A Reformation Debate: Karlstadt, Emser, and Eck on Sacred Images: Three Treatises in Translation (Renaissance and Reformation Texts in Translation, 5)

From its earliest history the Church harboured a sometimes intense hostility to religious imagery. Controversy over images could erupt into violence as it did during the long period of iconoclasm in Byzantium. The issue again surfaced violently in the first half of the sixteenth century when several prominent Reformers – including Zwingli and Calvin – vigorously attacked the traditional use of images. The debate was launched by a short tract, On the Removal of Images, written in 1522 by Andreas Karlstadt. In strident tones, Karlstadt formulated the basic arguments against images which were to echo down through the century in many Protestant polemics: images were prohibited by Scripture, they fostered superstition, and they bound simple folk to a pointless faith in the mediatory powers of the saints and the Holy Virgin. In the same year, 1522, two of the most prominent Catholic theologians sprang to the defence of tradition. Hieronymus Emser, in a treatise entitled That One Should N