Word vs. Image

This cognitive study of the Reformationist struggle between word and image argues that Shakespeare contributed to the restoration of cultural sanity by adapting the Italian grotesque style to English needs.

Arguing on recent cognitive evidence that reading a Bible is much more difficult for human brains than seeing images, this book exposes the depth and breadth of Protestant theologians’ misunderstandings about how people could reform their spiritual lives – how they could literally change their minds. Shakespeare’s achievement, accomplished for the English stage by a translation of the Italian grotesque, was to display for audiences battered by years of religious chaos and dread that a loving God was not only in heaven but in full control on earth: His providence was embodied and visible: you didn’t have to read it.

ELLEN SPOLSKY is a Professor of English at Bar-Ilan University, Israel. She is a literary theorist with an appetite for biological theories such as cognitive cultural theory, iconotropism, performance theory, and even some aspects of evolutionary literary theory. Her books and essays have worked toward a sophisticated understanding of both the universal and historically local aspects of Renaissance art, poetry and drama.

Preface: Images, Words and Grotesques in Shakespeare’s England * Word vs. Image * Building Categories of Material Representation before the Reformation * Forbidding Images: With Good Reason * Building a Literate Mind * Category Mismatches and Grotesque * Genre: Shakespeare’s Lucrece and Trying Again * Managing Cognitive Hunger