of spirits, and badges of Antichrist’, Bacon continues, ‘grew
92
Pierre Du Moulin, Heraclitus, or, Meditations vpon the Vanity & Misery of
Humane Life, trans. Robert Stafford (Oxford, 1609, STC 7325), 27; cf. idem, 82.
93
Ibid., 11.
94
‘Praestat igitur non ἀνθρωποπαθῶϛ‎, i.e., more hominum, qui subtilius de Deo
comminiscendi finem nullum faciunt, sed more scripturae, i.e. quo ipse se contem-
plandum praebuit, ita Deum contemplari talemque animo concipere’, John Milton,
‘De Doctrina Christiana’, in John K. Hale and J. Donald Cullington (eds.), The
CompleteWorks of John Milton (Oxford, 2012), viii.1, 28. I have altered the translation
from that which appears on the facing page.
95
The Complete Works of John Milton, viii.2, 948/9–950/1 (B.2, Ch.3).
96
John Milton, ‘Eikonoklastes’, in Neil Keeble and Nicholas McDowell (eds.),
The Complete Works of John Milton (Oxford, 2013), vi, 282.
to be esteemed... to the great scandall and detriment of Religion’.97 I

would suggest, too, that we can understand Bacon’s famous ‘idols of
the mind’ within the more expansive notion of idolatry we have been
discussing. Indeed, Bacon himself characterizes these philosophical

idols as the improper reflection, by the imagination, of the nature of
things as God created them. In the Advancement, Bacon is explicit about
the parallel between humanity’s inability to perceive nature aright and
its inability to perceive God aright:
in the inquirie of the diuine truth, their pride enclined to leaue the
Oracle of Gods word, and to vanish in the mixture of their owne inu-
entions: so in the inquisition of Nature, they euer left the Oracle of
Gods works, and adored the deceiuing and deformed Images, which
the vnequall mirrour of their owne minds, or a few receiued Authors
or principles, did represent vnto them.98
In all these cases, the philosophical as much as the theological, human-

ity substitutes some image, invented by the imagination on the basis
of sensory accidents, for the true reality willed and created by God.
Protestant concerns about idolatry, therefore, extend beyond the litur-
gical into a more generalized anxiety about the status of fictions, and
the potential for imagination to lead us into sin and inaccuracy.
Perhaps the most famous case of such anxiety is characterization
of theatrical performance as idolatrous by English Protestants, from
Stephen Gosson (1554–1624) to William Prynne (1600–69).99 Indeed,
in a sermon preached before the Virginia Company in 1609, Crashawe
warns the assembled colonists against the ‘three great enemies’ of
their project: ‘the Divell, Papists, and Players’, that is, actors. What, for
Crashawe unites these three? They all ‘mocke at religion, and abuse
the holie Scriptures’.100 While Crashawe does not use the term idolatry
in his condemnation of papists or players, he does assert clearly that
they, like the devil, aim at some end other than God, while the colonial
97
Francis Bacon, ‘The Advancement of Learning’, in Michael Kiernan (ed.),
The Oxford Francis Bacon (Oxford, 2000), iv, 26 (Book I).
98
Ibid., 25 (Book I).
99
See Michael O’Connell, The Idolatrous Eye: Iconoclasm and Theater in Early-
Modern England (Oxford, 2000).
100
William Crashawe, A Sermon Preached in London Before the Right Honorable the
Lord Lavvarre, Lord Governor and Captaine Generall of Virginea (London, 1610, STC
6029), fo. H1r–v.
enterprise is justified on precisely those grounds, viz. that it is oriented
towards a holy cause. This should give us cause to reconsider those
other Protestant condemnations of theatre, and poetry too. Scholars
have too often focused on the frequently negative characterization of

the imagination within English Protestant discourse. Ioan P. Couliano,
for example, claimed that ‘the Reformation leads to a total censorship
of the imaginary, since phantasms are none other than idols conceived
by the inner sense’.101 But, in fact, there was no question for those
Protestants discussed in this article of abandoning the imagination
altogether. And, indeed, close consideration of their views on religious
images indicates that, there too, it is, as Perkins puts it, ‘the scope and
intent of the commandement of God, onely to forbid the making of
images, in respect they are to be applied to Divine or religious use’.102
Thus, it is evident that as far as the theatre is concerned, Protestants
objected to its immorality; the lewd and debauched world in which
theatrical performances were situated, rather than their representative
character.103
***
The fictions of the Catholic Church were opposed by English
Protestants, not only because they were manifestly untrue, based on
imaginative projections, rather than the truth of scripture, but also
because they were wrong; they were oriented to an end other than God.
Images of God were wrong, not only in that they falsely represented
God, against his specific injunctions to the contrary in scripture, but
also because, granting worship to a physical image meant devoting to an
image that which ought rightly to be given to God alone. The adoration
of the Virgin Mary in the poem criticized in Crashawe’s pamphlet with
which this article opened is wrong too, not simply because it gives ado-
ration to an image, but because the poem itself describes a false reality,
and is oriented towards wrongful ends. Although English Protestants
certainly did criticize the representation of the divine, representing the
divine was not per se bad, for one could represent the divine if given
101
Ioan P. Couliano, Eros and Magic in the Renaissance, trans. Margaret Cook
(Chicago, 1987), 193.
102
Perkins, Warning Against the Idolatrie of the Last Times, 58 [recto 56]; recent
research has highlighted the degree to which English Protestants continued to make
religious artworks, see, inter alia, Tara Hamling, Decorating the Godly Household:
Religious Art in Post-Reformation Britain (London, 2010).
103
See the permitted reading of plays in O’Connell, The Idolatrous Eye, 34.
explicit instruction to that end. Rather, a false conception of God, such

as that enshrined in idolatry, oriented one towards immoral actions,
such as valuing the material over the divine or the sensible over the
salvific. Ultimately, the iconoclasm of English Protestants was decid-

edly puritanical; that is, it was moral more than it was metaphysical. If
images were restricted to scripturally permitted contexts, if the Virgin
Mary was understood as a creature like any other, then the fictions
of the Catholic Church could be overcome. More fundamentally, if
the imaginations of the English people were occupied with the right
images and their actions oriented to the right doctrines, then God’s
grace could surely be expected — though not, ultimately, guaranteed.
Thinking beyond the confines of early modern confessional conflict,
I would suggest that, for the English Protestants I have discussed here,
Catholic fake news is bad, as all other kinds of fake news, not solely
because it misrepresents the facts (though it may also do that), but
because it misrepresents the facts in a particular direction. If, say, a cer-
tain politician was to characterize representations of their agenda as
‘fake news’, more than decrying the facticity of this or that accounting,
such a declaration might better be thought of as the claim that that
representation serves to support an alternative agenda. It works against
rather than with the politician making the claim. That is, fake news
points in the direction of the enemy; it falsely imagines a world in which
that rather than this is true. And if, to return to the early modern world,
Protestant polemicists were sure about any one thing in particular, it is
that their this was the only right and true representation of the world.
Anything else is naught but a ‘fiction of the mind’.104
St Edmund’s College, Cambridge, UK Barret Reiter
104
I borrow this expression from Edward Stillingfleet, Several Conferences between
a Romish Priest, a Fanatick Chaplain, and a Divine of the Church of England concerning
the Idolatry of the Church of Rome (London, 1679), 337, itself a testament to the
longevity of this mode of speaking among English Protestants.

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A ‘FICTION OF THE MIND’: IMAGINATION

AND IDOLATRY IN EARLY MODERN

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a further commonplace has it that all our actions ought to be aimed at

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accusations of idolatry had motivated two waves of iconoclasm.10

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decking of Churches’ printed in the second volume (1563) of the offi-

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hand bringeth it foorth’.22 Although Calvin’s own quotations of the

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the imagination were embraced by both Catholics and Protestants.30

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In the Protestant philosophical tradition, too, there were discussions

treatment, Keckermann uses the concept to group together such dis-

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beings of reason.43 But this was unusual; most scholastics claimed, as

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Such entia rationis, Mosley writes, include ‘the representation of

the formation of beings of reason to animal imagination, attributing

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Unlike earlier presbyterians, moderate puritans such as Perkins typi-

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Imagination (1607). In this work, Perkins considers almost the entire

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to be esteemed... to the great scandall and detriment of Religion’.97 I

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In all these cases, the philosophical as much as the theological, human-

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explicit instruction to that end. Rather, a false conception of God, such

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St Edmund’s College, Cambridge, UK Barret Reiter

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