A NOTE ON EMBLEM BOOKS

Turnbull Library Record, Volume VII, 1 June 1947, Page 16

A NOTE ON EMBLEM BOOKS

According to the Oxford Dictionary, the meaning of ‘ emblem ’ in the early seventeenth century was ‘ an object or a picture of one, representing symbolically an abstract quality, an action, a class of persons etc.’, or ‘ a moral fable or allegory’. Emblem books have been rather a neglected branch of book lore save for a few scattered studies over the past eighty years, but their immense vogue and frequent production in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries entitle them to some regard.

It is curious that the thin thread of emblem interest links three articles in our present issue. For the interpretation of emblems is decidedly one of the supports of the Baconians, and association and admiration bind the greatest of the emblem writers to the author of a little law book later described.

Not long ago a volume of Andrea Alciati’s Emblems, 1566, was purchased from a local source. Already the library had several such volumes, but we had not regarded them as a class till now. As a whole, the group is small, but representative enough to allow of a useful examination of this kind of book, so completely characteristic of its age.

Alciati was a Milanese born in 1492, who was a famous jurisconsult, and widely known for his emblems and for his neatly turned classical, satirical, and sometimes witty stanzas in Latin which he appended to them. This became the accepted form for emblem books—an illustration with a related four or more lines of verse. His first known book was published in 1531 and this and others went through scores of editions in the next century or so. Although he was probably the best known of such writers, he is one of a veritable army of them, of whom Henry Green, the great authority of last century, listed 1300, compilers of over 3000 volumes of emblems.

Apart from its interest as a literary and occasional form, the emblem book evoked much pictorial and often artistic production. Famous engravers, many of whom are. represented in the library, include Jost Amman, Theodor de

Bry, Crispin de Passe, Albrecht Durer, Hans Holbein, and Wencelaus Hollar. These names are all associated with the illustration of emblem books.

In England a few translations of the continental productions were published, but the native output was slight. Quarles, Wither and Whitney are the principal names we know, and the library has the 1639 text of the first, the 1635 edition of the second, and Henry Green’s reprint (1866) of the last. Of Quarles there are other editions of the nineteenth century.

Two English editions of the eighteenth century with good copper plates are based on continental models. One is called Emblems for the entertainment and improvement of youth, published in London in 1750. The other is by Herman Hugo, who was a popular Belgian producer of emblem books; our example is a version of 1702, Pia Desideria, or Divine addresses, englished by one Edmund Arwaker, with 47 copperplates. Of other European specimens, the Emblemata Sacra de Fide, Spe, Charitate, 1636, by Hesius, with over 100 little woodcuts, and Emblemata et aliquot nummi antiqui opens by Sambucus, 1610, both printed by the famous Plantin Press of Antwerp, are of interest, the latter, incidentally, for its depicting of an early game of tennis. A Dutch specimen dated 1635, by Luiken, De bykorf des Gemoeds, is the only text in that language, and carried 100 engravings.

A certain number of works impinge upon the emblem style, such as the Dance of Death, Ars Moriendi, Biblia Pauperum and Brant’s Ship of Fools, editions of which are present. Achilles Bocchius’s Symbolicarum qucestionium de universo genere, libri quinque / a handsome 1555 edition of which was acquired last year, may be included, as can the Mirror of Majestie 1618.

In fact the extent to which emblem making is to be linked with heraldry, flags and banners, the engraving and woodcut art, decorative art etc. is scarcely yet assessed. Their depicting of scenes, costumes and events of their age gives them a consequence in the history of culture. Henry Green has been mentioned above for his studies

in this realm. His name figures a number of times in the catalogue, for his several excellent editions (by the Holbein Society) of Alciati, for a bibliography of the same, and for his study on Shakespeare and the Emblem writers.

A further survey revealed a score or more of studies in literary and historical journals that covered the ground in very satisfactory fashion. Of these perhaps the best is Bailey’s New light on the Renaissance, 1909.