This thesis is about making in post-Reformation England. Roughly covering the period between 1550 and 1600, it explores the English cultural contexts of Protestant and Calvinist discourses in the sixteenth century. But equally, it is a thesis about the meaning of making. Scholarship abounds on the procedures and dynamics of “meaning-making” in a specific field, department, or discipline. Yet, there has been a consistent lack of attention paid to the reverse form of this designation; what does it mean to make? How does it produce meaning within social, cultural, and intellectual contexts? Making, this thesis argues, has too easily been taken for granted. Culturally and intellectually expansive, rich, and complex in implication, making, as action and phenomenon, permeates the lifeworld of historical experience. In so far as creative production, conceptual engineering, and material fashioning all remain a staple of multiple spheres of meaning, the focus and identity of this thesis resides at the tangencies between intellectual and cultural history, as well as the history of art.

In particular, these are fields of singular interdisciplinary relevance with regard to research into early modernity. Furthermore, they have all in different ways concerned themselves with visual and material culture, not least how problems of aesthetics, philosophy, literature, and religion are entrenched in and expressed in material contexts. Sixteenth-century Europe remain a nexus classicus of such intellectual and historical ambulation; it was arguably the setting for the most distressing social and religious ordeal on the continent since the Black Death. Reformation England was no exception, as our exploration of figures like William Tyndale, Thomas Cranmer, John Calvin, John Jewel and William Perkins will demonstrate.

By teasing out tensions in the post-Reformation debates surrounding the act of artistic making in a religious framework, the thesis provides a framework for how these play out in four different contexts: Chapter 1 addresses the influence and reception of Genesis and the Second Commandment on art-making in the Reformation and its surrounding discourse; the English Calvinists of the Elizabethan period, such as John Jewel and Gervase Babington are central here. Chapter 2 moves from a discussion of divine creativity to that of human imagination and cultural production. Comparing Protestant and Catholic-Humanist examples, the chapter goes into particular detail on William Perkins’ work on the imagination.

In the third chapter the thesis explores the Eucharist as a nucleus of creative tension and confessional conflict. A discussion of the writings of William Tyndale and Thomas Cranmer extends into a study of Calvin’s eucharistic thought. This is followed by a contextualization of the critical discourse of theatre and the Mass in Protestant polemics, and the chapter ends with an approach to Richard Hooker, placing his sacramental writing in an aesthetic reformist debate.

The fourth and final chapter engages with iconoclasm as part of a Protestant aesthetic – a complex and paradoxical phenomenon blending breaking and making. Here, I will attempt to unpack some of the creative implications inherent in the destruction of art. Namely, that the act of tearing things down somehow makes them new again; from the fires of demolition another form of object is forged, another kind of aesthetic. This negativity, this re-forming of the sign, of making, produces an “absent” art of its own. This thesis interrogates these intellectual inflections of making in post-Reformation England. Through close reading of theological texts as well as use of visual material, the thesis highlights and asserts how several of the contested themes and conflicts of reform are crystallised in the imagery of making.

By reasserting the critical role of “making” as constitutive to the image-question, as well as a precondition for the hostile narratives of iconoclasm and idolatry, the thesis provides additional understanding of the way making concentrated and drove key concerns of visual politics in the Reformation. In addition, it further illuminates how the history of the later sixteenth century represents a charged landscape of cultural cohesion – a landscape in which art, theology, and aesthetics come to define each other mutually. Such reciprocal dynamics demonstrate not just that the frameworks of art and intellectual history are useful as part of a shared structure for exploring making, but also why making deserves attention as a topic of far-reaching historical relevance.