If vision was the noblest of the senses from Plato to Descartes, as Martin Jay has suggested, the last century of its reign was troubled by a succession crisis.¹ In sixteenth-century England, debates over the value of visual experience produced an anxiety over the use of images that extended beyond religious prohibitions against idolatry to a broad range of representational practices. While of all the senses the eyes were routinely credited with offering the most direct access to the world, they were also considered most susceptible to misrecognition or illusion.² This paradox is important for the present study, as it offered a particularly rich reserve for literary artists to represent the vexed relationship between ethical action and perception. If the world observed with the eyes provides a trustworthy guide for the ethical subject, the quality of one's moral reasoning is the basis on which one's ethical character is best judged. On the other hand, if the world revealed to visual experience is less stable, the challenge to the ethical subject becomes much greater. It is not surprising, then, that we witness an attempt to separate the reasoned, stable, and implicitly verbal world of morality from the unstable, emotional realm of visual experience in sixteenth-century England. This effort to compartmentalize vision and cognition—associated with images and words, respectively—provides an important context for the literary interest in the ethics of responding to the visual.