Trevelyon's pictorial commonplace and the patterns of a Protestant past

Abstract

A crucial issue confronting the historian of early modern textual culture concerns the complexity of the relationship between word and image in the early modern book. As Ruth Samson Luborsky points out in an earlier issue of this journal, often printers used the same woodcuts more than once in a single text, raising the question of what signifying function such repetitions held for the reader. In her exploration of the purpose and impact of such visual repetitions, Luborsky deploys a useful distinction between decorative (or ornamental) images, general images that are appropriate to but not specific to the text, and direct images that are cued to specific textual references.1 She acknowledges, however, that ‘the problem with the categories is that their formulation implies a constant role on the part of the reader’, and, in the end, it must be admitted that ‘how a reader attends is not constant’.2 In what follows, I want to suggest that it is possible to gather evidence about how early modern readers attended to images, particularly to repeated and decorative images, by considering how printed texts and images were appropriated, transcribed, and redeployed within individually compiled commonplace manuscripts. The pictorial commonplace of Thomas Trevelyon, compiled in the early seventeenth century, proves a particularly full and rich example that shows the expressive power that could be invested in the ‘merely’ decorative image. In his skillful combination and recombination of verbal and visual matter, Trevelyon makes the printed texts he appropriates speak new political truths.