Emblem Books Research Articles

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.

Never to Coincide: the Identities fo Dutch Protestants and Dutch Catholics in Religious Emblematics

This essay presents observations on the distinctiveness of Protestant and Catholic literary practices and identities in the seventeenth-century Dutch Republic. Inspired by Catholic emblematists from the Southern Netherlands, Dutch Catholics as well as Protestants employed the religious emblem as a means of bolstering their faith and shaping their identity – but never at the same time, and never in the same manner. The religious emblem was at first claimed by Protestants such as Jacob Cats. After 1635, it was appropriated by Catholic authors such as Jan Harmensz. Krul and Everard Meyster. As the genre was reappropriated by Protestants such as Jan Luyken in the 1680s, Dutch Catholics moved away from the emblem to express their identity in new and exclusively Catholic genres such as soberly illustrated prayer books. Production of Dutch emblem books occurred in the same social and cultural isolation as clandestine Catholic church art, indicating that no sharing of visual practices and media took place among denominations in the Republic.

Performative and Multimedia Aspects of Late-Renaissance Meditative Alchemy: The Case of Michael Maier’s Atalanta Fugiens (1617)

In 1617 the alchemist, counselor and court physician to the then recently deceased Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II (1552-1612) published his Atalanta Fugiens (Atalanta fleeing). The book fits into the general category of an ‘alchemical emblem book’, very popular in the day: it contains 50 beautiful engravings to which are assigned poetic sextets in both Latin and German. The main difference with all known similar works is that it includes a three-part canon with each engraving. According to the author, the purpose is for all of this input “to be looked at, read, meditated, understood, weighed, sung and listened to, not without a certain pleasure” (Maier 1990, 91). In this sense, this book might be interpreted as a very early example of multimedia, and as a work which requires a performative attitude and activity (in the form of singing) and not merely to be read, for its original purpose to be fully accomplished. In this brief article I will describe the work, and present arguments to support my belief that it would be reasonable to conclude that it is an early form of multimedia.

To Inform and Delight: The Commodification of Travel Images in Amsterdam

To Inform and Delight: The Commodification of Travel Images in Amsterdam Elizabeth Sutton In the Dutch Republic of the seventeenth century, merchants employed visual culture to demonstrate their involvement in overseas trade and show off their wealth. Still lifes from the 1630s and 1640s such as those by Jan Davidsz de Heem, Willem Kalf, or Willem Claesz Heda show diverse commodities from the multiple places where the Dutch were then trading: in the East, India, Indonesia, and China; and in the West, Africa, the Caribbean, and North and South America. Gold, silver, porcelain, fruits, and spices are tantalizingly displayed in these sumptuous settings, their novelty heightened by the surface sheen of the multiple layers of oil glaze.1 Each detail is carefully depicted, each different surface texture described, exemplifying an aspect of the “mapping impulse” Svetlana Alpers considers characteristic of seventeenth-century Dutch art.2 Valuable commodities from abroad also make an appearance in merchant portraits. At the height of Dutch wealth and intercontinental trade (the “Golden Age” of the Republic), Daniel Vertangen painted West India Company (WIC) director-general Jan Valckenburgh with the trade items from which the company—and Valckenburgh personally—profited: gold and slaves. Valckenburgh was stationed at Elmina, on the coast of present-day Ghana, from 1656 to 1659 and again from 1663 until he died there in 1667. In his portrait, a slave offers Valckenburgh a gold medallion, while Valckenburgh stands confidently looking out to the viewer, one hand on his hip, the other firmly holding a baton.3 The slave and the medallion assert Valckenburgh’s social status and position in the WIC by their understood value. This “explosion” of exotic visual culture in the last part of the century reflects the successes built upon earlier Dutch trading missions.4 Paintings such as these catalogue the goods to be bought and sold in the robust consumer society of the Golden Age Dutch Republic. [End Page 325] Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Daniël Vertangen, Jan Valckenburgh (1623–1667), Director General of the Coast of Guinea, c. 1660, oil on canvas, 128.3 × 102 cm. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam. SK-A-4969 (photograph provided by the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam). The African servant is here like the gold medallion: an object from the Gold Coast possessed by the Dutch WIC director.5 The cataloguing of goods from trade in Dutch visual culture underscored Dutch possession of goods and of the territories from which they came. As the first [End Page 326] step in the systematization of knowledge, this pictorial cataloguing augmented the “sense of epistemic superiority” that played a significant role in the complex processes of European imperialism.6 The paintings—and the objects they showcase—are obviously products of a successful market economy. Yet before paintings depicted commodities and themselves became commodities for wealthy merchants, prints provided a wide segment of the population with images of foreign flora, fauna, and people.7 Amsterdam bookseller Cornelis Claesz capitalized on these demands by creating small, affordable, illustrated books of recent Dutch voyages.8 Claesz’s quarto travel books published between 1598 and 1603, particularly that of Pieter de Marees’s voyage to West Africa (Beschryvinge ende historische verhael van’t gout koninkrijk van Gunea, 1602), shed light on the varieties of demands that these illustrated books filled, and how diverse readers constituted a wide and often interconnected market that Claesz exploited with new information legitimated by printed illustrations. At the turn of the seventeenth century, prints in illustrated books were ubiquitous. Emblem books, along with travel accounts, were some of the most read and most viewed material culture in the Dutch Republic.9 Indeed, burghers in the large cities in the Republic had the wealth and the numbers to generate demand for books.10 As Andrew Pettegree has recently shown, the most popular books consumed in early modern Europe were newsworthy and entertaining.11 Claesz used the relatively new technology of the illustrated book as a vehicle for entertaining as well as disseminating knowledge. The travel books he published are in many ways like the contemporary emblem books meant to “instruct and delight.”12 Claesz’s illustrated travel accounts and emblem books were produced in similar...

The Combination of Emblematics and Natural History: Botanical Emblem Books for Meditational Uses

This study investigates the interaction between emblematics and natural history, focusing on sixteenth- century botanical emblem books, in which plants can be seen as means of meditation. In the second half of the sixteenth century, the two genres of emblematics and natural history became so closely related that the empirical knowledge of natural history provided the reader a key for uncovering the disguised meaning of emblems. In particular, botanical emblem books, which appeared in the mid sixteenth century, demonstrate the combination of close scientific observations of plants and devotional approach to nature as Gods divine creation. This didactic and meditational use of botanical emblems is most evident in three botanical emblem books by Joris Hoefnagel (1542-1601), Joachim Camerarius the Younger (1534-98), and Thomas Palmer (1540-1626). In these books, Hoefnagel, Camerarius and Palmer demonstrated their emblematic way of looking at plants as an aid to meditation as well as their botanical knowledge in detail and accuracy, encouraging the audience to appreciate fully both the aesthetic beauty and the symbolic and allegoric meaning represented by each plant. Thus, these botanical emblem books represent their distinctive worldview of the late sixteenth century, with its combination of art, science, and emblematics.

Acceptatie van het vreemde - Pers- en geloofsvrijheid in de Republiek vanuit internationaal perspectief

During the majority of the seventeenth century, religious literature produced in the Dutch Republic contained far fewer illustrations than the religious literature produced in the Southern Netherlands, England and Germany. The relative freedom with which different denominations and their attendant ideologies coexisted in the seventeenthcentury Dutch Republic, would seem to provide an ideal setting for the integration of old and new religious visual practices. Visual components were, however, not easily integrated in literary-religious publications in the Republic. In fact, the process was unexpectedly complicated and discontinued, one aspect of which is discussed in this article. It is argued that in at least in one city in one of the Republic’s neighbouring countries old and new visual traditions intermingled earlier and more thoroughly, judged by the development of religious emblematics in Frankfurt between 1617 and 1631. In this period, a group of talented Southern Netherlandish engravers and authors joined forces with the Calvinistic publisher Lukas Jennis to produce a series of hybrid religious emblem books. The last book in the series was Bartholomeus Hulsius’ Emblemata sacra, the first Dutch Reformed emblem book ever published. Frankfurt provided exactly the sort of climate in which different confessional traditions intermingled and influenced each other with little friction. This exemplary case urges us to reconsider the nature of Dutch toleration: why could a country known for its religious toleration not develop these forms of cultural hybridity on its own initiative?

Emblem 37 / On Security

106 To be safe from both the gods and men, from the cold, the winds, the rain, dress in the furs of the mice from your barn, from your own small cache of good days. This is the way to walk among thieves: pocketless, protected by your motley coat, and able, even so, to catch more mice to stitch another when this one wears out. Andrea Alciati’s Emblematum liber or Book of Emblems, a collection of 212 Latin emblem poems, was first published in 1531 and was expanded in various editions during the author’s lifetime. RICHARD HOFFMAN EMBLEM 37 / ON SECURITY adapted from Alciati’s Book of Emblems ...

Dutch Religious Love Emblems: Reflections of Faith and Toleration in the Later 17th Century

In this article, I examine the process of appropriation demonstrated in early modern Dutch religious love emblems published in the Dutch Republic around 1700. These religious love emblems were adaptations of Roman Catholic emblem books, originally made by Jesuits or priests in the Southern Netherlands around 1630. The reconstruction of the network formed by these religious emblems in the Republic, and an analysis of the gaps between the originals and their adaptations, allow us to take a closer look at changing attitudes towards religious faith and religious toleration at the time.

Speaking Pictures: English Emblem Books and Renaissance Culture; Achille Bocchi and the Emblem Book as Symbolic Form

Speaking Pictures: English Emblem Books and Renaissance Culture; Achille Bocchi and the Emblem Book as Symbolic Form

Joannes Sambucus and the Learned Image: The Use of the Emblem in Late-Renaissance Humanism

The emblem is one of the most remarkable literary inventions of Renaissance humanism. The symbolic imagery presented in these Neo-Latin emblem books constituted an important influence on many areas in early modern literature and art. This volume provides the first comprehensive study of Sambucus’ influential Emblemata (first published by Christopher Plantin, Antwerp, 1564). It reconstructs the cultural-historical contexts in which it was produced, thus reconsidering the social and commercial functions of the humanist emblem. Accompanied by a detailed analysis of individual emblems, it takes into account the emblems’ classical intertextuality and the relationship between word and image. This study shows how the emblematic practice can differ from contemporary symbol and emblem theories, which have often coloured modern interpretations of the genre.

Early modern German literature, 1350-1700

Early Modern German Literature provides an overview of major literary figures and works, socio-historical contexts, philosophical backgrounds, and cultural trends during the 350 years between the first flowering of northern humanism around 1350 and the rise of a distinctly middle-class, anti-classical aesthetics around 1700. Recent scholarship has significantly revised many traditional assumptions about the of this period, starting with a reassessment of the canon. The notion of literature has expanded to include a much wider range of texts than before, such as broadsheets, illustrated books, emblem books, travelogues, demonological treatises, and letters.Greater attention to the cultural and social phenomena that affect literary production has led to hitherto neglected areas of research, including the culture of learning and learnedness; the idea of authorship; the relationship between the intellectual elite and the state and other political authorities and institutions; the development of the family; gender dichotomy; and, the early formation of an educated, urban middle class. In an introduction and twenty-seven essays on specific but broadly-based topics of seminal importance to the period, written by leading specialists from North America, the United Kingdom, and Germany, this pathbreaking volume reflects this state-of-the-art research.Contributors include: Klaus Garber, Graeme Dunphy, Renate Born, Stephan Fussel, Scott Dixon, Wilhelm Kuhlmann, Max Reinhart, Joachim Knape, Hans-Gert Roloff, Erika Rummel, John Alexander, Peter Hess, Andreas Solbach, Peter Daly, Helen Watanabe-O'kelly, Jill Bepler, Gerhart Hoffmeister, Steven Saunders, Jeffrey Chipps Smith, Wolfgang Neuber, Gerhild Scholz Williams, Anna Carrdus, John L. Flood, Laurel Carrington, Theodor Verweyen, and John Roger Paas. Max Reinhart is professor of German at the University of Georgia.

Instruments and images

In 1999 I took part in a conference entitled Poetry and music in the French Renaissance (proceedings published under the same title (Cambridge, 2001)), a look at 16th-century French culture with an inspiring interdisciplinary slant. One paper that brought together ideas from literature, music, social history and the history of art was given by Carla Zecher, who explored the rich imagery of musical instruments in French emblem books of the time in relation to issues of governance—how one governs one's own behaviour as well as the state. This book by Zecher expands the theme to investigate the role musical objects played in 16th-century French culture. Boldly grasping the interdisciplinary nettle, Zecher also explores the role of musical performance on different types of instrument, the sometimes complex relationships between poets and musicians, and the mythological role of instruments which allowed them to act as go-betweens in the all-consuming dialogue between Renaissance culture and that of ancient Greece and Rome. Thus the lute really is the one lying on the table, but it also serves as an ancient lyre when it needs to, and can even stand in as a model of poetry itself.

Adrien Gambart's Emblem Book (1664). The Life of St Francis of Sales in Symbols ‐ Edited by Terence O’Reilly

<i>Adrien Gambart's Emblem Book (1664). The Life of St Francis of Sales in Symbols</i> ‐ Edited by Terence O’Reilly

Epic Romance, Royalist Retreat, and the English Civil War

Previous article No AccessEpic Romance, Royalist Retreat, and the English Civil War*Anthony WelchAnthony WelchUniversity of Tennessee, Knoxville Search for more articles by this author University of Tennessee, KnoxvillePDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Modern Philology Volume 105, Number 3February 2008 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/591261 Views: 49Total views on this site Citations: 6Citations are reported from Crossref © 2008 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:Sonya Cronin Retreat Not Defeat: Politicized Topographies and a Poetics of Order, (Mar 2022): 43–88.https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-89609-6_2Colin Lahive Reading and Writing Romance in Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained, Literature Compass 12, no.1010 (Oct 2015): 527–537.https://doi.org/10.1111/lic3.12256Rachel Dunn Breaking a tradition: Hester Pulter and the English emblem book, The Seventeenth Century 30, no.11 (Feb 2015): 55–73.https://doi.org/10.1080/0268117X.2015.1007157Brandon Chua The Purposes of Playing on the Post Civil War Stage: The Politics of Affection in William Davenant’s Dramatic Theory, Exemplaria 26, no.11 (Jan 2014): 39–57.https://doi.org/10.1179/1041257313Z.00000000040 김보민 The Fates of the Poetics of Epic in the Age of Leviathan: Davenant’s Preface to Gondibert, and Thomas Hobbes’s Answer to the Preface, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern English Studies 23, no.22 (Nov 2013): 303–325.https://doi.org/10.17054/jmemes.2013.23.2.303Amelia Zurcher Serious Extravagance: Romance Writing in Seventeenth-Century England, Literature Compass 8, no.66 (Jun 2011): 376–389.https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1741-4113.2011.00805.x

Emblemata Sacra: Emblem Books from the Maurits Sabbe Library, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven [Exhibited in the] Francis A. Drexel Library, Saint Joseph's University (review)

Emblem Books from the Maurits Sabbe Library, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven [Exhibited in the] Francis A. Drexel Library, Saint Joseph's University. With a Preface by Joseph F. Chorpenning, O.S.FS. Introduction by Rob Faesen, SJ., and Catalogue of the Exhibition by Ralph Dekoninck, Agnes Guiderdoni-Brusle, and Marc van Vaeck. (Philadelphia: Saint Joseph's University Press. 2006. Pp.xiv, 103. $45.00 paperback.) This volume could be described as an exhibition catalogue, but to do so would seriously undersell a scholarly study of the early modern use of printed images within Catholic spirituality, and in particular of their exploitation by the Society of Jesus for both meditational and devotional but also for pedagogic purposes.The main body of the text is contributed by leading specialists in these areas, Marc van Vaeck from the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, and Frank Dekoninck and Agnes Guiderdoni-Brusle from the Universite Catholique de Louvain. In the preface Joseph Chorpenning, from Saint Joseph's University Press, explains that the year 2006 commemorated three significant dates for the Society of Jesus-the 450th anniversary of the death of its founder, Ignatius Loyola (1491-1556), and the 500 th anniversary of the births of Ignatius's first two companions, Francis Xavier (1506-52) and Peter Faber (1506-46). In celebration of these anniversaries, Saint Joseph's University organized the remounting in the Francis Drexel Library of an exhibition of some seventy devotional emblem books and allied works from the Maurits Sabbe Library of the Faculty of Theology of the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven which had been mounted in Leuven in 2005 to complement an international conference on Emblemata Sacra: Rhetoric and Hermeneutics in Illustrated Religious Literature. This present volume is based on the catalogue of that exhibition. The Maurits Sabbe Library is, as Rob Faesen explains in his introduction, particularly rich in Jesuitica, and this emphasis is reflected in the works discussed here, which are virtually all by Catholic, and predominantly by Jesuit writers, although some non-Jesuit writers, such as Augustin Chesneau and Abraham a Sane ta Clara, both Augustinians, are also included. Protestant emblematists, however, hardly figure here. (Cramer, for example, is mentioned only twice, while Montenay and Beze figure not at all.) The works described are primarily those published in the Netherlands (mainly Antwerp) and in France (mainly Paris). …

Text / Image Mosaics in French Culture: Emblems and Comic Strips

This study compares text/image interaction as manifested in emblem books (and related forms) and the modern bande dessinee, or French-language comic strip. It moves beyond the issue of defining the emblematic genre to examine the ways in which emblems - and their modern counterparts - interact with the surrounding culture, and what they disclose about that culture. Drawing largely on primary material from the Bibliotheque nationale de France and from Glasgow University Library's Stirling Maxwell Collection of emblem literature, Laurence Grove builds on the ideas of Marshall McLuhan, Elizabeth Eisenstein and, more recently, Neil Rhodes and Jonathan Sawday. Divided into four sections-Theoretics, Production, Thematics and Reception - Text/Image Mosaics in French Culture broaches topics such as theoretical approaches (past and present) to text/image forms, the question of narrative within the scope of text/image creations, and the reuse of visual iconography for diametrically opposed political or religious purposes.The author argues that, despite the gap in time between the advent of emblems and that of comic strips, the two forms are analogous, in that both are the products of a 'parallel mentality'. The mindsets of the periods that popularised these forms have certain common features related to repeated social conditions rather than to the pure evolution over time. Grove's analysis and historical contextualisation of that mentality provide insight into our own popular culture forms, not only the comic strip but also other hybrid media such as advertising and the Internet. His juxtaposition of emblems and the bande dessinee increases our understanding of all such combinations of picture and text.

Zacharias Heyns, Sometime Apprentice to Moretus, Becomes the First Merchant/Publisher in Amsterdam

Zacharias Heyns, a son of a schoolmaster and an apprentice to Jan Moretus, established his bookshop in Amsterdam between 1592 and 1594. The choice of a publisher's device, combining Christian with humanistic elements, proves that he was aiming at a wide public, both Catholic and Protestant, Latin and vernacular, local and international. He cooperated with several printers, since he himself never ran a printing shop. In his early years he published schoolbooks in small formats, as well as humanistic books for the international market. For the local market he published Dutch translations of French books in octavo or smaller formats. Around 1600 he changed his policy and displayed a talent to assess which genres were going to be popular with the new public in Amsterdam, often rich immigrants from the Southern Netherlands, who could afford more expensive books. Whether it was a costume book, an emblem book, a fable book, a biblical epic, a travel story, a geographical description or a military manual, when the texts were not available Heyns simply translated, adapted or wrote them himself.

Escaping the Reformation in the Republic of Letters: Confessional Silence in Latin Emblem Books

AbstractRecent scholarship has advanced paradoxical conclusions about the relationship between Renaissance humanism and the Reformation. While humanist techniques are considered to have played an instrumental role in the development, spread, and implementation of the Reformation, the humanist community is generally regarded as a supra-confessional “Republic of Letters.” This article addresses this paradox by looking at the religious language in Latin emblem books. These highly popular works emphasized a personal, intellectual spirituality, and expressed reservations against institutionalised religion. They have often been interpreted ideologically, as a humanistic, irenical response to the religious turmoil. When read in the context of the authors' and readers' practical interests, however, they reveal a more pragmatic strategy. Rather than promoting religious ideals, they used an a-confessional language to accommodate religious pluriformity. Examples of the reception by individual readers, e.g., in alba amicorum, further exemplify how confessional silence served as a communicative strategy in the Republic of Letters.

Text / Image Mosaics in French Culture: Emblems and Comic Strips by Laurence Grove

MLR, I03. I, 2oo8 249 Making personal traumas public through the process ofwriting, Fell argues, can be interpreted as fulfillinga cathartic function, as itcontributes towards transcending many divides atwork inherwriting. As La Place has already been the subject of study guides in both English and French, paired with Une femmeon the grounds that each deals with parental death, it may be that amore comparative approach, highlighting thedifferences between La Place and La Honte, and giving more prominence to the tension and complementar ity that bind them together,would have provided even greater scope for innovative analysis. Even so, this guide, with itsuseful bibliography of both works, plus essays and interviews by Ernaux, and critical studies of her aeuvre,will certainly appeal to students,who will find in ita verywell-written and highly accessible synthesis of the rapidly growing quantity of scholarlymaterial on Ernaux's works. SWANSEA UNIVERSITY NATHALIE MORELLO Text/Image Mosaics in French Culture: Emblems and Comic Strips. By LAURENCE GROVE. (Studies inEuropean Cultural Transition, 32)Aldershot: Ashgate. 2005. xiv+ I87 PP. ?5. ISBN 978-0-7546-3488-I. As thebande dessinee progressively attains the academic credibility itwas fordecades denied, a series of recent studies have begun tomap out this historically rich and culturally complex field of enquiry. In discussions of the form's origins, scholars remain divided: whereas some stress contemporariness (and privilege theworks of Topffer or the appearance of the Journal de Mickey as moments of emergence), others gesture vaguely towards pre-textual precursors-the paintings ofLascaux, for instance-to indicate a more ancient and more extravagant genealogy. One of the principal strengths of Laurence Grove's Text/Image Mosaics inFrench Culture is its author's refusal toaccept unquestioningly any received ideas regarding thehistory of the comic. Drawing on his extensive knowledge of theFrench emblem book, he aims todemonstrate-in the lightof the evolving history ofprint culture thecontinuities and discontinuities apparent in the comparative analysis of the emblem and theBD. Grove does not fall into the trap of elaborating a seamless teleology linking the two forms,but instead, through a process of 'parallelism' (p. xiv), explores the impact, at two significant, transitionalmoments in the history of print technology, of these hybrid formscombining textand image. Close engagement with case studies permits the cautious elaboration of parallels between fields normally considered discrete. After an introductory section discussing the history of print culture and the dis tinctiveness of the two forms under consideration, the study is divided into four principal parts-Theoretics, Production, Thematics, and Reception- each ofwhich devotes a chapter to the emblem and theBD in turn,before synthesizing reflections in an afterword.The emphasis ison continuity and discontinuity, exploring theways in which an earlymodern 'emblematicmentality' might be seen topersist, in radically altered forms, in a postmodern age. The result is a comprehensive initial engagement with questions of taxonomy and critical tradition, followed by a series of studies contrasting the hybridity ofwoodcuts, for instance,with theGallicization ofDisney inLe journal de Mickey-that would not usually coexist in a singlemonograph. There is an emphasis on the progressive institutionalization of the forms in question, with close attention paid both to genre construction and to questions of authorship. The aim isneither the conflation ofwhat are two very different forms,nor the elaboration of an imaginary genealogy linking the emblem and theBD. Instead, Grove holds the two genres in tensionwithin the frame of text/image studies (and in the lightof the mindsets towhich this field gives access). He observes in conclusion that emblems 250 Reviews and BDs have evolved in parallel yet ultimately contradictory ways, the former in creasingly emphasizing textand narration, the lattermoving more towards a recit en images inwhich conventional narrative collapses. This is a highly readable study by an author who has confident mastery of the diverse, even heterogeneous range ofmaterial under consideration. In relation to the BD itself,Grove moves far beyond an often excessively restricted canon to give a clear sense of the genre's historical texture.At the same time, he focuses on under explored key titles, such as the collaborationist Temeraire (the post-war trajectories of whose authors are tracked in illuminating detail). The argument is consistently well illustrated, both in terms of the variety of...

Adrien Gambart's Emblem Book (1664): the Life of St Francis de Sales in Symbols, and: Emblemata Sacra: Emblem Books from the Maurits Sabbe Library, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven

Reviewed by: Adrien Gambart’s Emblem Book (1664): the Life of St Francis de Sales in Symbols, and: Emblemata Sacra: Emblem Books from the Maurits Sabbe Library, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven Wendy M. Wright (bio) Adrien Gambart’s Emblem Book (1664): the Life of St. Francis de Sales in Symbols. Facsimile edition with a study by Elisabeth Stopp. Edited by Terence O’Reilly with an essay by Agnés Guiderdoni-Bruslé. Philadelphia: Saint Joseph’s University Press, 2005. xi + 373 pp. / 113 Illustrations. $60.00 (cloth); Emblemata Sacra: Emblem Books from the Maurits Sabbe Library, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven. By Ralph Dekoninck. Philadelphia: Saint Joseph’s University Press, 2006. 116 pp. / 81 Illustrations. $45.00 (pb.) So you thought graphic novels were something new? Or perhaps as you've studied or taught Christian spirituality you've left the visual evidence to the art historians or seen such as marginal to the tradition. Think again. Two beautifully produced new books from Saint Joseph's University Press will introduce you to the visually symbolic world of emblem books and, more intriguingly, to emblematic thinking, an important expression of early modern Christian humanist culture. From the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, emblem books thrived in Europe and in the mission field. As one learns, the term "emblem" covers a broad range of phenomena but in its canonical form an emblem typically has three parts: a motto, a symbolic picture, and an accompanying text. At the heart of an emblem is a metaphor or trope to which all elements of the emblem relate. All elements of the emblem, according to humanist theory, were also essential, for the theory held that an image is a body without a soul if not accompanied by its sister, poetry. Emblems rested upon the cognate assumption that hidden truths are ascertainable under the form of visible signs. While there were many types of emblems, the genre that is the topic of the two books under review—Adrian Gambart's Emblem Book and Emblemata Sacra—is sacred emblems. Such emblems were understood to be revelatory of hidden meanings, moral lessons, and divine truths. The invisible was assumed to be made manifest through the visible. Or, to put it in Ignatian terms, one could find [End Page 104] God in all things. Emblems also schooled one in the spiritual art of doing that very seeking and finding. Emblamata Sacra is the catalogue from an exhibition of selected emblem books from the extraordinary collection of Jesuitica at the Maurits Sabbe Library at Leuven exhibited at Saint Joseph's University early in 2006. But it functions as much more than a catalogue as it contains brief essays by noted European and American scholars on the theology, rhetorical theory, function (catechetical, meditative, educational, rhetorical, apologetic, evangelistic), production of and spiritual practices associated with sacred emblems. Emblematics saturated every facet of early modern life: the theatre, public life, court life, architecture, and religious procession. Especially interesting is the way in which emblems were linked to Jesuit spirituality, pedagogy, and catechetics as well as to wider humanist theory. Those quintessential early modern men, the Jesuits, were the great producers and disseminators of emblem books. Emblem books were used extensively in catechetical instruction and the foreign missions: Jerome Nadal's emblematic meditations on the Gospel were foremost among these. In some cases the pedagogical intent was overt: the various pictorial elements of emblems might be carefully numbered and accompanying comments would enable the ones instructed to discern an intended spiritual meaning. Jesuit schools were seedbeds of emblem culture. Not only were emblems used in schools to help hone the intellect (images cement abstract ideas in the mind, memory, and senses) but emblematic thinking itself was encouraged. There were contests in which students vied to create the most clever and insightful emblems. Most significantly, emblems mirrored the very techniques of spiritual formation employed by the Society of Jesus. The tripartite structure of the emblem correlates to the technical aspects of Ignatian prayer which acknowledges the distinction between composition of place, meditation, and colloquy; to its psychological dimension which appeals to the three faculties of the soul (memory, understanding, and will); and to the classic Christian spiritual progression of purgation, illumination...