Affronts to the sacred and their undoing: words, images, and rituals in the Anglo-Spanish War

This article explores the interaction of images, words, and rituals in the Anglo-Spanish War (1585–1604) by focusing on the history of the Marian image known as Our Lady the Vulnerata. Defaced during the Sack of Cádiz in 1596, it became an object of veneration in the Royal English College of St Alban in Valladolid. Moving away from existing accounts of the Vulnerata, which locate the image’s meaning exclusively in the context of English Recusant history, this article interprets it against the backdrop of the symbolic exchanges between Catholic Spain and Elizabethan England. It shows how iconoclasm was understood by Catholics as an act of dissent against sacred order and how it prompted a variety of gestures of atonement to undo the affront. Drawing connections between the representation of the violent events in Cádiz and the wider European visual culture of iconoclasm and martyrdom, the article situates Catholic Spain as integrated in the broader early modern confessional conflict. Finally, through an analysis of printed textual accounts, the evidence of the defaced effigy, and a little studied large-scale pictorial cycle narrating the journey of the image from mutilation to veneration, this article argues that the iconoclastic act cannot be fully separated from the ways in which it was verbally and visually reported, remembered, and invested with a new significance. It thus makes a case for understanding iconoclasm as a central force in granting images power.