RECENT NEWS: Matthew Fraser’s New Book
Monumental Fury: The History of Iconoclasm and the Future of Our Past
Matthew Fraser’s new book, Monumental Fury, offers a lively, rigorous, and insightful analysis of statue-smashing and violence against monuments and works of art. The book confronts long-neglected questions about our relationship with statues and monuments in public spaces, providing a rich historical perspective on iconoclastic violence against not only monuments, but also shrines, tombstones, sculptures, and paintings, as well as iconography from our modern celebrity and pop culture including street art, graffiti, internet memes, and holograms.
Using three broad themes—religion, revolution, revolt—Fraser explores the complex motivations that compel people to attack and destroy monuments. Statues are frequently erected as expressions of power, and the impulse to destroy them is often motivated by a desire to defy, contest, and eradicate their authority. However, the symbolic power of statues can stubbornly persist even after their destruction. This enduring paradox—between destruction and resurrection—is at the heart of this book. Monumental Fury poses fundamental questions about our relationship with the past, asking us to reflect on how much the past is responsible for the present, and how much the present is responsible for the past.
For a preview of the book, click here to read the Introduction and first two chapters.
From the book’s Introduction:
“Public monuments, many commemorating revered figures we believed could not possibly elicit controversy, have been pulled down from their commanding heights. Venerated icons have been defaced and mutilated as symbols of oppression. For the first time in generations, we are reflecting deeply on our relationship with the statues and monuments that stand in our public squares. This book is about why we erect statues, why they elicit such strong emotional reactions, why we sometimes attack and destroy them, and why we often replace them with new monuments.”
Praise for Monumental Fury:
“Iconoclasts for the most part operate feverishly to purify the past by destroying images. Matthew Fraser’s excellent Monumental Fury, by contrast, operates at a cooler temperature engagingly, constructively, and carefully to record the very long and illuminating history of image destruction in Western cultures. I’d much rather spend my time with this rich book.” — James Simpson, Harvard University, author of Under the Hammer: Iconoclasm in the Anglo-American Tradition
Release date for the United States and Canada: November 2022.
Release date for the UK and European book stores: January 2023.
Learn more about the book and order it here on Amazon. Readers in the UK can order the book here at Waterstones, at WH Smith, and on Amazon.co.uk. Ordering from your local bookshop is a good way to support independent booksellers.
For a preview, click here to read the Introduction and first two chapters.
At the end of the 9th century, the Catholic Church put the putrefied corpse of a deceased pope on trial. The gruesome event was so horrifying that the Vatican quietly expunged this shameful chapter from its own history.
In our era when figures from history are judged, disgraced, and their monuments removed from public places, a look back at the time when their corpses were literally dug up and “executed”.