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Graven Images: Protestant Emblem Books in England

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 November 2018

Huston Diehl
Huston Diehl*
Affiliation:
University of Iowa
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Extract

‘“they adorned their Citie with all manor of sumptuous and costely buyldings, with all kinds of curious and cunning works, as Theaters, Triumphal Arkes, Pyramedes, Columnes, Spires, and a great number of graven images … All which sumptuousnesse and superfluitie hathe oftentymes … been to their great hinderaunce and damage.”

“I have broughte in here twentie sights or vysions, caused them to be graven, to the ende al men may see that with their eyes, whiche I go aboute to expresse by writing”

Jan Van der Noot, A Theatre for Voluptuous Worldlings

Type
Research Article
Information
Renaissance Quarterly , Volume 39 , Issue 1 , Spring 1986 , pp. 49 - 66
Copyright
Copyright © Renaissance Society of America 1986

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References

1 Clements, Robert J., Picta Poesis: Literary and Humanistic Theory in Renaissance Emblem Books (Rome, 1960), pp. 33, 127, 220Google Scholar; Renaissance Letters: Revelations of a World Reborn, ed. Clements, Robert J. and Levant, Lorna (New York, 1976), pp. 40-42.Google Scholar

2 “Problems in Emblem Literature,” Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 45 (1946), 33 Google Scholar; “Henry Hawkins and Partheneia Sacra,” Review of English Studies, n.s. 26 (1975), 276; Praz, Mario, Studies in Seventeenth-Century Imagery (Rome, 1964), p. 207 Google Scholar; Daly, Peter M., Literature in the Light of the Emblem (Toronto, 1979), p. 52 Google Scholar who paraphrases Dietrich Jons, Das “Sinnen-Bild.” Studien zur allegorischen Bildlichkeit bei Andreas Gryphius (Stuttgart, 1966), p. 56 Google Scholar; Daly, , Literature, p. 50.Google Scholar

3 The Resources of Kind: Genre-Theory in the Renaissance (Berkeley, 1973), p. 50 Google Scholar; Frances Yates, “The Emblematic Conceit in Giordano Bruno's De Gli Eroici Furori and in the Elizabethan Sonnet Sequences,” The Journal of Warburg and Courtland Institutes, 6 (1943), 105.Google Scholar

4 Praz, , Studies, p. 170.Google Scholar

5 Word and Image in Quarks’ Emblemes,” Critical Inquiry, 6 (1980), 385-410Google Scholar; reprinted in The Language of Images, ed. W.J.T. Mitchell (Chicago, 1980), p. 63.

6 Kelley, Donald, Foundations of Modern Scholarship: Language, Law, and History in the French Renaissance (New York, 1970), pp. 102, 93.Google Scholar

7 See, for example, Perriere, Guillaume de La, Le Theatre des bons engins (Paris, 1539)Google Scholar; Montenay, Georgette de, Emblemes ou Devises Chrestiennes (Lyons, 1571)Google Scholar; Noot, Jan van der, A Theatre for Voluptuous Worldlings (London, 1569)Google Scholar. Voet, Leon, The Golden Compasses (Amsterdam, 1969)Google Scholar identifies Christopher Plantin, a major publisher of emblem texts, as a member of the secret anabaptist sect called The Family of Love (1, pp. 21-30) and supports the theory of H. de la Fontaine Verwey that Plantin secretly “published the heretical writings of his own spiritual mentors—Hendrik Niclaes in 1555—56 and Hendrik Janssen Barrefelt in 1579-80” (2, p. 277). In addition to documenting Plantin's connections with Niclaes, Barrefelt, and The Family of Love, his “indifference towards the outward forms of religion,” and the conversion to the reformed religion of his son-in-law Raphelengius, Voet argues that “Plantin's career as a printer undoubtedly has its origin in his religious convictions” (2, p. 24). Plantin never formally broke with the Roman Catholic Church, however, and, although his most intimate friends were also members of The Family of Love, he included supporters of both the Roman Catholic and Protestant positions in his circle.

8 Clements, , Picta Poesis, p. 31 Google Scholar; Hutton, James, The Greek Anthology in France (Ithaca, 1946), p. 321 Google Scholar; Baird, Henry Martyn, Theodore Beza: The Counsellor of the French Reformation (New York, 1899)Google Scholar and Rothrock, G. A., The Huguenots (Chicago, 1979), P. 33 Google Scholar; Clements, , Picta Poesis, pp. 200-201Google Scholar; Dannenfeldt, Karl H., “Wittenberg Botanists during the Sixteenth Century,” The Social History of the Reformation, ed. Buck, Lawrence P. and Zophy, Jonathan W. (Columbus, 1972), pp. 240-41Google Scholar; Gelder, H. A. Enno Van, The Two Reformations in the Sixteenth Century (The Hague, 1961), pp. 312-18.Google Scholar

9 Protestant Poetics and the Seventeenth-Century Religious Lyric (Princeton, 1979), pp. l$S-97 and Gilman, “Word and Image.” Lewalski considers Quarles’ emblem book “a thorough Protestant reworking of Hugo,” p. 192. Both Lewalski and Gilman contradict Karl Joseph Höltgen's assertion that “One hardly finds any alterations of the pictorialsources of Quarles’ emblem book for doctrinal reasons“: Francis Quarles 1592-1644 (Tubingen, 1978), p. 342.

10 Phillips, John, The Reformation of Images: Destruction of Art in England, I$﹜$-I66O (Berkeley, 1973), p. 46.Google Scholar Phillips is here quoting William Tyndale, An Answer to Sir Thomas More's Dialogue. I present a similar argument and use some of the same quotations in my essay, “ ‘To Put Us in Remembrance': The Protestant Transformation of Images of Judgment in English Renaissance Drama,” Homo, Memento Finis, ed. David Bevington (Kalamazoo, 1985), pp. 179-208.

11 Garside, Charles Jr., Zwingli and the Arts (New Haven, 1966), p. 134.Google Scholar

12 Crew, Phyllis Mack, Calvinist Preaching and Iconoclasm in the Netherlands 1 $44-1569 (Cambridge, 1978), p. 23.Google Scholar

13 Phillips, , Reformation of Images, p. 45 Google Scholar, from Tyndale, , Answer to More's Dialogue; p. 54 Google Scholar, from Ten Articles; p. 57, from Thomas Cranmer, Bishop's Book; p. 56.

14 The Sermons of John Donne, ed. Potter, George R. and Simpson, Evelyn M. (Berkeley, 1955)Google Scholar, 2: sermon 11, 237.

l5 The Herokall Devises of M. Claudius Paradin (London, 1591), ¶5, ¶6; A Collection of Emblemes, Ancient and Modern (London, 1635), sigs. A2, A, Kv, K2; Schola cordis or the heartofitselfe (London, 1647), sig. K; Ashrea (London, 1665), sigs. b2, bsv.

16 Yates, Frances A., The Art of Memory (Chicago, 1966), p. 74.Google Scholar

17 Barbara Lewalski similarly argues that “the typical Protestant procedure [of meditation] is very nearly the reverse” of Catholic meditation; “instead of the application of the self to the subject,” she writes, Protestant meditation “calls for the application of the subject to the self: Protestant Poetics, p. 150.

18 Eisenstein, Elizabeth L., The Printing Press as an Agent of Change (Cambridge, 1979). PP. 129 Google Scholar, 69; Yates, Art of Memory, p. 127.

l9 Sacorum emblematum centuria una (Cambridge, 1591), sig. G2. Lewalski distinguishes between Catholic and Protestant theories of typology: Protestant Poetics, pp. 123-26.

20 Institution of the Christian Religion, trans. Ford Lewis Battles (Atlanta, 1975). PP. 123, 125, 118, 148.

21 The Scules Solace, or thirtie and one spirituall emblems (London, 1626), sig. F6v

22 Minerva Britanna, (London, 1612), sig. b3v.

23 The devout hart or royal throne ofthepacifical Salomon (Rouen, 1634), sig. G9v.

24 A Book for Boys and Girls, or, Country Rhymes for Children (London, 1686), “To the Reader,” no sig.

25 The Theater of Fine Devices, (London, 1614), sigs. A5, A5v.

26 Emblemes (London, 1634), sig. A3.

27 The Royal Politician (London, 1700), sig. A3v.

28 The Invisible World, Discovered to spiritual eyes, and Reduced to usejul Meditation (London, 1652), pp. 335-56.