Ignoring the well-studied polemics of the Protestant reformers themselves, and arguing instead from the perspectives of the new cognitive literary theory, Words, Images and Grotesques in Shakepeare's England exposes the depth and breadth of the reformers' misunderstandings about how people could or could not reform their spiritual lives - how or if they could literally change their minds. After decades of cognitive disruption - caused by the widespread iconoclasm and the supposedly compensatory campaigns for literacy - Shakespeare's intuitive sensitivity to the way people learn and think undid some of the damage. Adapting the mode of Italian grotesque to the English stage, Shakespeare offered spectacle and reconciliation, delivering a vision of wonder and of peaceful, if sceptical, acceptance of inevitable unknowing. Shakespeare's achievement was to demonstrate to audiences battered by years of religious chaos and dread that a loving God was not only in heaven but in full control on earth: His providence was embodied and visible, you didn't have to read it.