Joe Moshenska’s extraordinary monograph begins with an equally extraordinary moment in the history of Reformation England. In a sermon delivered in Bristol, England in the 1530s, the Roman Catholic preacher Roger Edgeworth speaks of a phenomenon whereby sacred objects were taken from churches by Protestant reformers and given to children to be used as toys. Although plenty of historians have discussed Edgeworth’s reference to this curious practice, Moshenska is the first to contend that this instance of iconoclasm is different in quality to iconoclastic acts of wholesale destruction or adaptation for quotidian, mundane use. Here, iconoclasm is certainly clad in unfamiliar clothing: typically envisioned as austere, bleak, and uncompromising, here it is got up in the free, imaginative, and labile garb of child’s play. But then again, perhaps not so unfamiliar after all: influential work by David Freedberg and Ann Kibbey has shown that iconoclasts invest as much imaginative value in the offending objects of idolatry as do the iconophiles themselves.1 In the words of James J. Kearney, “…a vehement iconoclasm is always a kind of idolatry insofar as it grants the offending object immense power”.2 Challenging the Weberian narrative of modernity’s disenchantment, in which iconoclasm has traditionally played so large a part, Iconoclasm as Child’s Play asks if an item is necessarily desacralised by being made into a toy, or whether play is, in fact, a sacred mode of engagement with objects and the world.

Each chapter is named for a single word, designating a particular object or object-relation, but their content is dazzlingly plural. Chapter 3, “Puppet”, for example, focuses on the liturgical puppet as the “articulated” object of iconoclastic child’s play, in the sense of being an object “visibly and ostentatiously composed of parts that move and function in relation to one another” (p. 71). Here, the sacred and the toy are linked by their abjectivity: both puppet and the body of Christ are ready to be broken, indeed already broken, and always ready to be broken again. Thus the act of iconoclastic child’s play that opens the previous chapter, “Doll” – a man in Cologne in 1536 snapping the arms from a crucifix before bestowing it on his children as a toy – both disturbs and affirms the sacrality of the object. Meanwhile “Play”, the fifth chapter, invokes the curious history of a series of blank-faced wooden figures displayed on the wall of a staircase at Audley End House, in Essex, to explore the temporalities and affective charges of play. Perhaps most successful is the conclusion, “Toy”, a version of which was published as “Spenser at Play” in PMLA in 2018, which offers a compelling reading of the slain dragon of Book 1 of The Faerie Queene, whose continued material presence in the poem after its allegorical function has been spent lends itself to another kind of iconoclastic repurposing.

For a long time in Anglo-American literary studies, “nothing” – in the words of Margreta de Grazia – “could be worse than to be accused of anachronism”.3Iconoclasm as Child’s Play reflects a turning of that tide, and makes a refreshing addition to a vanguard of works subverting the rigorous historicist approaches their material might have seemed to demand a decade or so ago. Part of the charm of Moshenska’s monograph is its unabashed embrace of affect. He confesses to having been “seduced” (p. x) by the passage from Edgeworth’s sermon; the subject of another chapter is “[the] one that intrigues me the most”, and the lack of information about it is not the source of scholarly chagrin but, for Moshenska, a “stimulus to imagination” (p. 41). The undisguised fascination exerted on the author by these (often sparsely-detailed) historical scenes generates questions about our own practice as scholars; indeed, Moshenska’s narrative asks us to consider the isomorphism between iconoclasm and critique (drawing on Rita Felski’s work on the limits of the latter as an interpretive mode4), and what insights might emerge from adopting a sportive rather than adversarial attitude to one’s subject matter. In this sense, the affect-driven approach of Iconoclasm as Child’s Play chimes with Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s “reparative reading”, Sharon Marcus’s “just reading”, and Timothy Bewes’ “generous reading”, all of which seek to demonstrate that just as much scholarly mileage can be gained from a good-faith approach to literary-historical documents as can be gained from a hermeneutics of suspicion.5

At times, however, the eclecticism of Moshenska’s theoretical toolkit – Marxism, psychoanalytic approaches to object relations, anthropological accounts of play – overwhelms the central question of the relationship between iconoclasm and the playing of children. Chapter 6, for example, caroms from ethnographic accounts of masked figures in rituals, to Adorno’s definition of late capitalism, to an extended reading of Bruegel’s painting Children’s Games. At their finest, these enthusiastic leaps from framework to framework are deft and virtuosic, but less successful instances felt haphazard. In the midst of some chapters I found myself unclear as to how the subject matter shed light on the central issue of iconoclasm as child’s play, and it was in such cases that I craved the terra firma of a more robust and circumscribed historical focus.

Indeed, one of the regrettable side-effects of the numerous methodologies Moshenska engages is that some compelling material, worthy of sustained analysis, appears only in aperçus. Though Moshenska is not wrong in his claim that Heinrich von Kleist’s Über das Marionettentheater (1810) has received the lion’s share of attention in modern analyses of puppetry, more might have been made of the essay’s engagement with movement and articulation, especially in relation to other interrogations of the spatial configuration of play: I am thinking here of the Gadamerian account of Spiel cited in Chapter 1, which “describe[s] a flowing and repetitive motion that seems most proper to the inanimate and the mechanical – but also, perhaps, to God” (p. 33) – in essence, the conclusion of Kleist’s essay, which Moshenska does cite later6 – or Louis Marin’s observation, speaking of More’s Utopia, that “we say ‘there is play’ when the pieces of a mechanism, the elements of a system, or the parts of a whole are not perfectly adjusted to one another” (p. 36). So, too, would it have been fascinating to read Moshenska expand further on the implications for his argument of the “frequent claim that the Reformation was principally a movement of the young” (pp. 71-72), or to draw out further parallels between iconoclastic child’s play and the practice of repurposing Catholic vestments as costumes for players (pp. 145-146) – what affinities might be shared between the playing of children and the playing of actors?

Still, no monograph can be that Borgesian map the size of the country it represents. Iconoclasm as Child’s Play is a scholarly generous and generative book, and with it Moshenska has crafted a rich and suggestive narrative that demands much more of its readers than the kind of scholarly “book-breaking” to which we have become habituated – and rewards that much more in turn.7

Notes:
1 See David Freedberg, The Power of Images. Studies in the History and Theory of Response, Chicago 1989 and Ann Kibbey, The Interpretation of Material Shapes in Puritanism. A Study of Rhetoric, Prejudice, and Violence, Cambridge 1986.
2 James J. Kearney, Trinket, Idol, Fetish, Shakespeare Studies 28 (2000), pp. 257–261, here p. 260.
3 Margreta de Grazia, Anachronism, in: James Simpson / Brian Cummings (eds.), Cultural Reformations: Medieval and Renaissance in Literary History, Oxford 2010, pp. 13–32.
4 See Rita Felski, The Limits of Critique, Chicago 2015.
5 See Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading, or, You’re So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Essay Is About You, in: id., Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity, Durham 2003, pp. 123–151; Sharon Marcus, Just Reading: Female Friendship and the Marriage Plot, in: id., Between Women: Friendship, Desire, and Marriage in Victorian England, Princeton 2007, pp. 73–108; Timothy Bewes, Reading with the Grain: A New World in Literary Criticism, in: Differences 21 (2010), p. 1–33.
6 “Grace appears most purely in that human form which either has no consciousness or an infinite consciousness. That is, in the puppet or in the god”; cited in Moshenska, p. 90.
7 Douglas Hunter, Book Breaking and Book Mending, in: Slate (05.10.2020).