A brief history of Iconoclasm

A brief history of Iconoclasm

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.
I'm a professor of English Literature at the University of Oxford. I work principally on the literature and culture of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, with frequent forays into later periods. My thinking about this period usually gets drawn back, in one way or another, to close and sustained encounters with Spenser’s Faerie Queene and Milton’s Paradise Lost. I’ve tended to work at the intersection between literature and contiguous fields – philosophy, theology, science, visual arts – and have longstanding interests in critical theory. I am a 2019 Philip Leverhulme Prize winner.
About Joe Moshenska