Abstract
After the publication of Andrea Alciato’s Emblemata (1531), emblem books were the most popular and most widely printed vehicle for illustrated poetry in the Renaissance. European printers produced many editions of emblem books and translated them into several languages. Artisans created emblem illustrations through what we might now consider “visual paraphrase”: copying or redrawing existing images to carve new woodblocks. These (re)production habits created a pan-European discourse community. The particular reuses of illustration afforded vernacular readers a shared visual language, and translators shifted verbal signifiers to meet the demands of new audiences. This article examines image reproduction and translations of fowling emblems: Alciato’s “Dolus in Suos” and Guillaume de la Perrière’s “Emblem LIIII.” In particular, it focuses on vernacular translation practices that brought continental images to English readers. Two early English emblem books, Geffrey Whitney’s A Choice of Emblems (1586) and Thomas Combe’s The Theater of Fine Devices (1614), included language to help readers navigate the pictures and poetry. Whitney and Combe produced translations/adaptations that reshaped the emblem: instead of constructing traditional, connotative meanings between motto, poem, and picture, these translators produced a denotative word–image relationship so that English readers could more easily decipher and understand emblems’ visual vocabulary.
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