LAUSR

was only completed in the eighteenth century when science and reason finally displaced the central role of religion and magic in the lives of English men and women. Crucially, Thomas’s thesis applies not to central Europe but to England, which witnessed the destruction of medieval Catholicism during the Reformation and the gradual emergence of a Calvinist ideology by the end of the seventeenth century. As Ivanič herself points out, the arrival of the Calvinist Frederick V of the Palatinate as elected King of Bohemia in Prague in 1619 coincided with the attempt of his court preacher Abraham Scultetus to destroy the modus vivendi established by the Utraquists through the destruction of religious objects, starting with those in the St. Vitus Cathedral. Such iconoclasm, typical of Edwardian and Elizabethan England, was roundly condemned and rejected by the burghers of Prague. In other words, confessional politics played a more significant role than Ivanič is prepared to acknowledge in her insistence on a holistic and harmonious “cosmic” link between the material and sacred spheres. Religious politics played a crucial role in the very survival of the objects that she analyzes so carefully. The fact that so few religious artefacts have survived from medieval England confirms that history consists not only in what has survived but also in what has been obliterated by the forces of iconoclasm.