Emblematica: An Interdisciplinary Journal for Emblem Studies, Vol. II by Peter M. Daly , Daniel Russell , Michael Bath (review)

Abstract

MLRy 99.1, 2004 277 Emblematica: An Interdisciplinary Journal for Emblem Studies, Vol. 11. Ed. by Peter M. Daly, Daniel Russell, and Michael Bath. New York: AMS Press. 2001. xii + 478pp. $112.50. ISSN 0885-968X. For long the major journal of emblem studies in English, Emblematica has reconfigured itself this year as a single, substantial annual volume. This allows, with the inaugural instalment, the welcome flexibility to publish monographs as well as the more usual articles and reviews. Dorigen Caldwell's extremely detailed and exhaustive study of the development of ltalian impreseand their attendant theorization from within the sixteenth-century academies supplies a gap in emblematic research. Al? though precisely focused on a specific form and provenance, Caldwell carefully lays out the background and history of the impresa as cousin-german to the more popular emblem, and her book will interest specialists and generalists alike. The remainder of the volume offers a remarkably varied set of approaches to emblem studies, and shows exactly why this area of literary-pictorial investigation has gained such ground in the past few decades. A discussion of medieval French proverb manuscripts and work on Alciati's correspondence, together with a valuable bibliography of Spanish emblem sources and secondary material, are the shorter or more technical offeringsalongside several major interpretative articles. Emblematic pictorialism in mainstream literature is one of the liveliest areas of discussion in wordand -image scholarship: relations between poets and fineart, portraiture, the artisanal crafts such as embroidery, interior decoration, architecture, and jewellery, and em? blem and imprese culture have yielded important insights into the compositional and structural techniques of Spenser, Sidney, and Shakespeare (to name only the best and the brightest?the list could go on). Judith Dundas engages in an apparently bygone undertaking in comparing Spenser's poetry to specific emblems?bygone because practised once upon a time rather less effectivelyin such as Green's Shakespeare and the Emblem-Writers (1870), where emblematic titbits in the plays were dutifully but not very illuminatingly linked to known emblems. Much more interesting is Dundas's concern with what amounts to ekphrasis, word-pictures not needing illustrations but functioning none the less like the word-image alliance of the standard emblem, and, like visual artefacts, carrying with them the difficultburden of potential idolatry. It should be almost impossible by now, in the wake of work by Bender, Skretkowicz, Duncan-Jones, and Gent, to think about works like Arcadia or The Faerie Queene without recognition of the influence of emblem and imprese theory and practice, and Dundas adds to our sense of Spenser's awareness of this material across the whole range of his work. Inter-emblematic relations is another area of study which has broadened our think? ing about scholarly networks and the dissemination of printed material in the early modern period. Gabor Tiiskes discusses the relations between Sambucus, the Hungarian humanist and emblematist, and GeffreyWhitney, who borrowed heavily from his Emblemata (1564) forA Choice ofEmblemes (1586). The article considers human? ist concepts of imitation through the strategic borrowings by emblem-writers in the retouching of existing plates and the wholesale importation of the emblems of one writer into the collection of another. One might argue that the emblem tradition in the sixteenth century deals almost exclusively in the already known, in loci communes, and that this familiarity is its primary didactic and aesthetic feature. Emblems, as Dundas also notes, serve the understanding, not the imagination, and even a topic as remote from the literary experience of emblems as the compositional and publishing history of a book like Whitney's can remind us of the way in which the emblem was a form of intellectual currency, specie in a precise didactic economy within which a writer like Spenser could operate. In the same vein as Tiiskes, Michael Bath documents the borrowings from Alciati 278 Reviews by Edward Topsell in The Historie ofFoure-Footed Beastes (1607) and The Historie of Serpents (1608), showing the early modern naturalist's use of literaryevidence, a prac? tice which would gradually be banished by post-Baconians like Ray, Willughby, and Merrett in the later seventeenth century. The volume's most unusual contribution is by James Tanis discussing the American...