Emblem Books Research Articles

Using linked open data to enhance the discoverability, functionality and impact of Emblematica Online

PurposeEarly Modern emblem books are primary sources for scholars studying the European Renaissance. Linked Open Data (LOD) is an approach for organizing and modeling information in a data-centric manner compatible with the emerging Semantic Web. The purpose of this paper is to examine ways in which LOD methods can be applied to facilitate emblem resource discovery, better reveal the structure and connectedness of digitized emblem resources, and enhance scholar interactions with digitized emblem resources.Design/methodology/approachThis research encompasses an analysis of the existing XML-based Spine (emblem-specific) metadata schema; the design of a new, domain-specific, Resource Description Framework compatible ontology; the mapping and transformation of metadata from Spine to both the new ontology and (separately) to the pre-existing Schema.org ontology; and the (experimental) modification of the Emblematica Online portal as a proof of concept to illustrate enhancements supported by LOD.FindingsLOD is viable as an approach for facilitating discovery and enhancing the value to scholars of digitized emblem books; however, metadata must first be enriched with additional uniform resource identifiers and the workflow upgrades required to normalize and transform existing emblem metadata are substantial and still to be fully worked out.Practical implicationsThe research described demonstrates the feasibility of transforming existing, special collections metadata to LOD. Although considerable work and further study will be required, preliminary findings suggest potential benefits of LOD for both users and libraries.Originality/valueThis research is unique in the context of emblem studies and adds to the emerging body of work examining the application of LOD best practices to library special collections.

The Spider and the Bee Emblem in Edmund Spenser’s Sonnet

Specifi c features of the Renaissance poetics have been studied insufficiently yet, especially the influence on them of the emblematic culture. The emblematic type of thinking was typical for that period, which is evidenced by the fact that both books of emblems and images from them were widely spread. The article offers an analysis of the 71st sonnet from “Amoretti” cycle by Edmund Spenser, where description of an embroidery pattern is combined with its allegorical interpretation, which permits to consider the entire sonnet as a kind of emblem. In contrast to the already existing religious interpretation of The Spider and the Bee emblem, which represented them as an unrighteous man and a true Christian, Spenser gives his own interpretation and associates The Spider and the Bee with lovers. The poet catches his beloved in his love net; and thus he reverses the common Petrarchan topos of the golden hair of the lady who caught her beloved in her net. The free image interpretation is a part of the emblematic thinking, which can give not just one but several interpretations to any object. Therefore, Spenser creates a sonnet referring to both the scholarly (emblems) and the household (embroidery) knowledge of the reader, thus showing his love of compound poetical images.

User Engagement with Digital Archives for Research and Teaching: A Case Study of Emblematica Online

Researchers increasingly engage with the digital archives built by libraries, archives, and museums, but many institutions still seek to learn more about researchers' needs and practices with these digital collections. This paper presents a user assessment study for Emblematica Online , a research digital library that provides digitized versions of emblem books from leading rare book collections. This paper examines the ways in which scholars engage with the special collections contained within Emblematica Online through analysis of interviews. The authors propose that the diverse and complex uses of digital special collections require libraries and archives to consider expanding the capabilities of their digital content and platforms.

La biblioteca del collezionista. Una palestra del ‘gusto’ artistico?

The paper argues that art collectors leveraged their library as one of the formative places of artistic taste. Acquiring knowledge through books may have helped shaping one’s artistic judgment, usually a mix of both intellective and emotional processes. Based on the Venetian case study of 17th-18th centuries patrician libraries, the paper explores the works used by art collectors in order to increase their discernment and artistic judgment: emblem, hieroglyphic and exempla books served as database of both pictorial and textual symbols which helped decipher paintings’ symbols and scenes. The Venetian libraries’ inventories and catalogues reveal the existence of two distinct phenomena: the inclusion of generic emblem printed books (with rare manuscript exceptions) in almost all surveyed libraries and the presence of rare and sometimes costly emblem books, specifically tailored to the collector’s field of interest in several libraries. Moreover, the more professional art collectors shared knowledge and titles in order to cut on expenses, relying on the fact that at least one copy was to be found in Venice.

The collector library. A training for the artistic 'taste'?

The paper argues that art collectors leveraged their library as one of the formative places of artistic taste. Acquiring knowledge through books may have helped shaping one’s artistic judgment, usually a mix of both intellective and emotional processes. Based on the Venetian case study of 17th-18th centuries patrician libraries, the paper explores the works used by art collectors in order to increase their discernment and artistic judgment: emblem, hieroglyphic and exempla books served as database of both pictorial and textual symbols which helped decipher paintings’ symbols and scenes. The Venetian libraries’ inventories and catalogues reveal the existence of two distinct phenomena: the inclusion of generic emblem printed books (with rare manuscript exceptions) in almost all surveyed libraries and the presence of rare and sometimes costly emblem books, specifically tailored to the collector’s field of interest in several libraries. Moreover, the more professional art collectors shared knowledge and titles in order to cut on expenses, relying on the fact that at least one copy was to be found in Venice.

Drawings for Emblem Books and Lives of the Saints from the Collection of Count Charles Cobenzl: on the Authorship of Abraham van Diepenbeeck

Amongst the more than four thousand drawings of the collection of Count Charles Cobenzl, formed in Brussels between 1761 and 1768 and today mostly in the State Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg, are a number of small sheets kept under the name of Abraham van Diepenbeeck. The author clarifies their relationship to his oeuvre, identifying them as designs by different artists for in-text illustrations in books published in Antwerp in the second quarter of the seventeenth century. The history of these drawings, some of which were formerly in the celebrated drawings collection of the banker Pierre Crozat in Paris, throws light on the circulation of drawings in the eighteenth century. Moreover, it provides the first indications of the composition of the drawings collection of Francois-Ernest de Salm Reifferscheid, Bishop of Tournai, of which little was previously known.

“Ut Pictura Poesis”: the Poetic and Pictorial Emblem of the Baroque

The article describes parallelism of the two arts, poetry and painting, in the emblematic books of the Baroque epoch. In the Baroque art, an emblem, as a visual metaphor, formed stylistic singularity of the culture of the 16th-17th centuries. The emblem represented the principle of simultaneity, a picture with a brief motto coexisting with a didactic or spiritual text. Not only was the emblem an ornamental “insertion”, a piece of encrusted graphics, but it also reflected the Baroque principle of a witty game. A book of emblems could act as a visual dictionary of signified objects. The significance of finished emblems was not limited to their pictographical meanings, they could also include some symbolic senses. Such verbal pictures illustrating abstract notions can be found in the “Emblemata” (1531) by Andreas Alciatus. The synthesis of the verbal and the visual, as an allegorical way of defining the world and the exegesis of Biblical texts, provided wide opportunities for the emblematic signification. The Picta Poesis Baroque book “Graphical Poetry. Alchemy” (1552) by Barthélemy Aneau contained an alchemy symbolism reflecting the character of the Renaissance worldview. Dutch artists of the 17th century developed the theme of evanescence and vanity in their emblematic still-life painting.

Breaking a tradition: Hester Pulter and the English emblem book

The emblem book genre has long been dismissed as unworthy of serious critical study. But the recently discovered mid-seventeenth century manuscript of Hester Pulter, and the generic existential crisis figured therein, imply otherwise. A vehement royalist, Pulter suggests that the events of the English civil wars have broken established emblem form by defying analogy in their horror; according to her, emblems cannot continue as they were after the deposition and regicide of Charles I. Yet, rather than succumbing along with the monarchy, Pulter’s emblems formally reimagine emblem structure, adopting a new devotionalism at odds with conventional emblem form. Thus, even while Pulter’s poems register political crisis, they prepare for a political order beyond that of the Commonwealth and demonstrate emblems’ ability to comment upon their own contemporary world.

'Placardes and Billis and Ticquettis of Defamatioun': Queen Mary, the Mermaid and the Hare

Placards circulating in Edinburgh following the murder of Henry Darnley in 1567, depicting Quuen Mary as a seductive mermaid and Darnley as a timid but lecherous here, are shown to copy details from two emblems in Claude Pardin's Devises heroiques. Once stripped of their Latin mottoes, these emblems are not easy to make sense of, and the two variant copies of the placards which are preserved in the English National Archives at Kew raise issues of meaning, from and function surrounding such public documents, which are explored in this article. The historical circumstances of their display in Scotland are examined, together with documents identifying James Murray as their 'deviser'. This leads to a wider discussion of the place of emblems in Scottish culture at this period in relation to other forms of political and judicial publication, variously known as 'placards', 'bills', 'libels', German 'Schandbilder' and Scots 'baffles', these being genres which have not hitherto been identified as strongly emblematic or indebted to printed emblem books. The scholarly and often erudite basis of emblems is always likely to have problematised their use in such popular, public displays, and the iconography of the 'Mermaid and Hare' must not only have challenged early viewers unfamiliar with the emblems on which it was based, but remains unclear in a few of its details even now when its sources in Paradin have been identified. Its political effectiveness in its own day is not, however, in doubt.

The “Ingendred” Stone: The Ripley Scrolls and the Generative Science of Alchemy

Acquired at auction in 1958 from the library of C. W. Dyson Perrins, the Huntington Library’s Ripley scroll (HM 30313) is one of the most ornate and esoteric illuminated manuscripts of early modern England. Much remains unknown about the iconology and historical context of the Ripley scrolls, of which approximately twenty remain worldwide. The self-consciously archaic scroll at the Huntington draws on a range of contemporary sources, including emblem books, heraldic imagery, and illuminated alchemical manuscripts from the fifteenth century, such as the Rosarium philosophorum and the Aurora consurgens. Aaron Kitch situates the Ripley scrolls in the context of English alchemy in the sixteenth century, especially the tradition of emblematic alchemy and John Dee’s efforts to establish George Ripley as England’s chief alchemical authority. He analyzes the pattern of imagery on the scrolls in relation to the ancient and early modern philosophy of generation, which focused on questions about sexual reproduction and the emergence of new matter in nature.

The Painted Closet of Lady Anne Bacon Drury by H. L. Meakin (review)

Reviewed by: The Painted Closet of Lady Anne Bacon Drury by H. L. Meakin Marcus Harmes Meakin, H. L., The Painted Closet of Lady Anne Bacon Drury, Farnham, Ashgate, 2013; hardback; pp. 410; 64 colour, 31 b/w illustrations; R.R.P. £75.00; ISBN 9780754663973. Lady Anne Drury was an early seventeenth-century English gentlewoman who installed in her country house a decorated ‘closet’, or a small chamber decorated with painted panels. The images contained therein are, for the most part, allegorical and suggest a great deal about Lady Drury’s education, erudition, and also something of her inner emotional life, as they perhaps provided themes and ideas to stimulate her prayers and meditations. Although [End Page 300] these panels have received some scholarly attention from historians and art historians, H. L. Meakin’s monograph is the first comprehensive examination of the images, their sources, the possible date of their creation and installation, the role of Lady Drury in their design, their positioning in the architectural space, and the woman who commissioned them, as well as the social context from which she emerged. Lady Drury was granddaughter of Sir Nicholas Bacon, the Lord Keeper of Elizabeth I, and was a friend of John Donne and Joseph Hall, a clergyman and writer on Protestant meditations. As Meakin points out, the Bacon family usually educated their daughters, as they did their sons, to a high level. This observation is the starting point for Meakin’s rich interpretation of the panels. The first section of the book surveys Lady Drury, her circles, and ways to interpret the closet, in particular the outlet it may have provided her, in terms of what she chose to put on the panels, for expressing her view of the world (p. 29) and her meditations on life experiences, such as her husband’s frustrated career and her daughters’ deaths. In the second section of the book, each panel is given individual attention and analysis. The analysis is impressive and multi-disciplinary. The very idea of sitting and contemplating in a closet brings the meditative writings of Joseph Hall more than once into consideration. Other sources for the often-enigmatic images are proverbs, classics such as Martial and Apuleius, Christian stoicism, bestiaries such as Edward Topsell’s The Historie of Foure-footed Beastes, and continental emblem books. Meakin points to some panels that simply defy interpretation, but the cumulative impact of the panel-by-panel study is to reconstruct the meaning of the small but visually and intellectually rich space in which Lady Drury could immerse herself. Marcus Harmes The University of Southern Queensland Copyright © 2015 Marcus Harmes

예수회 예술신학이 중국선교에 미친 영향에 관한 고찰: 중국화된 엠블럼 북들을 중심으로

이 글은 예수회 본국의 예술신학과 예술교육이 중국이라는 선교지의 예술선교 방식에 어떤 영향 주었는지를 17세기경 중국에서 만들어진 엠블럼 북의 제작과 이에 대한 중국인들의 반응을 살펴봄을 통해 고찰해 보았다.이를 위해 2장에서는 예수회의 예술신학과 예술교육에 대해 살펴보았다. 기존에 예수회의 ‘예술신학’(Art Theology)이라는 이름으로 정의되지 않았던 예수회의 예술에 관한 신학적 관점을 ‘예술신학’이라는 이름으로 정의하고 두 가지 정도로 정리하였다. 하나는 토마스 아퀴나스(Thomas Aquinas)의 신학에 담겨진 아름다움과 예술에 관한 함의이다. 아퀴나스는 현실세계가 선한 하나님이 창조한 세계이며 하나님의 진리와 선, 아름다움을 반영하고 있다고 보았다. 따라서 아퀴나스는 예술이 자연을 모방하는 것은 신적 창조의 아름다움을 파악하고 자연 안에서 지속적으로 나타나는 하나님의 창조를 모방하는 행위로서 가치 있게 여겼다. 피조물을 재현한 예술작품은 세상을 창조한 하나님을 계시하는 하나의 도구로 쓰일 수 있다고 보았으나 이것은 오로지 하나님의 은총에 의해서만 가능한 것이라고 본다. 다른 하나는 예수회의 ‘영적 이미지’(spiritual images)라는 이론으로서, 사람들의 마음에 복음을 피조물의 이미지를 통해 은유적으로 이해시키고 각인시켜서 하나님께 더 가까이 나아가도록 도움을 줄 수 있다는 이론이었다. 이러한 예술신학적인 관점에 따라 예수회에서는 이미지를 활용하여 신앙을 교육하고, 예수회 대학에서 원근법을 가르쳐서 복음을 전하고 회원들과 신자들의 신앙을 향상시키고자 하였다. 또한 엠블럼 북과 같은 삽화와 이에 대한 해설을 곁들인 책들이 유럽 본국에 널리 전파되고 유행하였다.3장에서는 예수회의 예술신학과 예술교육의 내용들이 중국이라는 선교지에서도 적용되어 반영되는 과정을 17세기에 유럽에서 파송된 선교사들이 중국에 가서 제작했던 중국말로 번역된 도해와 중국적인 모티브와 양식이 가미된 엠블럼 북들을 통해 살펴본다. 그 중에서도 기울리오 알레니(Giulio Aleni)가 중국에서 제작한 『천주강생출상경해』(Tianzhu Jiangsheng Chuxiang Jingjie)는 유럽에서 제롬 나달(Gerome Nadal)이 만든 『그림으로 된 복음 이야기』(Evangelicae Historie Imagines)에 관한 그림에서 몇 점을 뽑아서 예수의 생애를 중국인들에게 소개한 책이다. 알레니는 유럽의 언어로 되어 있는 그림의 해설 부분을 중국어로 번역하였고, 그림도 완전하지는 않지만 중국적인 표현을 서양양식과 혼합하여 표현하였다. 이러한 이미지는 유교라는 현실주의적 세계관을 가진 중국인들에게 예수의 생애의 초자연적인 부분들을 보여줌으로써 당대 유교 사대부들로부터 글을 모르는 일반적인 중국인들에게 커다란 관심을 불러일으켰다.이러한 예수회의 예술신학과 예술교육이 중국 예술선교의 방식과 상호작용한 사례에 대한 고찰은 예술선교나 사역이 활발히 진행되고 있는 한국의 개신교와 한국의 중국선교 상황에 몇 가지 시사점을 제공해 준다. 먼저 개신교의 예술신학과 예술교육의 연구 기반을 좀 더 확고히 하는 가운데 예술 선교사역이 이루어져야 한다는 것이다. 이를 위해 이러한 예술 신학적이고 예술교육의 이론적인 측면이 신학교 커리큘럼에 좀 더 반영되어야 한다는 점이다. 이처럼 예술신학과 예술선교가 서로 영향을 줌으로써 복음이 들어가는 다양한 문화 속에서 한층 더 방향성 있고 풍성한 방식으로 소통할 수 있게 될 것이다.

Rethinking Virtue, Reforming Society: New Directions in Renaissance Ethics, c.1350–c.1650 ed. by David A. Lines and Sabrina Ebbersmeyer (review)

Reviewed by: Rethinking Virtue, Reforming Society: New Directions in Renaissance Ethics, c.1350–c.1650 ed. by David A. Lines and Sabrina Ebbersmeyer Anne-Marie Sorrenti Rethinking Virtue, Reforming Society: New Directions in Renaissance Ethics, c.1350–c.1650, ed. David A. Lines and Sabrina Ebbersmeyer, Cursor Mundi 3 (Turnhout: Brepols 2013) 351 pp. In this volume, the editors and contributors affirm the importance of moral philosophy as a serious discipline in the Renaissance, inherently rejecting Cartesian claims that, because of the rhetorical methodologies employed by humanists, Renaissance philosophy is a misnomer. David Lines’s informative introduction and his articles in the collection focus on the uninterrupted use, from the medieval period to the Renaissance, of Aristotle’s Ethics as the foundational text for the study of moral philosophy in Europe. The contributions in the volume support his view that the commentary tradition existed well into the sixteenth century alongside innovations in methodology, sources, and genre in the teaching of ethics from the age of Petrarch to the mid-seventeenth century. The field of Renaissance ethics is so rich and complex, he claims, because the influx of Platonic, Ciceronian, Stoic, Epicurean, and newly discovered Aristotelian sources was met with attempts to reconcile these various strands of thought with existing Aristotelian commentary, Christian doctrine, and the Bible. In her epilogue, co-editor Sabrina Ebbersmeyer focuses on the displacement of Renaissance ethics in the seventeenth century by the new grounding of moral philosophy on reason, and by the preoccupation with human self-preservation as opposed to the cultivation of personal virtue. The collection is divided into three parts, namely, Contexts, Approaches and Genres, and Themes. In the first part, David Lines and Jill Kraye summarize the sources available from 1350 to 1650 for the study of ethics. In addition to a study of Marsilio Ficino and Lorenzo de’ Medici, they also include analyses of English Aristotelian John Case, Justus Lipsius’s interpretation of Stoic ethics, and Francisco de Quevedo’s reading of Stoic and Epicurean moral thought. These are refreshing and novel contributions in a field that has tended to concentrate on Aristotelianism and Neoplatonism in the Italian context. The second paper, also by David Lines, provides a survey of how and where moral philosophy was taught and discussed throughout Europe, including schools, universities, religious studia (especially of the Dominican order), humanist circles, academies, and courts. He makes the important point that the teaching of ethics became accessible to a much broader audience because of the new appearance of vernacular texts on the topic of ethics and the emergence of new and popular [End Page 317] genres for ethical instruction, including dialogues, poems, and essays. Risto Saarinen’s article concentrates on ethics in the sixteenth century European Reformations, and provides clear analyses of both the Lutheran and Calvinist contexts. He makes the point that while the former concentrates on doctrine and theory, the latter focuses on the practice of ethical living. The second part of the collection includes an important paper by Eckhard Kessler in which he identifies two distinguishing features of Renaissance moral philosophy that set it apart from medieval approaches to the discipline. The first is the new awareness of the contingency involved in making moral judgments. The second is the self-conscious reliance on rhetorical methods that the humanists used to deliberate on these issues. Luca Bianchi, in contrast, argues that the commentary tradition survived well into the sixteenth century. He also acknowledges the co-mingling of different strands of thought and the gradual mutation of the traditional forms of commentary into a much looser and more accessible formats that could be composed in vernacular instead of Latin, and that often include references to literature, poetry, the visual arts, history, contemporary affairs, the New World, and autobiographical details. This is a fitting segue to Ann Moss’ article about the proliferation of the printed commonplace book in the sixteenth century, and its status as a new and widely accessible genre for moral instruction. These handbooks blended short, easily referenced quotes from philosophy, poetry, and the Bible. She also discusses the genesis of the emblem book and its blending of text with image as an enhanced means of communicating on ethical...

A Rose Blooms in the Winter: The Tradition of the Hortus Conclusus and its Significance as a Devotional Emblem

AbstractThe hortus conclusus, or the “garden enclosed,” is a motif of biblical origin that images the Virgin Mary as a cloistered garden. Gaining popularity in the early medieval period, the Marian hortus conclusus remained the property of the Catholic church after the Reformation. There it briefly thrived, reaching its apogee in the early modern period as the eponymous subject of Henry Hawkins’ emblem book, Partheneia Sacra. The Virgin in (and as) the garden still lives a half‐life today, continuing to appear without our recognizing it in medieval and Renaissance artwork, in hymns, in the names of flowers, and in prayers. Where it is known, the Marian hortus conclusus is usually perceived as a Catholic object of adoration, but its enduring nature suggests that it holds promise as a catholic subject of devotion as well.

Media Literate Catholics: Seeing, Reading and Writing in Early Modern Participatory Culture

In this article I use the concept of ‘media literacy’ – generally discussed in the context of new media – to analyse media ability and conversance in seventeenth century Catholic culture. In particular, I focus on an untitled and anonymous Dutch composite volume which combines handwritten texts, printed texts and images. By reconstructing the relationship between the manuscript and its printed sources, I argue that the composite volume was the result of a meditative reading and writing process in which fragments from the popular religious emblem book Pia Desideria (1624) and other contiguous printed books were combined in a new multimedial product, which may serve as a means to share (media) skills and knowledge, and to facilitate the meditation processes of future consumers. I demonstrate that literacies now associated with new media – such as the ability to actively participate in media practices, and to consult hypertexts – were vital to early modern Catholics who constructed their identity by using and producing media.

Book of Honors for Empress María of Austria. A Translation with an Introductory Study and Facsimile of the Emblems by Antonio Bernat Vistarini, John T. Cull and Tamás Sajó (review)

Reviewed by: Book of Honors for Empress María of Austria. A Translation with an Introductory Study and Facsimile of the Emblems by Antonio Bernat Vistarini, John T. Cull and Tamás Sajó Harry Sieber Antonio Bernat Vistarini, John T. Cull and Tamás Sajó, Book of Honors for Empress María of Austria. A Translation with an Introductory Study and Facsimile of the Emblems. Early Modern Catholicism and the Visual Arts Series, Vol. 5. Saint Joseph's University Press, 2011. 240 pp + unpaginated facsimile. This volume joins other important emblem books and studies published by St. Joseph's University Press, such as Emblematic Images & Religious Texts (essays written in honor of G. Richard Dimler, S.J.), Adrien Gambart's Emblem Book (ed. Terence O'Reilly), and Emblemata Sacra (emblems from the Maurits Sabbe Library, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven). The emblems are reproduced on high quality, semi-glossy paper and are near perfect images of rare and often difficult texts to locate or otherwise obtain. The present volume of emblems is no exception. It should be made clear at the outset that this volume is primarily an English translation from Spanish sources without the original language included, thus precluding an assessment of the accuracy of the translations of most material contained in the Libro de las honras que hizo del colegio de la Compañía de Iesvs de Madrid . . . , namely the oration by Juan Luis, the sermon preached by Jerónimo de Florencia, and the commentary that accompanies the emblems. Part of the Introduction to the volume (3-38) was previously presented by A. Bernat Vistarini and John T. Cull and published in the conference proceedings (GRISO, 2010), 101-26. After relatively brief remarks on "María de Austria and the Jesuit College of Madrid," "The Genre of El Libro de las Honras," "The Structure and Content of the Libro de las Honras," a "Summary Table of the Hieroglyphs," "The Poems," and "The Present Edition," the translation begins with the title page, preliminaries, a description of María de Austria's catafalque, a funeral oration delivered by Juan Luis ("Theologian of the Society of Jesus, and Professor of Rhetoric"), the translation of Jerónimo de Florencia's lengthy sermon, and the commentary on the emblems themselves. The relationship between María de Austria and the Jesuit College is described briefly, framed with a few biographical remarks on her marriage, family connections, her cloistered life in the Descalzas Reales and a reference to her death in 1603 (also see below). The main focus is to emphasize her "zealous Catholic fervor" and to point out that she "virtually left the whole of her estate to the Jesuits in Madrid, including a parcel of land on Toledo Street," which would later become the home of the Colegio Imperial. The authors describe the work as a "relación de suceso in its most fundamental meaning [End Page 456] as a published chronicle or summary of an important public event" (4). The purpose of this "literary genre," as they call it, is to inform, entertain and move the public. Funeral exequies, especially those featuring monarchs or royal personages, functioned to reassure the public of the stability of kingship and dynastic succession. The mythological imagery employed to memorialize such occasions was often similar for both male and female royal personages. The section on the prayer and the funeral sermon (10-15) is a summary and analysis which concentrates on Spanish Baroque religious rhetoric, neatly dividing the material into the traditional structure: Exordium, Body and Conclusion. María is "allegorized as golden eagle," she is given a "new coat of arms, has not lost an empire," with a final reference to "[f]elicitations for glory attained" (14-15). The series of thirty-six emblems ("hieroglyphs") and their Latin mottos are translated and sourced and the content of the images are described in detail. The final section on the numerous anonymous poems that conclude the work are "largely uninspired and perfunctory" (29). The critical bibliography is up-to-date and pertinent and effectively lends the scholarly support expected in such studies. It is perhaps relevant to be reminded that the Court was in Valladolid (1601-1606) when the empress...

The Prince and the Hobby-Horse: Shakespeare and the Ambivalence of Early Modern Popular Culture

The Shakespearean hobby-horse, mentioned emphatically in Hamlet, brings into focus a number of problems related to early modern popular culture. In the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries the word was characterised by semantic ambivalence, with simultaneously valid meanings of a breed of horse, a morris character, a foolish person, and a wanton woman. The overlapping of these meanings in different cultural discourses of the age (playtexts, emblem books, popular verse, pictures) exemplifies the interaction of different productions of early modern popular culture, from social humiliating practices to festivals and public playhouses. This attests to a complex circulation of cultural memory regarding symbols of popular culture, paradoxically both ‘forgotten’ and ‘remembered’ as a basically oral-ritual culture was transformed into written forms. In this context, the Hamletian passage gains new overtones, while the different versions of the playtext (Q1 & 2: 1603, 1604, F: 1623) also offer insights into the changing attitudes regarding popular culture, as it became gradually commercialised and politicised in the following decades. Finally, Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale and Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair solidify a critical and sceptical attitude, which seems to have signalled the end of ‘Merry Old England’ on-stage and off-stage as well.

The Frontispiece of Peter the Great’s Simvoly i Emblemata (1705): An Iconographical Analysis

The reign of Peter the Great witnessed a “revolution in Russian imagery,” to borrow the title of James Cracraft’s book. A crucial role in this revolution was played by a handbook of Western symbolism, Simvoly i Emblemata, published in Amsterdam in 1705 on Peter’s order. While Tsar Peter was on his grand tour of Western Europe in 1697-98, he became fascinated by the emblem book of Daniel de la Feully (Devises et Emblémes), published in Amsterdam in 1691. Peter ordered a Russian translation of the book and a new frontispiece as well. The frontispiece, designed by Joseph Mulder, contained Peter’s Western-style portrait surrounded by eight 8 devices (images and mottos) with bilingual Latin and Russian inscriptions. Until now, there has been no study of the iconography of the frontispiece which aimed to glorify Tsar Peter as a military leader – a new Hercules – in Russia and abroad. Careful study of the frontispiece reveals hidden messages addressed to the enemies of Russia and also shows how Peter was presented as the creator of a new Golden Age of Russia. Iconographical analysis is used here to decode the ideological and propaganda messages conveyed by the frontispiece.

Shakespeare, sound and sense

What does music mean, and how is meaning attached to music? These are questions that have been at the heart of musicological debate in recent decades, and it seems they were similarly important questions for Shakespeare and his contemporaries too. In his new book, Joseph M. Ortiz argues that Shakespeare's representations of music reveal a sceptical attitude to many of the musical meanings that scholars commonly associate with the 16th and 17th centuries—notions of heavenly and political harmony; the affective power of music; indeed, the extent to which music’s meaning can be fixed at all. Instead, Ortiz suggests that Shakespeare presents music’s meanings as potentially infinite, whereas such commonplace interpretations were attempts to universalize musical meaning and control music’s sensuousness and indeterminacy. Ortiz’s book has a dual significance. On one level the book is an analysis of Shakespeare’s representation of music, while on another level Ortiz’s analysis of these plays revises our current perception of music and language in the period, offers new insights into the sixteenth-century debates surrounding music, and illuminates the cultural and political ideologies that lay behind conventional tropes of musical meaning. It manages this because the chapters not only focus on particular Shakespearean plays and the extensive literary criticism that surrounds them, but also draw on emblem books, essays on music theory, handbooks on practical music, classical mythographies and, in the final chapter, the works of John Milton.

Thesis-Building: Architecture, Alchemy and the Constructive Moment(s) of a Doctoral Dissertation

This paper looks back at the long and sometimes difficult process of doing a ‘PhD’. It asks how certain ‘moments’ in the building of a doctoral thesis – moments of conception, of discovery, of despair, of truth, of revelation and of jouissance – inform the building of a thesis. By revisiting these moments, the paper traces the genesis of the author’s thesis on Architecture and Alchemy and explores the metaphor of construction encountered in the work of cultural theorist Walter Benjamin. Drawing on some of the historical sources of the thesis, in particular the emblem books of seventeenth-century alchemist Michael Maier (1568-1622), the paper argues that the above-named ‘moments’ in a PhD constitute an ensemble of impassioned investment, which can be known as the PhD-pathos. This paper, then, can be read as no more, or less, than a pathological guide to the PhD, where architecture and alchemy come into play as polar opposites in the process of construction and change that thesis-building is.