Formerly a no-man's land between literature and the fine arts, the emblem is currently being re-mapped bibliographically, making accessible tracts of this lost terrain. This volume is the second in a sub-series of the Index Emblematicus dedicated to the English Emblem Tradition, providing a uniform and systematic set of indexes to all emblematic works published in English from 1569 to 1700. Volume One contained the first four books of emblems and imprese that appeared in English. Volume Two contains the next four: P.S. (Paradin), P.S. (Simeoni), Willet, and Combe. Includes facsimile reproductions of the title pages and of the emblems. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Antwerp and Amsterdam were among the most active publishing centres for emblematic forms in Europe during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Nowhere else was the emblematic mode more integrated into the literary and artistic culture than in the Low Countries. The essays are revised versions of papers presented at the Fourth International Emblem Conference held at Leuven in 1996. The table of contents provides an overview of the variety of topics and approaches represented in the volume.

A fully illustrated study of Shakespeare's awareness of traditions in visual art and their presence in his plays and poems.

This important and overdue book examines illuminated manuscripts and other book arts of the Global Middle Ages. Illuminated manuscripts and illustrated or decorated books—like today’s museums—preserve a rich array of information about how premodern peoples conceived of and perceived the world, its many cultures, and everyone’s place in it. Often a Eurocentric field of study, manuscripts are prisms through which we can glimpse the interconnected global history of humanity. Toward a Global Middle Ages is the first publication to examine decorated books produced across the globe during the period traditionally known as medieval. Through essays and case studies, the volume’s multidisciplinary contributors expand the historiography, chronology, and geography of manuscript studies to embrace a diversity of objects, individuals, narratives, and materials from Africa, Asia, Australasia, and the Americas—an approach that both engages with and contributes to the emerging field of scholarly inquiry known as the Global Middle Ages. Featuring more than 160 color illustrations, this wide-ranging and provocative collection is intended for all who are interested in engaging in a dialogue about how books and other textual objects contributed to world-making strategies from about 400 to 1600.

This study reexamines the invention of the emblem book and discusses the novel textual and pictorial means that applied to the task of transmitting knowledge. It offers a fresh analysis of Alciato’s Emblematum liber, focusing on his poetics of the emblem, and on how he actually construed emblems. It demonstrates that the “father of emblematics” had vernacular forebears, most importantly Johann von Schwarzenberg who composed two illustrated emblem books between 1510 and 1520. The study sheds light on the early development of the Latin emblem book 1531–1610, with special emphasis on the invention of the emblematic commentary, on natural history, and on advanced methods of conveying emblematic knowledge, from Junius to Vaenius.

Andrea Alciati's Emblematum Liber was an essential work for every writer, artist and scholar in post-medieval Europe. First published in 1531, this illustrated book was a collection of emblems, each consisting of a motto or proverb, a typically enigmatic illustration, and a short explanation. Most of the emblems had symbolic and moral applications. Scholars depended on Alciati's book to interpret contemporary art and literature, while writers and artists turned to it to invest their work with an understood didactic sense. This new edition of the Emblematum Liber includes the original Latin texts, highly readable English translations, and the illustrations belonging to each of the 212 emblems. The editor's introduction explains both the importance and the cultural contexts of Alciati's book, as well as its innumerable artistic applications. For instance, close study of the emblems reveals--to cite only two examples--why statues of lions are traditionally placed before government buildings, and what underlying political message was conveyed by innumerable equestrian portraits during the Baroque era. The collection includes as an appendix the formerly suppressed emblem, "Adversus Naturam Peccantes," accompanied by a translation of the learned commentary applied to it by Johann Thuilius in 1612. An extensive bibliography points the student to scholarly research specifically dealing with artistic applications of Alciati's emblems. Altogether, this new edition of Alciati's seminal work is an essential tool for modern students of the liberal arts.