Seventeenth-century puritans had the habit of speaking visually, talking pictures. Sermons and tracts from the English-speaking Reformed tradition made lavish use of vivid verbal images drawn from the Bible. Yet zealous Protestants wanted to strip images out of churches and books – and, some would say, even from the mind – in an ‘inner iconoclasm’ to match the outer. So why fill the mind's eye with pictures?

It is often thought that Protestantism, particularly of the Reformed variety, saw a decisive shift from the visual to the verbal. However, the move was by no means a clean break. Visual elements survived aplenty, though often transposed into new forms. The complexity of these changes has been well recognised by recent scholars, but the focus has been more on outward and material aspects of Protestant culture than on words (or, more accurately, the Word) as image-makers for the mind.

To understand the drive for verbal imaging in puritanism with more precision, this paper considers the experience of readers in a culture where print was new; aspects of Reformed theology that paved the way, in particular the stress on the unity of scripture that promoted interest in typology; the boost that new printed aids to Bible study – specifically, concordances – gave to drawing ‘mental pictures’ from scripture; and the relation of all this to making the Bible both easy to handle and memorable, which was a key element in the strategy to drive the Protestant message into the hearts and minds of the people.