[Cracking eggs depicting religious wars] · Centre for Early Modern Visual Culture

Title: [Cracking eggs depicting religious wars]
Subject: Religious Disputations; Religion and Politics; Religion in Literature; Politics; Fictional Works; Fictitious Characters; Imaginary Places; Imaginary Creatures; Lilliput (Imaginary Place); Gulliver's Travels
Period: 1800-1850;
Geographic: Lilliput; Blefuscu; England
Description: In this image we see the two types of eggs at war with each other. Those on the left are cracked on the top, while those on the right have been cracked in the middle. This difference as to the correct way to crack an egg was the reason for the tensions between Lilliput and Blefuscu. This is a thinly veiled reference to the religious wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, where Swift insinuates that the correct religious beliefs – like the correct way to crack an egg – is a personal decision, and not one worth going to war over. The same image appears in the 1839 Krabbe edition.
Image Creator: Grandville (Illustrator); Breviere (Illustrator); Francais (Illustrator)
Type: StillImage; Vignettes
Identifier: mta:21550
Language: ger
Source Name: Gulliver's Reisen in unbekannte Länder
Parent Collection: 1843 Stuttgart Grandville vol. 1
Image: mta_21550_OBJ.png