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.

The discourse of political counsel in early modern Europe depended on the participation of men, as both counsellors and counselled. Women were often thought too irrational or imprudent to give or receive political advice—but they did in unprecedented numbers, as this volume shows. These essays trace the relationship between queenship and counsel through over three hundred years of history. Case studies span Europe, from Sweden and Poland-Lithuania via the Habsburg territories to England and France, and feature queens regnant, consort and regent, including Elizabeth I of England, Catherine Jagiellon of Sweden, Catherine de’ Medici and Anna of Denmark. They draw on a variety of innovative sources to recover evidence of queenly counsel, from treatises and letters to poetry, masques and architecture. For scholars of history, politics and literature in early modern Europe, this book enriches our understanding of royal women as political actors.

This volume examines how and why many early modern pictures operate in an ekphrastic mode.

An investigation of the complex image-text relationships between frontispieces and illustrated title pages with the following texts in European books published between 1500 and 1800.

This volume, first published in 2007, examines the role of religion as a vehicle for cultural exchange.

This volume of 14 original essays by historians and literary scholars explores childhood and children's books in Early Modern Europe, 1550-1800. The collection aims to reposition childhood as a compelling presence in early modern imagination--a ready emblem of innocence, mischief, and playfulness. The essays offer a wide-ranging basis for reconceptualizing the development of a separate literature for children as central to evolving early modern concepts of human development and socialization. Among the topics covered are constructs of literacy as revealed by the figure of Goody Two Shoes, notions of pedagogy and academic standards, a reception study of children's reading based on book purchases made by Rugby school boys in the late eighteenth-century, an analysis of the first international best-seller for children, the abbe Pluche's Spectacle de la nature, and the commodification of child performers in Jacobean comedies.

The fourteen essays that comprise this volume concentrate on festival iconography, the visual and written languages, including ephemeral and permanent structures, costume, dramatic performance, inscriptions and published festival books that ’voiced’ the social, political and cultural messages incorporated in processional entries in the countries of early modern Europe. The volume also includes a transcript of the newly-discovered Register of Lionardo di Zanobi Bartholini, a Florentine merchant, which sets out in detail the expenses for each worker for the possesso (or Entry) of Pope Leo X to Rome in April 1513.

The Jesuit Emblem in the European Context' sets out to understand the emblems currently known to have been written by Jesuits (at least 1,525 printed books) in the context of the production of emblems in Europe. The Introduction offers a brief account of the Society of Jesus, followed by chapters on the European Emblem, the Ratio studiorum (the flexible blueprint for Jesuit education as offered by Jesuit colleges throughout the world), Jesuit Theory of Symbology, the Major Jesuit Emblem Books, the Material Culture (everything not deriving from print), and Purposes Served by Jesuits Using Emblematic Forms. Conclusions follow, with historical information on provinces and colleges of the Society of Jesus provided in appendices. 0Many scholars have considered this or that Jesuit writer, some of his works, individual colleges, and the role of emblem in Jesuit education. However, to date these investigations remain partial. This is the first comprehensive attempt ever to review what Jesuits accomplished using the emblem form.

Why Jesuit emblems? The Society of Jesus produced more books inthis genre than did any other identifiable group of writers andpublished in all major European vernacular languages as well as inLatin. Jeremiah Drexel, for example, was the most prolific and mostpublished writer in Europe in the seventeenth century. He wrote morethan twelve emblem books and each was translated and reissued innumerous later editions. Between 1618 and 1642, 170,000 of Drexel'sbooks were sold in Munich alone - then a city of 22,000 inhabitants.Father Dimler, Research Professor of Emblem Studies at FordhamUniversity, has assembled every known study on Jesuit emblembooks and their authors. His bibliography includes both books writtenby individual Jesuits as well as those produced by Jesuit colleges andinstitutions.