Iconoclasm as Child's Play

In his talk Joe Moshenska investigates the use of holy objects as children's playthings both as a material practice, and a philosophical and poetic concern.

Joe is one of the Directors of Studies in English at Trinity, where he mostly teaches Renaissance literature with some forays into earlier and later periods.  His first book, Feeling Pleasures: The Sense of Touch in Renaissance England, explores the varied and contested importance of touch in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.  His current research has two strands.  The first of these concerns the seventeenth century polymath Kenelm Digby (1603-65), whose correspondence he is editing (under contract with Oxford University Press, projected publication 2018).  He is also writing a book about Digby’s voyage around the Mediterranean in 1628 (under contract with William Heinemann, projected publication 2016) during which he fought a sea-battle, freed slaves, collected Arabic manuscripts, and wrote criticism on Spenser’s poetry and a romance autobiography on a Greek island. The second strand is a book provisionally titled Iconoclasm as Child’s Play, which begins with the fact that, during the Reformation, holy things were sometimes given to children as toys rather than being broken or burned.  In it Joe considers the conceptual intersections between iconoclasm and play in the sixteenth century, in later philosophical writing, and in the poetry of Spenser.