From an Archaeology of Iconoclasm to an Anthropology of the Body

The attack on images in England in the sixteenth and seventeenth century was not random destruction. Particular parts of the body, namely, the head and the hands, were the focus of attack. These were the same foci against which capital and the severest forms of corporal punishment were aimed. Distinct from the theological reasons for iconoclasm, these persistent foci and forms of attack reveal something about attitudes to the body in this period and the privileging of the head and hands in a number of social and cultural discourses. Iconoclasm both informs and was informed by an understanding of bodies as they were constructed in the later medieval and early modern periods.