The word iconoclasm refers most literally to the breaking of icons, which is to say, the breaking of images of God that are believed to have God or some sense of divine force residing in them. It first came to prominence as a question for the history of Christianity in Byzantium in the 3rd and 4th centuries, where there was a huge controversy about whether icons should be allowed and, if not, whether and how they should be broken. Now it tends to have a much broader sense, which is the breaking of any image or object to which someone takes a particularly powerful form of exception.

The starting point for my interest in iconoclasm is the forms that it took on in the 16th century in Europe, and especially in England, where, as part of the Reformation, the establishment of the Protestant church and the separation of the Church of England from the Roman Catholic Church, there were a series of iconoclastic acts. Some of these acts were actively encouraged by the church and the crown; others were more spontaneous outpourings of public violence. These were aimed at churches, at the objects that they contained, at monasteries; things were smashed, burned, broken, stolen, reshaped or refashioned.

One of the dilemmas for iconoclasts is what to do with the stuff that they destroy. It’s very hard, on a practical level, to destroy something completely. This comes through most obviously in the image of whitewashed walls in reformed churches, the blank surface on which there is nothing to be seen over the centuries. In fact, even at the time this was happening, it turned out that whitewash is not a great way of getting rid of things, because it fades and the words or images underneath begin to show through. That’s a metaphor for the way in which iconoclasm is always incomplete, imperfect and never tends to fully do its job.

So, on the one hand, you have this dilemma: what do we do with what remains that can be glimpsed, that can be held? On the other, there’s a problem – even if you are successful in getting rid of something completely, it soon becomes clear that you’re not sure that’s really what you wanted, in any case – because if you’re really good at destroying something and making other people forget it, the risk is that they’ll forget having forgotten it. You create a kind of void into which error can rush. It’s very easy to relapse or to fall back into old ways. So, iconoclasts are torn: on the one hand, they might keep bits and pieces around as a reminder, but they might end up meaning new and unexpected things. On the other hand, get rid of them altogether, but people might start relapsing in other ways. So, it’s an impossible practice that has to be repeated and repeated and repeated.

My particular interest in iconoclasm is the surprising fate that befell some of these objects that were broken or partially destroyed, which is that they were placed in the hands of children, given to children as toys. The evidence suggests that these children were actively encouraged to play with them. Clearly, the intention behind this decision was that by playing with the objects, these children would confirm that what had once been held up as holy and sacred and great – things like reliquaries or pyxes, which were containers for the consecrated host – were instead trivial and meaningless, and that, by playing with them, our children reveal the inanity, the worthlessness that these things always possessed.

However, the thing that struck me when I first came across this evidence is that, if you want to really destroy something, or if you want to make it meaningless or worthless, the last place that you would put that object is actually in the hands of a playing child – because what children do, as anyone who’s ever been a child or watched a child at play knows, is generate meanings. They generate stories. They don’t ruin things once and for all but incorporate them into new kinds of narrative. When a child plays with an object, it can be one thing at one second, and then a moment later it’s something else. So, the story of child’s play is a very discontinuous, changing, metamorphosing one, whereas what these iconoclasts wanted was for play to mean ruined, senseless, worthless once and for all.

The richest piece of evidence that iconoclasm sometimes took the form of child’s play comes from a single sermon that was given in the 1530s near Bristol by a man called Roger Edgeworth, where he describes this process in action. He was a religious traditionalist; he was lamenting the fact that iconoclasm was happening and that the church was changing. In the course of this sermon, he says that people have been taking these idols from monasteries and giving them to their children.

He presents an extraordinary little domestic scene of what iconoclasm might actually have been like in practice. He says the children are there dancing with the objects by themselves, and then one of the child’s parents says to the child, ‘What hast thou there?’ The child responds as it’s been prepped to respond, saying to the parent, ‘I have here mine idol’, and if this right answer is given, the parent laughs, joins the game and the play continues.

It’s an extraordinary scene that combines child’s play as we might recognise it, but then there are moments of adult interrogation. It’s almost like a catechism, this idea that a lot of children’s religious education took the form of: being asked questions and knowing the prepared answer to give. Of course, in this instance, the children are not showing that they’re pious or that they’re learning the ways of the church. They’re saying, ‘I am ruining this object in just the right way, just the way you told me to’. So it’s play, but it’s also a curious kind of performance.

One of the reasons why it’s worth exploring the history of iconoclasm is that it’s a way of thinking more broadly about the attitudes and experiences that we have of the material world that we occupy today. We’re now living through a moment where there is a huge amount of public debate about the status of monuments and statues, which ones should stand, whether some should be torn down and broken into pieces.

One of the things that really interested me in these debates is the claim that those who have problems with particular monuments are in some ways opposed to history or trying to erase history. It’s often forgotten that the history of England, and of much of the rest of the world, is also a history of iconoclasm. It’s a history of breaking, remaking, transforming and changing.

Iconoclasm takes us into this middle ground, where we are dealing constantly with a world made up of fragments, reconstructions and histories, layered on top of other histories. For me, a very positive outcome of these debates about public monuments would be to ask not just, ‘What do we think about these particular objects?’ but, ‘How does it fit into the ways in which we do and don’t experience history as part of our lives?’ Which histories do we experience, and which ones are erased because they’ve been built over, because they’ve been perfectly reconstructed?

The objects against which iconoclastic violence was typically practiced were those that offered some kind of connection between the human realm and that of the divine. When we think about what sacredness or holiness means, we tend to associate it with a separation. Holy and sacred things are things that have been, in some sense, removed from ordinary life. They’ve been charged with some kind of force, worth or significance, and they can’t be accessed routinely. They are not part of the humdrum, day-to-day set of interactions, but there are particular moments and ritualised forms in which people are permitted access to them: in a church service, where you are able to touch an object that has touched something holy, if not the holy thing itself. So, in reality, the holy and the sacred turn out never to be as fully separate from the mundane world as they’re supposed to be.

People would go on pilgrimages and they would touch their clothing to a sacred object that they had journeyed to see, or they would buy a little pilgrimage medal that would allow them to carry a fragment of that holiness with them. There are grimly funny accounts, for example, of relics of the true cross, where people had to guard them quite carefully: pilgrims would go in to take a kiss and actually try to bite a bit out of the relic, so they’d have a bit to take home with them. People wanted the holy to be portable, to be accessible; however, that also makes them tension points, because if the sacred and the profane are supposed to be opposed, then the point at which they join is always going to be the most fraught moment. It’s almost at that meeting point of the sacred and profane that iconoclastic acts tended to be aimed.