This volume of the Index Emblematicus deals with three early seventeenth-century works: Remaines of a Greater Worke Concerning Britaine, by William Camden; The Mirrour of Maiestie, by H.G.; and Otto van Veen's Amorum Emblemata. Camden's Remaines is noteworthy for using imprese in language as pictorial image; for mixing imprese with cognizance; and for considering impresa itself as the identity of the individual rather than as a general principle. H.G.'s Mirrour is remarkable in that every one of its emblems consists of a personal heraldic coat of arms of an identified statesman twinned with a pictorial engraving, motto, and epigram on an opposite page. Van Veen's Emblemata enters literary history as a volume of emblem pictures consecrated to secular love experience, encapsulating some of the conventions of the sonnet sequences and having a strong influence on religious love literature. Each book is reproduced with critical and bibliographic introductions, translation of the poems and mottos, descriptions of the emblems, and indices to the visual and verbal components of the works.

The literature of the 16th and 17th centuries was informed by the symbolic thought embodied in the mixed art form of emblems. This study explores the relationship between the emblem and the literature of England and Germany during the period.

This publication is the first of its kind. It approaches Anglo-Dutch relations from the angle of the production of the highly popular emblem book and its influence on important cultural and political events, mainly in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

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.

This bibliography provides descriptions of 432 manuscripts from Europe and the United States, of which 341 contain visual imagery in various media. The manuscripts feature tripartite emblems proper, as well as festivity books, hieroglyphic texts, proto-emblematic material, allegories, triumphs, symbolic source books, schemata, devotional handbooks, and libri amicorum with emblematic imagery.

This book discusses the printers’ devices used in Poland-Lithuania in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The compositions that served to identify the products of individual printers are explored here as previously unacknowledged research material for cultural studies: they allow for the reconstruction of the mentality of contemporary printers as well as their co-workers and reading public. The book investigates relationships within early modern intellectual communities and shows that the textual and visual discourses of the printers’ devices were pan-European, reflecting the networked communities of European centres of learning and commerce. It documents the broad range of the output of Polish-Lithuanian presses as well and is therefore also a study of book culture in a multinational and multilingual state, whose inheritance is poorly recognised internationally.

In recent years, literary scholars have come increasingly to acknowledge that an adequate understanding of texts requires the study of books, the material objects through which the meanings of texts are constructed. Focusing on French poetry in the period 1400-1600, contributors to this volume analyze layout, illustration, graphology, paratext, typography, anthologization, and other such elements in works by a variety of writers, among them Charles d'Orléans, Jean Bouchet, Pierre de Ronsard and Louise Labé. They demonstrate how those elements play a crucial role in shaping the relationships between authors, texts, contexts, and readers, and how these relationships change as the nature of the book evolves. An introduction to the volume outlines the methodological implications of studying the materiality of literature in this period; situates the various papers in relation to each other and to the field as a whole; and indicates possible future directions of research in the field. By engaging with issues of major current methodological concern, this volume appeals to all scholars interested in the materiality of the literary text, including the burgeoning field of text-image studies, not only in French but also in other national literatures. In addition, it enables fruitful connections to be made between late-medieval and Renaissance literature, areas still often studied in isolation from each other.

Itineraries, perambulations, and surveys : the intersections of chorography and cartography in the sixteenth century / John M. Adrian -- To serve my purpose : interpretive agency in George Wither's A collection of emblemes / Rob Browning -- The three noble kinsmen : Chaucer, Shakespeare, Fletcher / Kathryn L. Lynch -- Ovid and the question of politics in early modern England / Heather James -- Parodies lost : Aretino reads Raimondi /Helen M. Whall -- Accepting the flesh : George Herbert and the sacrament of Holy Communion / Jeannie Sargent Judge -- Twixt treason and convenience : some images of Thomas Wentworth, first Earl of Strafford / Julia B. Griffin -- Backbiters, flatterers, and monarchs : domestic politics in The tragedy of Mariam / Heather E. Ostman -- Gender and the market in Henry VI, I / Jennifer A. Rich -- Hrethel's heirloom : kinship, succession, and weaponry in Beowulf / Erin Mullally -- Shylock : Shakespeare's bad Jew / Jay L. Halio -- Coping with providentialism : trauma, identity, and the failure of the English Reformation / Scott Lucas.

This study examines representations of early modern female consorts and regnants via extra-literary emblematics such as paintings, jewelry, miniature portraits, carvings, placards, masques, funerary monuments, and imprese.