In this chapter, an overview of the various genres of hagiographic literature is given: The focus gradually shifts from the martyrs in the age of persecution to holy bishops, monks and monastery founders. Collections of edifying stories and miracles become popular, holy fools and fictional saints appear on the scene as the heroes of novel-like texts. Hagiographic literature reflects the ecclesiastical and social developments in the lives of real and imaginary martyrs of Iconoclasm, of saints who resisted the unpopular church union in the late 13th century or who supported the Hesychast movement in the 14th century. Hagiographic literature was written at both a simple and a sophisticated stylistic and linguistic level, and many lives of saints were rewritten in later times in a more refined language. For liturgical purposes, lives of saints were also brought together in collections, reduced to short entries and used as the base of hymns.

For the Byzantine emperor orthodoxy was a strategic imperative. From the perspective of Constantinople, to practise wrong belief, whether as a Jew or a Christian not adhering to imperially defined orthodoxy, was a dissident act which risked angering God and could put the empire in peril. For the dissidents themselves, to obey imperial religious policy was to betray God, and therefore not an option.

This chapter considers dissident practices and their persecution by emperors through a series of case studies from roughly the sixth through twelfth centuries. The chapter begins with a study of the persecution of those who opposed the Council of Chalcedon, particularly under the reign of the emperor Justinian. This is followed by the persecution of the Jews, with a focus on the period beginning in the seventh century. We then address the opponents of imperial religious policy, namely the Christological policies of the Heraclian dynasty, and resistance during the iconoclast controversy. Finally, we conclude with two semi-dualistic movements, the Paulicians and Bogomils.

Violence against religious objects is the chief subject of this chapter. It considers Irish Catholic violence against the Protestant Bible, arguing that its status as a heretical object was central in explaining hostility and destruction; however, its anglicising power was also targeted, with implications touching language, the law, imperialism and more. Protestant iconoclasm also receives some attention, though the chapter notes its relative paucity in the sources; when it occurred however, it was a powerful statement against perceived idolatry, superstition and the believed inherent violence of Catholicism, especially the clergy. The chapter concludes with a reconsideration of massacre in light of iconoclasm and material violence, arguing that the body could be understood as a form of ‘sacred image’, and thus, interpersonal attacks must be viewed and understood as part of a continuum of violence against symbols of faith, giving a new perspective to long-running debates concerning massacre in the rebellion.

From the Socialist Education Movement onwards, folk religion specialists – now classed as ‘superstition professionals’ (akin to ‘religious professionals’) -- were targeted for re-education. Spirit mediums were singled out because of their number and their central role in healing. This was the prelude to the Four Olds Campaign inaugurated by the Cultural Revolution in 1966, when religious sites were destroyed and religious specialists came under attack from Red Guards, despite the fact that ‘religion’ was never named as one of the ‘four olds’. Two features of Cultural Revolution politics are explored: the use of iconoclasm – especially in relation to the Confucius Temple in Qufu; and the attempt to ‘revolutionize the environment’, which entailed renaming streets, shops, and consumer items, and painting buildings red. It ends with the fitful Campaign to Criticize Confucius and Lin Biao (1973–6), which engaged the rural and urban populace in a polemical critique of some simple Confucian texts.

Emerson’s thought, from his early essay Nature to his late lectures on atomic physics, reveals the contradictory complexities of the Western concept of “nature,” which indexes both the outer world external to the human self, or “soul,” and the essence of our own human “nature.” Emerson’s thought thus reveals the deeper drama of American modernity, which refuses continuities between human and natural history to protect the divinity of the all-empowering human mind from its embedding in social and ecological relations. Emerson’s salvation lies in the realm of aesthetics, which responded to modernity’s iconoclastic destruction of nature by resurrecting the beauty of nature in art, reanimating in a quarantined zone all that modernity destroys. Today, when “nature” – now including anthropogenic climate change – no longer reassures us of our divinity but precipitates an existential crisis, it becomes increasingly difficult to read Emerson as our contemporary, even as his work discloses the sources of our predicament.

This chapter introduces violence as a tension in education studies with iconoclasm and religious persecution as a guiding force in educational conformity. Moments of invasion, religious destruction, and dogmatic imposition, and foreign attacks on Mesoamerica’s multidimensional archives set a darker tone for the book. Weighty theories highlight violence and sudden change as hindering coherent local learning modalities. This is especially shown in discussions on place as a factor in power-knowledge construction and destruction, highlighting moments of ‘placebreaking’, or the direct assault on historic sites to remove community attachments, that Nahuas faced in military campaigns. Flexible, adaptive placemaking and ethnogenesis after a moment of placebreaking are offered as ways that newly Christian communities reconciled a history of violence. Regionally, it focuses on the religious and educational capital of the Puebla-Tlaxcala valley and the Temple of Quetzalcoatl. This was the earliest assault upon an example of a Mesoamerican learningscape, and this event is reframed to include differing Indigenous visions of destroying a place of learning. The thought is carried forward into the period of early Christianization, during which Motolinía is identified as an agent of compelled placebreaking but also a documentarian of the inability to complete the spiritual conquest.

This chapter reveals how Laskarid rulers created and communicated their imperial image on bronze, silver, and gold coinage, and in lead and gold signature seals. Much of their imagery was retrospective, drawing on well-known icons once displayed in public areas of the lost capital. One icon in particular, depicting Christ Chalkites, appeared widely on Laskarid coins and seals between 1204 and 1261, not appearing again until 1315 in the narthex of the famed Church of Christ in the Chora in Constantinople, a church considered to be the epitome of the artistic and architectural innovations of the Palaiologan Renaissance. It was renovated by one of Andronikos II’s most important court officials, Theodore Metochites, originally from Nicaea and whom Andronikos II met during his 1290−1293 sojourn and subsequently elevated to the high court office of Grand Logothete. The importance of this icon in the history of Iconoclasm is resurrected with Andronikos II’s work to heal factions resulting from the Arsenite Schism.

The image in Plate 13 is now housed in the City Museum of Münster. The museum dates it to 1491. On the back, their website informs us, is the name of an otherwise unknown painter, Seewald. The museum lists it as “Faces without Eyes,” in which the eyes of all but Christ and two others have been “carefully removed such that one can often see the wood beneath.” The online description glosses the removal of the paint designating eyes as “destructions,” evoking “the immediate association” of “iconoclasts of the Reformation period.” As the Museum’s website suggests, there is a long tradition of using the word “iconoclasm” to name a part of what happened in the sixteenth century and a rich and dense body of scholarship on “the destruction of art.” But, as the painting materializes, the word has never fit as a name for what Evangelicals did.

It is impossible to understand how American Patriots first mobilized men, women, and children in support of their Revolution and then created a new political culture for their new republic without studying Revolutionary-era material culture. American Patriots made their Revolution through creating and destroying things. As they toppled statues, dumped tea, raised liberty poles, and made homespun clothes and uniforms, Americans also crafted Revolutionary politics and societies. From acts of iconoclasm to the origins of “made in America,” the material culture of the American Revolution allows us to consider how civilians at home, as well as the military, protested imperial politics, fought a civil war, and fashioned new political identities, building a common cause as they created and destroyed material culture.

Chapter 12 tackles the first of several myths regarding tenure’s effects on individual faculty incentives, namely, that tenure promotes undesirable iconoclasm. The chapter uses available research linking tenure with intellectual and pedagogical risk-taking as well as industry knowledge regarding how newly tenured professors actually behave to show that the “post-tenure renegade” is more assumption than fact.

During the eighth and ninth centuries the papacy extricated itself from the Byzantine world and allied with the Franks. The alliance secured protection from the Lombards and aided the formation of the first independent Papal State in Italy. Secular and ecclesiastical institutional structures inherited from late antiquity matured and created a recognizable medieval papacy. The popes supported the expansion of Latin Christianity in Scandinavia and eastern Europe. Peace brought prosperity to Italy and the popes both built and restored numerous churches and installed frescoes, mosaics, and liturgical fixtures all over Rome. Nicholas I, Adrian II, and John VIII made powerful ecclesiological statements that hinted at future claims. Toward the end of the period aristocratic strife in Rome foreshadowed the tumultuous tenth century.

Samuel Butler sharply divides critics, some seeing him as a relativist and thus a precursor of modernism, others as a purveyor of outdated scientific and philosophical dogma. This essay situates him as a transitional figure, straddling modern and Victorian paradigms in the tradition of the novel of ideas. Butler’s relativistic tendencies emerge through distinctive formal techniques, his chief influence on the modern novel: enigmatic use of satire; rapid, dissonant tonal shifts; defamiliarization of commonplace ideas; and fierce iconoclasm – techniques that fuel his radical questioning both of rationality and of ideas themselves. But Butler also affirmed common sense, instinct, and faith – in opposition to rationality – by conceiving them in Lamarckian evolutionary terms: that is, as repositories of intellectual choices made over the course of millennia and preserved in collective unconscious memory. Butler thus believed that ideas always fall short of truth, even as they facilitate an open-ended, interminable progress toward it.

Chapter 8 explains why the most powerful chiefs in Hawaii decided to be baptised a few years after dispensing with their old cult. The most important of these factors revolved around immanent power: The ability of the new god to deliver victory in battle in the immediate aftermath of the abolition, and to Christian forces at the battle of Waimea in 1824, made a great impression, while healing was, as always, also a matter of concern. The impotence of the old gods was confirmed by deliberate challenges to the volcano goddess Pele and the female prophets who spoke for her and by the iconoclastic tours of Ka‘ahumanu, who was now taking centre stage. Meanwhile, the high chiefs also felt the need to repair the sacral basis to their authority, if now in a more righteous mode, while the strict form of Protestantism provided a way of ‘restoring the tabus’, disciplining both their subjects and the Euro-American inhabitants of Honolulu.

Chapter 2 tells the story of the conversion of the kings of Kongo. Nzinka a Nkuwu (King João) was baptised in 1491 but later apostatised and was succeeded by his son, King Afonso, who established an enduring Catholic dynasty in west central Africa. After acknowledging the significance of religious diplomacy, the chapter shows how the realm of immanent power was the most critical factor in the Kongo case. A close reading of the evidence indicates that the Portuguese or their ruler may have been considered to have a special association with the realm of the ancestors, while baptism was received as an initiation granting unusual powers, particularly in battle. This helps explain King João’s apostasy and is most apparent in the miraculous interpretation of the military victory that brought Afonso to the throne in 1506. However, it is also argued that conversion may have helped Afonso solidify his control of the religious field, as expressed in the iconoclastic sweeps that happened at several points in 1480–1530. The theme of cultural appeal is illustrated by a more general importation of the Portuguese culture by elites. Afonso is presented as a visionary with ambitions for societal recreation.

Chapter 4 explains why Christianity did not become the faith of more than a small minority of warlords and why it was rejected and ultimately persecuted by the rulers who unified Japan in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. The plural religious scene – including competing sects of Buddhism, alongside Confucianism and Shinto – afforded an intellectual opening for Christianity. This mattered in particular to the conversion of certain elites in the Gokinai of the 1560s. However, the most emotional debates centred on the dynamics of immanent power noted in the last chapter, and here Buddhism, as a transcendentalist system, found ways of countering the force of Christian arguments. Indeed, on an institutional level, too, the sangha represented a formidable enemy for daimyo contemplating conversion. This chapter then proceeds to analyse the actions, diplomatic letters and anti-Christian edicts of Hideyoshi and Tokugawa Ieyasu in order to identify the terms by which Christianity was identified as a subversive and unnecessary force. The transcendental elements of Japanese religion therefore played a decisive role in constraining the reach of the Japanese Christian movement. Lastly, the unifiers were intent on sacralising their authority, particularly post-mortem, and Christianity had little to offer in this regard.

Erasmian humanism paved the way for the spread of the Protestant Reformation in the Swiss Confederation. Basel’s printing houses played a major role in the diffusion of Luther’s ideas, which were then further disseminated by preachers in other cities. Supported by Zurich’s ruling council, Huldrych Zwingli played a key role in spreading the Evangelical movement in Switzerland. Anabaptism also attracted many adherents, but persecution effectively marginalised the movement and limited it to rural areas. Central Switzerland remained staunchly Catholic, and a brief war broke out between Catholic and Protestant Confederates in 1531. The resulting Peace of Kappel rolled back the progress of reform and created a bi-confessional structure within the Confederation. The Catholic cantons formed a majority but they were countered by the powerful Reformed cities of Zurich, Basel, Bern and Schaffhausen. Through the second half of the century these cities allied with Geneva and developed a strong Swiss Reformed identity in response to both German Lutherans and the Tridentine Catholicism that spread from Italy. Confessional tensions were particularly marked in areas jointly governed by Protestant and Catholic members of the Confederation, but competing religious loyalties were never strong enough to overcome their shared political identity as Swiss.

This chapter offers a comparative analysis of the territories along the southern Baltic littoral, namely Poland, Pomerania and Mecklenburg, with a primary focus on identifying the overarching patterns in the development of the Reformation in the region. The emergence and dissemination of the Reformation in the Baltic region can be traced back to Martin Luther’s prominent public appearance in Worms in 1521. Subsequently, the reform movement rapidly transcended the political and ecclesiastical boundaries in this area. Drawing upon pre-existing institutional frameworks, this article delves into the mechanisms behind the propagation of the new religious message, the establishment of reform networks and the responses of secular authorities. By shedding light on the content of Evangelical preaching and the phenomenon of Baltic iconoclasm, this study aims to discern the identity of the earliest proponents of the burgeoning reform movement. The chapter argues, however, that the subsequent monolithic Lutheran character of the region was a result of the collective decision of princes and secular authorities to adopt the Reformation according to the Wittenberg model.