Deviceful Settings: The English Renaissance Emblem and its Contexts.

Moseley, C.W.R.D.

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. While it may seem to glorify Cromwell in almost Messianic terms, its subtext is far more ambiguous, and suggests quite other ways of seeing him at the height of his power. This essay is a natural complement to the case made by Eirwen E.C. Nicholson, `English Political Prints c. 1640-c. 1830: The Potential for Emblematic Research and the Failures of Prints Scholarship'. The provocative title introduces a polemical essay, arguing that the adjective `emblematic' can properly be applied to the rather conservative procedure and imagery used in single sheet engraving, title pages of polemical works, broadsheets, and pamphlets. She suggests that this material, `applied emblematics', deserves a more resourceful and open-minded methodology of study than it has received so far. (Much of the argument depends on precise reference to the prints themselves, which are not reproduced and are not held in all libraries: a pity the publisher could not be more generous.) Victor Morgan (`Perambulating and Consumable Emblems: The Norwich Evidence') stresses the visually informed rhetoric of the Renaissance, the universality of expressing abstract ideas in visual terms, and looks in particular at the evidence for the Guild Day and Guild Feast in Norwich in the early seventeenth century. Clearly, the celebration of the city's identity through the processions and ceremonies was conveyed by clever use of emblematic techniques, complemented in the climactic Guild Feast by the design not only of trenchers but of the very food that was eaten, not least the sugar and marchpane. The use of emblematic material in the ephemerality of table decoration and food presentation is difficult to research, but it is clearly of great significance in any assessment of the mentalite of the communal eaters. John H. Astington, `The Illustrations to Ashraea, 1665' suggests that the engraver of that Catholic emblem book was John Chantry, whose hand he sees in a lot of unsigned work of the period. There is an interesting deduction of a plausible working relationship between Chantry and the unknown author of the book. Finally, Peggy Munoz Simonds, `The Aesthetics of Magic and Meaning in Edward Collier's "Still Life with a volume of Wither's Emblemes"', places Collier's 1696 painting in the context of Dutch emblematic and vanitas painting, and the fashion for it in England in the time of William and Mary, and indicates how this cluttered painting subtly raises many complex issues, not least the status of art itself, and what it can convey. She takes issue, rightly I think, with Svetlana Alpers's rather literalist view of such Dutch painting, stressing its complexity, allusiveness, and intertextual, self-referential polyvalence. A provocative parallel with The Tempest teases, suggesting that play's links with the vanitas theme. This essay, which I read a few months after the news of Peggy Munoz Simonds's death arrived, is a model of close reading, and shows all the richness and resourcefulness of her thought. It reminds us of how much she will be missed.

There are a few minor proofreading errors. It is a pity the publisher could not find a more attractive and efficient way of reproducing the pictures, crucial in a book like this. The murky obscurity of many defeats even a strong light and a magnifying glass.

C. W. R. D. MOSELEY
WOLFSON COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE