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Recent developments in emblem studies
Michael Bath

The importance of emblem books to Dutch seventeenth-century culture has never been in doubt, and the distinctive contribution of Dutch emblem books to the way the emblem genre developed more widely - in England, France and Spain for instance - during the seventeenth century has long been recognised in such standard histories as Mario Praz's Studies in Seventeenth Century Imagery (London, 1939) and Rosemary Freeman's English Emblem Books (London, 1948). The last few years have seen a strong revival of scholarly interest in emblem books amongst literary- and art-historians, however, and there have been a number of recent developments in this field which may be of interest to Dutch scholars. As Peter Daly has recently claimed, the emblem ‘helped to shape virtually every form of verbal and visual communication during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The emblem is consequently a cultural phenomenon of major significance’. The statement can be found in Daly's summary of ‘Directions in Emblem Research’ in the first issue (Spring, 1986) of the journal Emblematica. The institution of the journal, published by AMS Press, New York, is itself a symptom of this recent reawakening of interest.

Research into emblem books has often been undertaken by specialists looking for answers to specific questions. Traditionally emblems have served, above all, as sources of evidence for received iconographic topoi, and emblem books tend to be pillaged, typically, in search of iconographic evidence. The dangers of regarding emblem books as simply a body of icon indices, however, ought to be recognised, and it would not be difficult to supply cautionary tales from the work of literaryand art-historians whose citations of emblematic sources frequently ignore the varying states of well-known editions, the often complex transmission of plates, texts and motifs, and the publishing history of the major emblematic authors. It would be difficult to imagine another area of work in this period where otherwise responsible and experienced scholars would lay themselves open to such errors, but the truth is that much of the fundamental bibliographical and iconographic work on the corpus of, we now estimate, two thousand editions of over a thousand titles by 600 authors - over a million printed emblems - which appeared from European presses between 1531 and 1700, remains still to be done. Symptomatic of this state of affairs is the bibliography of the 170 known editions of the Emblemata of Alciato, initiator of the emblematic genre; the standard bibliography is still Henry Green's, it dates from 1872 and its general reliability can be guaged from the fact that it begins with a notorious ghost. In a world where opportunities for original research are increasingly a condition of academic survival, it seems remarkable that this area should have been ignored for so long. It is not surprising that the time should seem ripe to coordinate the work of scholars in various languages and disciplines working in this field, and to begin to establish the study of the renaissance and baroque emblem as an area of enquiry in

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its own right.

The recent formation of the Society for Emblem Studies is a sign of this awareness. The Society owes its origins to a group of enthusiasts who had organised annual sessions at the Medieval Studies Congress at Western Michigan, Kalamazoo, and it is now establishing an international membership under an approved constitution. Indeed it is probably fair to suggest that the last few years have seen the necessary invention of a new area oñ research, to be known as ‘Emblem Studies’ - I am not aware that the phrase has had much currency until recently. The announcement of an instructional M.Litt degree in ‘Emblem Studies’ at Glasgow University suggests that this is now a discrete - albeit heavily interdisciplinary - subject, which can be taught. Glasgow University Library has for the past three years hosted meetings of the Glasgow Emblem Group, a research seminar which meets regularly to hear papers by members and visiting scholars. A similar research group, ‘Poétique de l'Emblème’, meets regularly in the University of Paris VIII.

The Society for Emblem Studies has no project beyond the modest aim of facilitating the development of individual and collaborative work in the field. It circulates a twice-yearly Newsletter, and organises international and local conferences. Its first major conference was in Glasgow, August 1987, on ‘The European Emblem’, and attracted 150 delegates to 70 papers in 20 sessions over three days. This was an open and exploratory meeting, to identify and represent as much as possible of the diverse work currently progressing in all languages and disciplines. One of the things it was felt to have shown was the need to bring scholars together again to consider further some of the specific theoretical and methodological problems in the study of emblems - particularly the different ways in which art-historians use literary evidence, and vice-versa. The Society sponsored colloquia at Princeton on Alciato in September, 1988, and in Montreal in the same month to discuss the possible institution of an ‘Index of Emblematic Art’. In December, 1989, it was associated with the colloquium organised by Professor Porteman at Leuven on ‘The Dutch Emblem: Requirements of International Research’. The next major international meeting will again be in Glasgow, in August 1990.

A brief review of recent work in emblem studies will serve to identify the major areas where further work still needs to be done. The primary bibliographical project is probably the most fundamental and urgent. Emblem books cross linguistic and national frontiers in a way that is characteristic of few other renaissance genres. The standard bibliographies are those by Mario Praz, in his Studies in Seventeenth Century Imagery and the three volumes by John Landwehr.^1. But we need to know much more about the publishing history, variant states and descent of individual titles and editions. Emblem books are rare books, and we need to know more about the location of copies, since few libraries possess very many. Catalogues of the major collections are therefore particularly welcome. We now have the short-title finding list of the largest single collection - the 1,777 emblem books in the Stirling Maxwell Collection in Glasgow (London: Scolar

1. German Emblem Books: A Bibliography (1972); Emblem Books in the Low Countries (1974; revised and augmented edition: 1988); French, Italian, Spanish and Portugeese Books of Devices and Emblems (1976) all three volumes published in Utrecht: Haentjens Dekker & Gumbert.

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Press, 1988, ed. David Weston). William Heckscher has compiled a catalogue of the important holdings at Princeton (Princeton University Library, 1984). The bibliographic data relating to the eight hundred-odd emblem books filmed by Inter Documentation Company, Leiden, for their microfiche series is shortly to be made available to libraries. The most important development in this area, however, is the Union Catalogue of Emblem Books Project which Professor Daly is directing from Montreal. This will eventually provide on-line access to a database, offering a detailed bibliographic description of the corpus, and identifying locations in European and North American libraries. The database will provide the material for several discrete printed bibliographies of emblem books in various languages, major collections, and subject areas, including the enormous corpus of Jesuit emblem books. Dr Sandra Sider is working in New York on an associated bibliography of emblematic manuscripts.

Work progresses, but has some way to go, on emblem theory, advancing our understanding of the nature of the emblem and its relation to analogous symbolic forms - hieroglyph, impresa, rebus, medal, fable, epigram, enigma, proverb, spiritual exercises, allegory, bestiary, mythologiae. Most of the modern work in this area has been undertaken by German scholars - the standard references are still Albrecht Schöne's 1964 Emblematik und Drama im Zeitalter des Barock and Dietrich Jöns's Das Sinnen-Bild (1966) or the Heckscher-Wirth entry: ‘Emblem, Emblembuch’ in Reallexicon zur Deutschen Kunstgeschichte (1959). Peter Daly's work (Emblem Theory, Nendeln/Lichtenstein: KTO Press, 1979) has made this research available to English readers. Histories of emblem books are necessarily histories of a distinct (or perhaps not so distinct) genre. The best of current historical work tends therefore to be interested in reconstructing historical genreconcepts, and can hardly dispense with an adequate genre-theory. The acceptance of a normative model or idealtypismus is increasingly called into question, as the realisation grows that the emblem was a constantly-evolving form, with a large number of sub-genres and congeners. Daniel Russell's recent The Emblem and Device in France (Lexington, Kentucky: French Forum, 1985) shows how this ought to be done - it is as much a history of evolving genre-concepts as of particular books. Only such work will begin to reclaim some precision in our use of terms. The question of precisely what Alciato meant, for instance, by the term ‘emblem’ when he initiated the genre by calling his collection of neo-Latin epigrams ‘Emblemata’ continues to exercise recent theory - Bernhard Scholz's essay in Emblematica, I.ii (1986) summarises and furthers this debate. An adequate theory of the emblem which took full account of modern semiotics has yet to be written.

In the area of iconography the need is to consolidate and extend the type of access to particular motifs which was provided by Henkel-Schöne's Emblemata. Handbuch zur Sinnbildkunst des XVI. u. XVII. Jahrhunderts (2nd ed. Stuttgart: Metzler, 1976). As a first-resource for the aspiring symbol-hunter, Henkel-Schöne is likely to remain indispensible, but it selects emblems from only 47 separate emblem books, and indexes only the pictures, not the mottoes or epigrams. Peter Daly's Index Emblematicus series (Toronto U.P.) has made a start towards a more

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comprehensive and exhaustive indexing of motifs; the Alciato volume has already appeared, (Toronto, 1985, 2 vols) and the first of the volumes on ‘The English Tradition’, covering Van der Noot, Daniel's translation of Giovio, and Geofrey Whitney (Toronto, 1988). The project has had to be cut back to cover only English emblem books, but even so it is already clear that conventional publishing methods will mean that such indexes will fill rather a lot of expensive shelf-space. Though the first impression of the Alciato index sold out, it is clear that a comprehensive motif-indexing project would probably have to be computer-based. A colloquium in Montreal, September 1988, looked at the indexes of Christian Art, and Iconclass as possible models for such a project. Such a tool will make it much easier to see how the corpus of emblem books shared and developed the received iconographic systems of European literature and art.

Histories of the national traditions of emblematics continue to appear, though we still await definitive histories of the emblem in Italy, and Spain. Because so many of the best-known emblem books were translated into various vernacular and polyglot editions, it is often unclear how useful it is, finally, to speak of independent national traditions of emblematics. An emblem book written in English and published in London may have more in common with similar books written in other languages, and published in Paris, Antwerp or Frankfurt, than it has with any other English emblem book, and the most important connections are always likely to be with the neo-Latin tradition in which the genre had its roots. There is, I believe, something a little odd about histories of English, Dutch, Italian or German emblem books which accept polyglot texts as belonging to a particular vernacular tradition, whilst excluding Latin editions, often by the same authors - editions which in many instances include the same emblems. There have been two quite different recent histories of emblem books in France, since in addition to Daniel Russell's Emblem and Device in France, Alison Saunders' The C16 French Emblem Book (Geneva: Droz, 1988) offers a more traditional descriptive and evaluative account. Ingrid Höpel's Emblem und Sinnbild (Frankfurt: Athenäum, 1987) adds to existing historical studies of the emblem in Germany. Karel Porteman's 1977 Inleiding tot de Nederlandse Emblemataliteratuur (Groningen: Wolters-Noordhof, 1977) has helped to define the particular characteristics of the national tradition which was, perhaps, more distinctive than most, updating the earlier history of Dutch emblem books by E.F. von Monroy, Embleme und Emblembücher in der Niederlanden, 1560-1630 (Utrecht: Haentjens, Dekker & Gumbert, 1964). P.F. Campa's history of the emblem in Spain is announced from E.J. Brill in their important new series. ‘Symbola et Emblemata’. It is now over forty years since Rosemary Freeman wrote the standard history of English Emblem Books - in the intervening years much new information has come to light, and critical approaches to emblem books and to Renaissance texts generally have changed significantly. I am currently engaged on writing a new history of The English Renaissance Emblem to be published by Longman, London, in 1992.

Facsimiles and reprints of rare emblem books continue to appear. IDC's ambitious project for their comprehensive microfiche series is well advanced; Olms Verlag continue to add to their ‘Emblematisches Cabinet’, and Scolar Press,

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London, have recently announced a relaunch of their emblem book reprint series, with new and longer introductions than the original series contained. Volumes announced so far include Thomas Combe, Whitney, Schola Cordis, Paradin and Wither. As yet very few emblem books have been reissued in scholarly editions with an adequate apparatus criticus. K.J.Höltgen's forthcoming edition of Francis Quarles (Olms Verlag) will certainly meet these requirements, and fill what is perhaps the most conspicuous gap in the modern reprint canon. The recent edition of the emblems of Joachim Camerarius, edited by Wolfgang Harms and Ulla Britta-Kuechen (Graz: Akademische Druck-u. Verlagsanstalt, 1988) offers a substantial introduction and critical apparatus. August Buck's separatim Introduction to the facsimile of Sambucus's Emblemata (1564) (Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó, 1982) presents the finest results of modern scholarship on this most important and influential book. Karel Porteman's edition of P.C. Hooft's Emblemata amatoria (Leiden 1983), which is provided with expansive comments in depth, offers a substantial introduction to the Dutch love emblem. Klaus Conermann's edition of the emblems produced by the Köthen academy at the court of Ludwig I of Anhalt-Köthen, Die Früchtbringende Geselsschaft (VCH: Acta Humaniora, 1986) provides one of the most comprehensive and thoroughly-annotated modern editions of an emblem book. Anthony Hippisley's edition of the first Russian emblem book, Ambodik's Symbola et Emblemata, created for Peter the Great,) shows how it uses its renaissance and baroque sources, as Hippisley's exhaustive editorial commentary explains; the volume is the first to appear in the new series from E.J. Brill.

More general studies of the emblem are appearing in ever increasing numbers. The Henkel-Schöne Handbuch listed 2338 secondary works to 1967. More recent work is summarised in Jerome S. Dees's excellent ‘Recent Studies in the English Emblem’ in ELR 16 (1986), 391-420. Peter Daly and Mary Silcox have now completed their bibliography of secondary literature on English Emblems, which will be published shortly by K.G. Saur, Munich, in their new Corpus Librorum Emblematum series. The first volume to appear in the AMS Press series ‘Studiesin the Emblem’ is The English Emblem and the Continental Tradition (New York, 1988), a collection of individual studies of continental sources and influences on the emblem in England, edited by Peter Daly. Alan Young's exhaustive list of English Tournament Imprese has appeared in the same series, providing the full documentation to supplement his recent Tudor and Jacobean Tournaments (London: George Philip, 1987). In the same series is John Manning's edition of the manuscript emblems of Thomas Palmer, created in 1565 for the Earl of Leicester. Some of the directions of current work on the English emblem are represented in K.J. Höltgen's Aspects of the Emblem (Kassel: Reichenberger, 1986). C.W.R Moseley's A Century of Emblems provides the nearest thing to date to a general teaching text which will introduce students to a full range of emblems in various languages and of different periods, with a descriptive and analytical commentary on each of the hundred emblems which it reproduces; it is the first volume to appear in the new series of reprints from Scolar Press, London. Recent books on Alciato by F.W.G.Leeman (Alciatus's Emblemata. Denkbeelden en voorbilden, Groningen: Bouma's Boekhuis, 1984) and by Johannes Köhler (Der Emblematum liber

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von Andreas Alciatus, Hildesheim: Lax Verlag, 1986) testify to the extent of continuing work on Alciato, as does the volume of essays on Alciati and the Emblem Tradition (1989) from AMS Press. Much work on emblems is appearing in other contexts. The debate about a specifically Protestant poetics of the emblem begun by Barbara Lewalski in 1979 has been pursued in E.B. Gilman's Iconoclasm and Poetry in the English Reformation (Chicago, 1986). Studies of the emblem are, naturally, well represented in various books and journals devoted to the wider relationship between word and visual image, specifically in the journal Word and Image, in the Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, and in the collection of essays, Word and Visual Imagination. Studies in the Interaction of English Literature and the Visual Arts, ed. Höltgen (Erlangen: Universitätsbibliothek, 1988). A regular Forschungsbericht of emblem research is now an increasingly urgent requirement.

Membership of the Society for Emblem Studies is open to all interested scholars, and costs £5.00 per annum. Further information from: Dr Michael Bath. University of Strathclyde, Department of English Studies, Glasgow G1 1XH, Great Britain.