Brewer's: Iconoclasts

(Greek, “image breakers”). Reformers who rose in the eighth century, especially averse to the employment of pictures, statues, emblems, and all visible representations of sacred objects. The crusade against these things began in 726 with the Emperor Leo III., and continued for one hundred and twenty years. (Greek, ikon, an image; klao, I break.)

“The eighth century, the age of the Iconoclasts, had not been favourable to literature.” —IsaacTaylor: The Alphabet, vol, ii. chap. viii. p. 159.

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