9 - Memorable Motifs

Summary

This chapter focuses attention on a visual motif that became synonymous with the Reformation; the scales of justice weighing the Bible against the vanities of the Roman Catholic Church. It traces the migrations and mutations of this iconography in English visual culture from the 1570s to the 1670s, examining the contexts in which it appeared and was viewed, including canonical Protestant texts, popular print, domestic decoration and the battlefields of the civil war. It is argued that, in contrast to the pictorial elaboration of similar iconography in reformed continental art, an ‘insular’ process of visual compression enhanced the efficiency and immediacy of this motif’s message of Protestant righteousness. In this synoptic form the imagery served practices of ideological and social cohesion as well as fuelling conflict and division. Like memory itself, the ‘weighing motif’ was repeatedly remade; it was reiterated but modified as it transferred between and across objects, places and spaces. Its success as a particularly memorable motif encapsulates an understanding of the Reformation as both defining historical event and incremental process; while its imagery commemorated a single moment of judgement effecting schism, its persistence and longevity emphasised and facilitated the ongoing struggle for reform.