Personification: an Introduction

Personification: An Introduction Walter S. Melion and Bart Ramakers Personification, or prosopopoeia, the rhetorical figure by which something not human is given a human identity or ‘face’, is readily spotted, but the figure’s cognitive form and function, its rhetorical and pictorial effects, rarely elicit scholarly attention. As a communicative device it is either taken for granted or dismissed as mere convention. The aim of this volume is to formulate an alternative account of personification, to demonstrate the ingenuity with which this multifaceted device was utilized by late medieval and early modern authors and artists. The fact that literary and pictorial genres designed to appeal to large audiences, such as festival plays and royal entries, often uti- lize allegorical personification, indicates that the figure was seen to accom- modate a wide spectrum of tastes and expectations. Personification operates in multiple registers—sensory and spiritual, visible and invisible, concrete and abstract—and it deals in facts, opinions, and beliefs. With reference to the visible, current events and situations were represented by means of personifications that objectified various social groups and institutions, as well as their defining ambitions and the forces that motivated them. As regards the invisible, processes of thinking, feeling, and experiencing were bodied forth by means of personifications that revealed how these modi operandi were constituted. Our interest in personification is motivated by several trends that have emerged over the last decade in cultural (historical) studies, whereby artistic expression is approached from the point of view of the body, performance, and cognition. Seen in light of these trends, personification (along with the texts and artifacts that employ the figure) offers many research opportuni- ties. In methodological terms, personification is susceptible to an approach that balances a more semiotic analysis, concentrating on meaningful effects, and a more phenomenological analysis, focusing on effects of presence. This approach would entail foregrounding the full scope of prosopopoeic dis- course—not just the what, but also the how, not only the signified, but also the signifier. The contributors to this volume address one or more of the following aspects of personification in their chapters. First, the theory of personification. What ideas about allegorical personification circulated in late medieval and early modern times? How were its principles and workings described, either explic- itly or implicitly? How can modern neuropsychological insights concerning © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ��6 | doi ��.��63/97890043�0438_00� 2 Melion and Ramakers metaphorical thinking be linked to theories of personification based in contemporary rhetorical theory? Second, the perception of personification. How did contemporary audiences perceive and interpret personifications? How did they react to them and make use of them? Did the device fulfill instructive, persuasive, propagandistic, mnemonic, or even meditative and contempla- tive functions? To what extent did personification stimulate the imagination or the inner eye? What about the element of playfulness? Third, the means of personification. How was the device constituted? What (self-)descriptive procedures of naming were involved? What kinds of visual and verbal inter- action? What clothes, attributes, gestures, facial expressions, positions, and actions? What courses of events or chains of thought, aided either by dialogue (in plays) or inscriptions (on prints)? Fourth, and lastly, the context of personification. What were the wider circumstances within which personification and genres based on personification allegory came to be employed, and how do these circumstances help to explain both the contents and effects of the device in practice? Did particular religious, social, and political situations stimulate its use? As already noted, personification is readily identified, but the figure’s cognitive form and function, its rhetorical and pictorial effects, have elicited little scholarly attention. Another question, therefore, is: Why is personification hardly studied? To find the answer, we have to delve—albeit not too deeply— into the history of allegory, or more precisely, into the study of allegory and its critical tradition; excavating this background will bring to light the mutually supportive relationship and interdependence of textual and visual approaches to allegory and personification. Only by combining the insights and opinions of both textual and visual scholars, of literary and art historians—the proj- ect of this volume—is it possible to answer the questions posed above. Much has been written on allegory, far less on personification. Both, moreover, are mainly studied from a textual point of view. We believe it necessary to empha- size the essentially visual character of both. This introduction opens by deal- ing briefly with the relation between personification and allegory, but it deals mainly with the manner and meaning of personification, and concentrates on some contemporary voices that expound the form, function, and meaning of personification, especially from a pictorial point of view. Personification and Allegory Talking about personification means talking about allegory. One reason for this is that texts and images which are considered allegories very often contain personifications. Where personification is used, allegories come into being. For Personification: An Introduction 3 this reason literary and art historians employ the term ‘personification allegory’ to denote both the procedure and the result of creating allegory through personification. Some even speak of allegory and allegories when they in fact mean personification and personifications. Traditionally, the study of allegory is the realm of textual scholars, literary historians in particular. And this for obvious reasons, since some written allegories from the medieval and early- modern periods—a number of which are discussed in this volume—are amongst the greatest treasures of world literature. There is another reason for the dominance of literary scholars amongst the students of allegory. This is that the word has two meanings or, to be more precise, that it refers to two procedures: a manner of writing and a manner of interpreting.1 The latter is called allegoresis and refers to the procedure of figural, non-literal reading of mythological and scriptural texts, especially the Bible.2 Others speak of critical or hermeneutical allegory or (in German) ‘auc- tores-Allegorese’.3 Allegory as a reading method is older than allegory as a manner of composition or style, which is also called rhetorical or creative allegory, and emerged from the moment the Greek term allêgoria (speaking) came to replace the term hyponoia (other-speaking):4 ‘Allegoria came to denote a form of writing as well as a form of reading’.5 As a compositional technique, allegory has always been a part of rhetoric. As a figure of speech or trope it is classified under elocutio, the third of the five canons of classical rhetoric. Quintilian in his Institutio Oratoria (8.6.44) pro- vides the standard and often repeated—well into early modernity—definition of it: ‘Allegory, which is translated in Latin by inversio, either presents one thing in words and another in meaning, or else something absolutely opposed to 1 Tambling J., Allegory, The New Critical Idiom (London – New York: 2010) 21–23; and Copeland R. – Struck P.T., “Introduction”, in eidem, The Cambridge Companion to Allegory (Cambridge: 2010) 1–11, here 2. Also see Copeland R. – Melville S., “Allegory and Allegoresis, Rhetoric and Hermeneutics”, Exemplaria 3,1 (1991) 159–187. 2 On allegory mainly as a narrative procedure and on allegorical reading and interpretation, see, for example, Madsen D.L., Rereading Allegory: A Narrative Approach to Genre (New York: 1994). 3 Meier C., “Überlegungen zum gegenwärtigen Stand der Allegorie-Forschung”, in Frühmittelalterliche Studien 10 (1976) 1–69, esp. 45–46. Also see Ohly F., “The Spiritual Sense of Words in the Middle Ages”, Forum for Modern Language Studies 41.2 (2005) 18–42; and Hellgardt E., “Erkenntnistheoretisch-ontologische Probleme uneigentlicher Sprache in Rhetorik und Allegorese”, in Haug W. (ed.), Formen und Funktionen der Allegorie. Symposion Wolfenbüttel 1978, Germanistische Symposien-Berichtsbande 3 (Stuttgart: 1979) 25–37, esp. 26–27. 4 Copeland – Struck, “Introduction” 2. 5 Ibid. 4 Melion and Ramakers the meaning of the words. The first type is generally produced by a series of metaphors’.6 Although he defines allegory in literary terms—the Institutio, after all, was a handbook of oratory—Quintilian and other rhetoricians, both classical and post-classical, are aware of the visual or pictorial aspects of this way of ‘other-speaking’ (or writing). Its aesthetic attraction and effect are attributed to its ability to arouse the listener’s (or reader’s) imagination, to bring lively images before the mind’s eye. This is also true for personification or prosopopoeia, which Quintilian takes to mean impersonation (from persona, meaning mask in Latin) and defines in the Institutio (9.2.29–32) as: a device which lends wonderful variety and animation to oratory. By this means we display the inner thoughts of our adversaries as though they were talking with themselves [. .]. [W]e are even allowed in this form of speech to bring down the gods from heaven and raise the dead, while cities

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