C HAPTER 2 Destruction: Iconoclasm and the Reformation in Northern Europe May God will that our lords be like the pious secular kings and lords of the Jews whom the Holy Spirit praises. In sacred Scripture they have always had the power to take action in churches and abolish what offends and hinders the faithful. —Andreas Karlstadt, “On the Removal of Images” 1 Unfortunately such examples of iconoclastic mayhem, Byzantine- style, did not quietly disappear into history. Europe experienced another outbreak of destructive religious zeal during the late medieval and early modern period. As Reformation ideas spread across Europe, one of the first outbreaks occurred in Basel in 1529 when angry mobs took over the town. The day after the destruction, the scene was like a battlefield after war: “The images lay everywhere in and about the churches, some with heads missing, others with hands, arms, or legs lopped off. There remained little that the authorities could do beyond attempting to legitimize and regularize what had already transpired. City workmen were dispatched to the cathedral and other churches, where they systematically removed and demolished all the remaining cult objects overlooked by the iconoclastic mob, and whitewashed the walls.” 2 Similar scenes were repeated in France, Switzerland, the Netherlands, and England before Reformation frenzy came to an end. In England, after Henry VIII ordered the dissolution of the monasteries in 1536–39, eight hundred abbeys were destroyed, literally overnight. Among the oldest buildings in England, the eight hundred included Saint Augustine’s Abbey in Canterbury, dating to the conversion of England in 597; Lindisfarne Priory, founded on Holy Island by Saint Aiden in 635 as a center of early Anglo-Saxon Christi- anity and where Saint Cuthbert was prior; Pershore, dating to 681–89; and