Deviceful Settings: The English Renaissance Emblem and Its Contexts

Abstract

Deviceful Settings: The English Renaissance Emblem and its Contexts. Ed. Michael Bath and Daniel Russell. (AMS Studies in the Emblem, 13) New York: AMS Press. 1999. xii + 256 pp. $78. This volume of essays is based on papers from the Third International Emblem Conference in Pittsburgh (1993). Alastair Fowler's magisterial keynote address, `The Emblem as a Literary Genre', provides a stimulating and richly suggestive opening. Alan R. Young has recently edited the manuscript emblem books of Henry Peacham in the Index Emblematicus (Vol. v), and his `Jacobean Authority and Peacham's Manuscript Emblems' is complementary to the succinct introduction he there offers. The emblem form carried its own special sort of literary authority during the Renaissance, and James I, much concerned by authority of all sorts, is known to have been interested in it. Peacham, who met James at Hinchingbrooke on the progress down England in 1603, sought his patronage, and later that of Prince Henry, for whom James wrote Basilikon Doron. Young shows that Peacham's three manuscript emblem books are related not only to James's Basilikon Doron, but also (especially in case of the heraldic emblems, which stress authority, legitimacy, and descent), to the iconography and themes of James's triumphal entry in London. The case for Peacham supporting (opportunistically or not) James's ideas of godlike, absolutist kingship is convincingly made out. Judith Dundas, `Unriddling the Antique: Peacham's Emblematic Art', explores Peacham's use and adaptation, in Minerva Britanna, of his sources, in particular Laurentius Heachtanus. The freedom of some of his verses sometimes makes their thrust more explicit (less subtle?) than the original; and the pictures, even allowing for the difference in medium, reveal that his artistic ability was rather limited. Jane Farnsworth, `An equall, and a mutuall flame: George Wither's A Collection of Emblemes 1635 and Caroline Court Culture', explores the cultural context of Wither's book. Taking with due seriousness the dedications to King, Queen, and major figures of the court, she sees the book as part of a celebration of ideas of marriage and monarchy as they could and might be, and links it with the attitudes that the `Court neo-Platonism' surrounding Henrietta Maria and Charles I encouraged. To fit the book into the search for patronage and the perennial desire to influence the great is attractive. Perhaps more attention might be given to the re-application by Wither of the blocks he took over from Rollenhagen's Nucleus Emblematum Selectissimorum, and the relationship between his verses and those of the earlier book. The case for Wither's originality is not entirely convincing, and Rosemary Freeman's remark about Wither's old-fashionedness still stands. Lyndy Abraham, `Arthur Dee's Hieroglyph', reminds us of Arthur Dee, son of the more famous John, himself no negligible chymist nor physician. When Doctor in Phisik to James I, in 1621 he was headhunted by Tsar Michael Romanov, and while in Moscow composed his Fasciculus Chemicus, a collection of alchemical material. Elias Ashmole treated his work with respect. Abraham's essay extends her work in the byways of alchemy, the arcane art where attempts to manipulate matter were part of a search for the transmutation of the self, a uniting, coniunctio, of heaven and earth. Bruce Lawson, `The Body as a Political Construct: Oliver Cromwell's Image in William Faithorne's 1658 Emblematic Engraving', demonstrates that this complex print, built from many visual and verbal elements available to Faithorne, is deeply ambiguous. …

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