摘要：Judith Butler's definition of sex/gender as an essentially corporeal medium that creates cultural and political significance and meaning is a useful starting point for a consideration of the representation of idolatry in the writings of the Reformation playwright and polemicist John Bale. Taking as its central focus the carnivalesque figure of Idolatry in the festive morality play Three Laws, and a critical approach primarily informed by Butler and the works of Natalie Zemon Davis, Michel Foucault and Mikhail Bakhtin amongst others, this paper will examine how Bale uses the concept of feminised idolatry as a way of undermining the authority of Roman Catholic religious orthodoxy and consequently of promoting the power interests of the Tudor dynasty. Simultaneously, this paper illustrates how idolatry is vital to the advancement of Bale's personal agenda of radical reform - an agenda which illustrates the radical divergence of voices in the English Reformations. Key to this paper will be the illustration of how transgressive Idolatry follows in medieval traditions of grotesque females as exemplified in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales or John Lydgate's translation of Guillaume de Deguileville's Le Pelerinage de la vie Humaine (The Pilgrimage of the Life of Man).
