Yet, inconveniently, emblems continued to be published and sold. This was, apparently, in 1686, when John Bunyan dedicated his emblems to boys and girls. Rosemary Freeman in her history of the English emblem book was confident enough to date the demise of the emblem. As with origins, the ‘end’ of the emblem tends to be grossly exaggerated. It was clear that notions of chronology had to be reconfigured and rethought. The regulation, ordering and systematizing of symbolic forms might induce innovation, but equally could act as a conservative brake on novelty. Replicated themselves through ingrained rhetorical habits of imitation, so that a ‘new’ emblem book could accommodate persistent survivals of traditional habits of thinking, writing and reading. Woodblocks and copperplates archived in the printing-houses could be taken up and reused. Nor were later editions or texts an infallible ‘advance’ over their predecessors. ‘Beginnings’ could coincide with a first edition, but equally emerge in a later editorial innovation.
‘Origins’, for instance, had the disconcerting habit of receding, or paradoxically appearing much later than one had at first believed. Orderly and rational though this might appear, it did not take long to realize that it was based on the naïve assumption that the calender was a real guide to generic developments. The Ariadne’s thread through this labyrinth was bibliographical: dates of first editions would determine where a work was discussed. Beginning with the sixteenth century, each chapter would unfold successive ‘centuries’ of emblems. My method was to have provided a historical overview of the form. My original aim was to offer an alternative to studies of emblems, which were either synchronically or unhistorically conceived, or which were essentially motif studies, which unrealistically pretended to unlock the coded conceptual allegories of Renaissance and Baroque art or to deliver the ‘meaning’ of literary texts. This present book attempts to do so by setting the emblem against the backdrop of a shared European neo-Latin culture of festive celebration.
The pervasiveness of the emblem surely leads us in a different direction: that the emblem itself can only be understood in terms of the broad cultural assumptions that produced it.
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This surely places too great a burden on the narrow shoulders of a form that began life as no more than a series of terse epigrams. Collectively these can be seen to impinge on every aspect of Renaissance and Baroque culture.1 The inference from this has frequently been that emblems might be used as a peep-hole into the cultural assumptions of the period. Daly, the most tireless modern apologist for the emblem, has conservatively estimated that there are ‘perhaps as many as two thousand’ emblematic titles in all European languages. Lyly, EuphuesĪn Emblem without a Key to’t, is no more than a Tale of a Tub Sir Roger L’Estrange, ‘Preface’, Fables of Æsop and other Eminent Mythologistsįoreword 9 Acknowledgements 11 Introduction 13 1 Talking with the Dead: The Beginning and Before the Beginning 37 2 Towards an Emblematic Rhetoric 80 3 The Imaginotheca: Curators and Janitors 110 4 Children and Childish Gazers 141 5 Carnal Devotions 166 6 Fame’s Double Trumpet 185 7 Licentious Poets and the Feast of Saturn 220 8 Last Things 275 Appendix: Three Emblem Books 321 References 345 Select Bibliography 379 List of Illustrations 385 Index 392 If shal seeme to light to be read of the wise, or to foolish to be regarded of the learned, they ought not to impute it to the iniquitie of the author, but to the necessitie of the history.
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I want cups, and free words, games and jokes, too Sambucus, Emblemata, page 80 EGO VERA LOQUOR Nil sit in ore, qvod non prius in sensu Nothing can by the mouth, which was not previously by the senses. What thou seest, write in a book … Revelation 1. Printed and bound in Great Britain by St Edmundsbury Press, Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Manning, John, 1948– The emblem 1.Emblems in art 2.Emblems in literature I.Title 704.9’46 isbn 1 86189 110 5 Published by Reaktion Books, Ltd 79 Farringdon Road, London ec1m 3ju, uk First published 2002 Copyright © John Manning 2002 All rights reserved Typography by Ron Costley No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.
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