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A Comparative, Iconographic Study of Early-Modern, French Emblems

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A Comparative, Iconographic Study of Early-Modern, French Emblems A Comparative, Iconographic Study of Early-Modern, Religious Emblems Julie E. Barr Degree of Doctor of Philosophy University of Glasgow French Section May 2008 © Julie Barr 1 Acknowledgments There are a number of people without whom this would not have been possible. I am deeply grateful to my supervisors, Professor Alison Adams and Dr. Laurence Grove for all their help and advice, as well as to the staff of the French Section at Glasgow University. I would like also to extend my thanks to David Weston, Keeper of the Special Collections at the University of Glasgow for kindly allowing me to reproduce the images included in this volume. My thanks must go also to my fellow postgraduate students, in particular Fiona Barclay, Sally Clark, and Lucy Whiteley for their collegiate spirit. Above all else I must thank my parents, John and Shirley, my sister, Marianne and last, but not least, Marcus for their continued and unwavering support and patience. 2 Abstract Although scholarly interest in the field of emblematics has increased greatly over the last decade, there is still much to be done, particularly in the area of religious emblems. The emblem form has been considered from the perspective of individual author, geographical factors and theological background but there have been few comparative studies with respect to religious emblems. This study will compare Protestant and Catholic emblems produced during the Reformation and Counter- Reformation, drawing on specific examples from, in particular, France, but also Germany and England. Emblems played a huge role in early-modern life. They expressed contemporary thought and also became part of the physical environment, being etched into stone, or wood, or sewn into cloth as decoration. In a period of such political, civil, and religious unrest, it would, therefore, seem likely that the Catholic and Protestant emblem would be quite distinct types either expressing theologically opposed notions, or manipulating the text/image relationship in quite different ways. Understanding how these emblems functioned, therefore, necessitates close reading, indeed, reading in the way the emblems were intended to be read. This study, therefore, will address the question of differences through detailed analysis of specific examples. This study begins with an introduction which gives a brief history of emblem literature and a review of relevant secondary material. Key terms and definitions regarding emblems are also explained here. This chapter also introduces the authors of the emblems analysed in later chapters. The first part of this thesis examines the emblem form in the wider context of the Reformation. From an initial overview of some of the key issues of the Reformation in chapter one, chapters two and three move on to analyse closely a wide corpus of Catholic and Protestant emblems. In these chapters the emblem is broken down into its component parts of verse and picture. Chapter two examines the religious emblem from the perspective of motif while chapter three approaches the emblem from a thematic angle. The second part of this study adopts a different approach presenting case studies of three authors. Chapter four explores the importance of the visual element in the emblems of Protestant author Rollenhagen. Chapter five investigates the Jesuit influences which shape the emblems of Catholic Berthod. While chapters four and five offer an insight into the work of prototypical Protestant and Catholic authors chapter six demonstrates the successful fusion of both Protestant and Catholic influences in the emblems of Wither. Indeed, this study suggests that the differences between Protestant and Catholic at this time are largely exaggerated with respect to emblems. Protestant and Catholic emblems are not, this study maintains, in essence all that different. It argues that, in fact, Protestant and Catholic emblems were often very close in terms of content and that the real difference is in the way they manipulate the text/image relationship. 3 Contents Page Ref. Acknowledgments 2 Abstract 3 Contents 4 Introduction 5 Part 1: The Religious Emblem and its Context Foreword 27 Chapter 1: The Religious Emblem in Context 30 Afterword 66 Foreword 69 Chapter 2: ‘I am the light of the world’: An Examination of Motifs of 71 Light Chapter 3: ‘Time waits for no man’: An Examination of the Theme of 111 Time Afterword 154 Part 2: Case Studies of Specific authors Foreword 157 Chapter 4: Rollenhagen: A Visual Puzzle 159 Chapter 5: Berthod: A Franciscan Following a Jesuit Model 194 Chapter 6: Wither: A European, Fusional Approach to Emblems 229 Afterword 256 Conclusions 260 Bibliography 271 Appendix 1 289 4 Introduction The early-modern period was a time of great change. In particular it was also a time of great technological and scientific advancement. The advent of the printing press, for example, was radically to change the face of European culture. The Renaissance also saw the advancement of the arts and the emergence of new forms of art and literature. Emblem books were just one of these new forms which sprang up. This may have been a period of immense development but it was also an age of great political and religious upheaval with the Reformation causing an irreconcilable rift in the Church. That the events of the Reformation forever changed the course of modern Christianity is undeniable. It marked a dramatic and permanent divide between Protestant and Catholic cultures in terms of education and worship for centuries to come. Elizabeth Eisenstein stresses the immediate impact of this divide and, arguing that the Reformation had further reaching implications than simply theological ones, points to a rift in Protestant and Catholic thinking on all levels: Sixteenth century heresy and schism shattered Christendom so completely that even after religious warfare had ended, ecumenical movements led by men of good will could not put all the pieces together again. Not only were there too many splinter groups, separatists, and independent sects who regarded a central church government as incompatible with true faith; but the main lines of cleavage had been extended across continents and carried overseas with Bibles and breviaries. Within a few generations, the gap between Protestant and Catholic had widened sufficiently to give rise to contrasting literary 1 cultures and lifestyles. 1 Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, The Printing Press in Early-Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), p. 155. 5 If the ramifications of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation had indeed given rise to independent literary styles, then we would expect this to be reflected in emblematic literature, which by its very nature was a reflection of contemporary culture. Elisabeth Labrousse, however, disagrees. She argues that hostility between Protestants and Catholics has been exaggerated and warns against overstating the differences between Protestants and Catholics, arguing that this conceals what they shared, especially at the level of the community where they had a number of common interests’. 2 Labrousse does not deny the differences between Protestants and Catholics, rather she argues that aside from the irreconcilable theological issues, on a social level, if there were differences at all, they were differences of degree. That there is much work still to be done in this area is highlighted by Christopher Hill, who writes, ‘There is certainly room for further thought and enquiry about a literary form which could appeal alike to Jesuits and to fiercely anti-Catholic Protestants’. 3 This study aims to examine French Protestant and Catholic emblematic literature in light of these conflicting opinions. Emblem books are unique in that they are conventionally understood to be the first pan-European text-image form. Unlike the illuminations of the earlier manuscript tradition, the symbolic imagery of the emblem is, more often than not, central in unravelling the meaning. The picturae , in other words, are not simply illustrative: not only do they complement the text, but they carry their own set of codified meanings which need to be ‘read’ in conjunction with the text in order to gain a full insight into 2 Elisabeth Labrousse, ‘ Une Foi, une loi, un Roi?’: La Révocation de l’Edit de Nantes ( Geneva: Labor et Fides, c. 1985), p. 70. 3 Christopher Hill, ‘Francis Quarles and Edward Benlowes’, in The Collected Essays of Christopher Hill , (Brighton: Harvester, 1985), II, pp. 188-206 (p. 196). 6 the message of the emblem. 4 Anne-Elisabeth Spica, for example, defines symbolic in an emblematic context in the following way, ‘la symbolique donc désigne la codification des rapports d’analogie entre l’objet et l’idée’. 5 Defining an emblem, however, remains difficult: for Daniel Russell, the emblem is neither one thing or the other but the ‘bridge between allegory, the dominant symbolic and rhetorical form of late medieval culture, and the type of metaphor that begins to take shape with European romanticism’. 6 But what is it that sets emblems apart from other early-modern allegorical forms such as the impresa ? As a general rule (although there are many exceptions), emblems can be described as having a tripartite format comprising a title or motto ( inscriptio ), an image ( pictura ), and a verse ( subscriptio ), usually printed in that order. 7 The meaning of an emblem is gleaned from the combination of these elements: the text and image must be considered together for the full moral lesson to become apparent. What the interaction between text and image necessitates is a special kind of ‘emblematic reading’. The eye of the reader does not scan from left to right, from top to bottom as 4 For more on the relationship between text and image in emblems see: Alison Saunders, ‘Picta Poesis: The Relationship between Figure and Text in the Sixteenth-Century French Emblem Book’, BHR , 48.3 (1986), 621-52. See also: David Graham, ‘“Voiez icy en ceste histoire…”: Cross-Reference, Self- Reference and Frame-Breaking in Some French Emblems’, Emblematica , 7.1 (1993), 1-24.
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