Scholars in multiple disciplines now recognize the emblem as a significant expression of the cultural life of the Renaissance and the Baroque, reflecting a panoply of interests ranging from war to love, from religion to philosophy to politics, from the sciences to the occult, from social mores to encyclopedic knowledge, and from serious speculation to entertainment. Following Andrea Alciato's publication of the first emblem book in 1531, the form enjoyed its heyday in the seventeenth-century, appearing in speeches, sermons, and printed texts, but also in wall and ceiling decorations, jewelry, carvings, paintings, and other material expressions. Beyond this early boom, the emblem was again present in eighteenth-century title pages and frontispieces, and experienced twentieth-century manifestations during the ideological battles of both world wars and Quebec's attempt at secession from Canada. The Companion to Emblem Studies introduces the multiple forms that the emblem has taken through nearly five centuries of production, and offers an interdisciplinary and international assessment of the long history of this pervasive symbolic device. use those vernacular languages; on Alciato, the father and prince of emblems; on bibliography and theory; on the Jesuit and Neo Latin emblems, which cut across national groupings; on flags and tournaments; and on emblems in recent material culture, logos, and advertisements. The Companion features 130 illustrations and concludes with a Selective Bibliography for Further Reading, which includes works written in western European languages and expands the volume's usefulness for researchers and students in the field.

Since its invention by Andrea Alciato, the emblem is inextricably connected to the natural world. Alciato and his followers drew massively their inspiration from it. For their information about nature, the emblem authors were greatly indebted to ancient natural history, the medieval bestiaries, and the 15th- and 16th-century proto-emblematics, especially the imprese. The natural world became the main topic of, for instance, Camerarius’s botanical and zoological emblem books, and also of the ‘applied’ emblematics in drawings and decorative arts. Animal emblems are frequently quoted by naturalists (Gesner, Aldrovandi). This interdisciplinary volume aims to address these multiple connections between emblematics and Natural History in the broader perspective of their underlying ideologies – scientific, artistic, literary, political and/or religious. Contributors: Alison Saunders, Anne Rolet, Marisa Bass, Bernhard Schirg, Maren Biederbick, Sabine Kalff, Christian Peters, Frederik Knegtel, Agnes Kusler, Aline Smeesters, Astrid Zenker, Tobias Bulang, Sonja Schreiner, Paul Smith, and Karl Enenkel.

The emblem was big business in early-modern Europe, used extensively not only in printed books and broadsheets, but also to decorate pottery, metalware, furniture, glass and windows and numerous other domestic, devotional and political objects. At its most basic level simply a combination of symbolic visual image and texts, an emblem is a hybrid composed of words and picture. However, as this book demonstrates, understanding the precise and often multiple meaning, intention and message emblems conveyed can prove a remarkably slippery process. In this book, Peter Daly draws upon many years’ research to reflect upon the recent upsurge in scholarly interest in, and rediscovery of, emblems following years of relative neglect. Beginning by considering some of the seldom asked, but important, questions that the study of emblems raises, including the importance of the emblem, the truth value of emblems, and the transmission of knowledge through emblems, the book then moves on to investigate more closely-focussed aspects such as the role of mnemonics, mottoes and visual rhetoric. The volume concludes with a review of some perhaps inadequately considered issues such as the role of Jesuits (who had a role in the publication of about a quarter of all known emblem books), and questions such as how these hybrid constructs were actually read and interpreted. Drawing upon a database containing records of 6,514 books of emblems and imprese, this study suggests new ways for scholars to approach important questions that have not yet been satisfactorily broached in the standard works on emblems.

Dada’s Subject and Structure argues that Dadaist praxis was far more theoretically incisive than previous scholarship has indicated. The book combines theoretical frameworks surrounding ideological subject formation with critical media and genre histories in order to more closely read Dadaist techniques (e.g. montage, irony, nonsense, etc.) across multiple works. These readings reveal both Dada’s preternatural focus on the discursive aspects of subject formation—linguistic sign, literary manifesto, photographic image, commodity form/aesthetics, which comprise the project’s chapters—and on Dada’s performative sabotage and subversion of them. In addition to highlighting commonalities between Dadaist works, artists, and chapters previously imagined disparate, the book shows how Dada simultaneously prefigured structuralist theories of subject formation and pre-performed post-structuralist critiques of those theories.

Hadrianus Junius was Holland’s most important scholar of the third quarter of the sixteenth century. This book analyses Junius’ most important works, some of which have never been studied before. It contextualise them in light of the tradition of humanism.

This book explores continuity and ruptures in the historical use of visual representations in science and related disciplines such as art history and anthropology. The book also considers more recent developments that attest to the unprecedented importance of scientific visualizations, such as video recordings, animations, simulations, graphs, and enhanced realities. The volume collects historical reflections concerned with the use of visual material, visualization, and vision in science from a historical perspective, ranging across multiple cultures from antiquity until present day. The focus is on visual representations such as drawings, prints, tables, mathematical symbols, photos, data visualizations, mapping processes, and (on a meta-level) visualizations of data extracted from historical sources to visually support the historical research itself. Continuity and ruptures between the past and present use of visual material are presented against the backdrop of the epistemic functions of visual material in science. The function of visual material is defined according to three major epistemic categories: exploration, transformation, and transmission of knowledge.

How the nature illustrations of a Renaissance polymath reflect his turbulent age This pathbreaking and stunningly illustrated book recovers the intersections between natural history, politics, art, and philosophy in the late sixteenth-century Low Countries. Insect Artifice explores the moment when the seismic forces of the Dutch Revolt wreaked havoc on the region’s creative and intellectual community, compelling its members to seek solace in intimate exchanges of art and knowledge. At its center is a neglected treasure of the late Renaissance: the Four Elements manuscripts of Joris Hoefnagel (1542–1600), a learned Netherlandish merchant, miniaturist, and itinerant draftsman who turned to the study of nature in this era of political and spiritual upheaval. Presented here for the first time are more than eighty pages in color facsimile of Hoefnagel’s encyclopedic masterwork, which showcase both the splendor and eccentricity of its meticulously painted animals, insects, and botanical specimens. Marisa Anne Bass unfolds the circumstances that drove the creation of the Four Elements by delving into Hoefnagel’s writings and larger oeuvre, the works of his friends, and the rich world of classical learning and empirical inquiry in which he participated. Bass reveals how Hoefnagel and his colleagues engaged with natural philosophy as a means to reflect on their experiences of war and exile, and found refuge from the threats of iconoclasm and inquisition in the manuscript medium itself. This is a book about how destruction and violence can lead to cultural renewal, and about the transformation of Netherlandish identity on the eve of the Dutch Golden Age.

"Profiling Saints" follows and expands the papers presented at the homonym online international conference (December 2021), which focused on cultural, theological, artistic, and social aspects of models of sanctity and their importance in the modern world up to the post-revolutionary period. This volume aims thus to shed light on the cultural value of canonizations and models of sanctity as models of Christian perfection, including the role of iconography and artworks, in the broader context of modern, global Catholicism. The topics presented by the authors include veneration to, and canonization and representations of, saint theologians, missionaries, martyrs, mystics, and reformers, men and women. "Profiling Saints" looks at modern sanctity and saints from multidisciplinary perspectives, ranging from liturgy, theology, and Church history up to history of ideas, cultural history, history of emotions, and art history, and contributes to shed light on such a complex phenomenon of Christian history in its modern developments.