The Whole Workes of W. Tyndall, Iohn Frith, and Doct. Barnes...

This book was compiled by the prolific Protestant printer John Day. From the outset of his career, Day used visual propaganda to advance a Protestant message. The woodcut of William Tyndale’s death shown is a clear example of illustration supporting text. Clad only in a loincloth, Tyndale’s nakedness recalls that of Christ on the Cross. His spiky hair may be redolent of the Crown of Thorns. The malignant or jeering expressions and gestures of the friars and monks who jostle with soldiers and townspeople around the scaffold is a convention. So, too, is the cartoon-like appearance of words in a scroll. Such words are usually, as here, a martyr’s dying utterance. The picture is explained verbally five pages later: ‘Devines from Louvain … tyed him to a stake, where with a fervent zeale, and a loud voice hee cried, Lord open the eyes of the King of Englande, and then first he was with a halter strangled by the hangman, and afterward consumed with fier’. Pictorial access reinforced the textual message for readers and increased access to books for illiterate auditors.