The Reformation of the Image by Joseph Leo Koerner

Author:Joseph Leo Koerner [Koerner, Joseph Leo]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 978-1-86189-832-6
Publisher: Reaktion Books
Published: 2004-03-25T16:00:00+00:00

16 Teaching

In Protestant culture words acquired the status of things by their aggressive material inscription. Text kernels were everywhere to be seen, and they served as much a decorative as a communicative function. Luther compiled long lists of them, wrote them on books, walls and doors, and had them etched in stone, iron and glass, where they could function as enduring emblems – he termed them ‘symbola’ – of his faith.1 In his preface to the Wittenberg Church Ordinance of 1526, he instructed parents to do the same, to write Bible quotations all over their houses and even to sneak them into their children’s ‘little sacks and bags’ as one would a coin, for they were worth more than Rhenish gold.2 And indeed in many Protestant homes, hostels and inns, pious sayings covered every available support: walls, ceilings, furniture, pillows, towels, curtains and tapestries; New Year’s greetings, postcards and Christmas-tree decorations; the blank spots on books, on picture frames and on pictures themselves. Pastors displayed their learning and piety by filling their churches with writing. In their house of worship, or ‘temple’, at Charenton, Huguenots covered the walls with Bible verses, the ceiling with a biblical table of contents, and the vaulting with the Ten Commandments, the Twelve Articles of Faith and the Lord’s Prayer (illus. 142).3

It is hard to judge whether such spectacles were meant primarily for reading. Occasionally an individual will report having been moved by an inscription, as when Johann Albrecht Bengel, writing in the early eighteenth century, recalls his ‘great joy’ as a six-year-old reading ‘sayings from the Letter to the Romans written in the church’ in Winnenden near Stuttgart.4 But if such a reading occurred, I suspect it did so accidentally, in the down time of church service, or when the mind wandered from the words intoned in preaching and sacrament. In Pfaffenhofen at 1617, a wall of the parish church was covered with Bible sayings warning readers not to fall asleep in church.5

Unread inscriptions still feature in the spaces of pedagogy, where they police an audience that should be facing elsewhere. In my high school’s auditorium, a motto was written in grey on grey: ‘KNOW SOMETHING DO SOMETHING BE SOMETHING.’ Boredom’s last resort, these words focused a regard neither of reading nor of beholding. This was partly because of placement and scale. The letters wrapped around the hall’s upper mouldings so that putative readers had to twist in their chairs to get the sentence, displaying their distraction. Generally the eye rested on a random group of letters which it endlessly pondered: ‘OWSOMETHI’. Meanwhile, the motto denounced these lazy games.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.