Iconoclasm and the Capitalistic Spirit of "making things new": a New Print Culture from the English Civil Wars and its Modern Legacy

This paper focuses on historical instances of iconoclasm after the Reformation to reveal how iconoclasm had greatly contributed to the formation of the Protestant mindset in the early modern times. During the English civil war, when iconoclastic campaigns and movements were in full tide, the paper argues that the notions of novelty and progress were more positively accepted among radical religious groups. To put it in another way, the paper suggests a different way of looking the formation of Protestant habitus by giving accounts of how iconoclastic impulses spurred diverse religious groups during the civil war to break the mold of conservative thinking and to revolutionize the print culture hitherto based on patronage and served as a buttress for status-quo. From this analysis, then, we are ledto the different portrait of the protestant in the seventeenth century, whose mindset was not quite as solitary and guilt ridden as Max Weber would have us believe.