Monarchy, Print Culture, and Reverence in Early Modern England: Picturing Royal Subjects by Stephanie E. Koscak

Abstract

This sophisticated, multidisciplinary study of commercial print representations of monarchy between 1649 and 1760 provides food for thought about what successful accounts of political practices might look like now that the “cultural turn” has run its course. Koscak situates the representations under study in a historically specific structural environment that provided the material conditions for their production—an expanding commercial market for domestically sourced print engravings. Koscak’s aim is to describe and account for the cultural practices of a “loyalist” bent that emerged in this environment. The book’s analysis is also grounded in an awareness that the representations under study were simultaneously material and semiotic in nature. Koscak’s approach, which she explicates in the introduction, helps her to show how the consumers could re-purpose engravings with their own representational, reverential, and devotional ends in mind but as conditioned by those objects’ material and semiotic characteristics.Readers would do well to keep Koscak’s broad framework in mind, because the chapters are a series of independent case studies devoted primarily to semiotic contextualization and analysis. Koscak’s multidimensional, resourceful account of cultural-political practices can be mistaken for a more familiar cultural history of limited methodological and theoretical interest. For instance, the first chapter encourages readers to view Charles I’s Eikon Basilike within the tradition of early modern emblem books. Since these books drew on contemporaries’ inclination to seek arcane meanings in the material world, this case study might appear to have been hand-picked to advance a strongly semiotic understanding of political history. But understood in terms of practice and its broader material environment, Koscak’s contextualization of Eikon Basilike as an emblem book implies a historically specific strategy behind the book’s production as well as a specific usage by readers. That usage was a liturgically grounded, spiritual-emotional practice that served as an alternative to the extemporaneous prayer associated with Puritans. Thus, Koscak is more intent on highlighting the political importance of early modern interpretive practices than on offering a semiotic analysis of a putatively autonomous cultural or linguistic field of political significance.The more straightforward methodological and historiographical argument in this book, however, comes from Koscak’s use of a discussion of representational practice to chip away at a remarkably durable whiggery in early modern British studies. This use of practice has proven to be a consistently productive approach in recent years. By focusing attention on practices and their material underpinnings before turning to ideological, intellectual, and political issues, Koscak is able to address a simple but crucial question. Did the “modernizing” structural conditions underpinning much of the representation in this period ultimately favor “progressive” ideologies, ideas, and political programs over traditional or “reactionary” ones? Did commercialized print provide a better venue for rationality and republicanism than for mystery and monarchism? Did the popularization of monarchical representation necessarily desacralize monarchy?Koscak’s answer to these questions is “no”—the same answer reached by many others who have approached practice in this way, including students of the early modern British “public sphere” and both revisionist and post-revisionist historians of the Enlightenment. The fallacy of yoking one type of modernization to another—particularly, practical modernization to liberalization and secularization—becomes obvious when practices become the primary object of inquiry. The early modern producers and consumers of print material shared practices with their ideological opponents in a changing structural environment. In the wake of Koscak’s book, historians might still be able to argue that monarchy was losing the representational battle for authority and go on to explain why. But they can no longer simply assume or assert these things; they will have to think and write in better conceptual and methodological terms about them.