Tudor Royal Iconography, by John N. King

CITATION: King, John N. Tudor Royal Iconography: Literature and Art in an Age of Religious Crisis. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989.
Understanding

• Question: How does royal iconography change reference throughout the Tudor period?
• Answer: Iconography consistently represent royals as God's governors, and in terms of Old Testament kings and queens, but inconsistently acknowledge the authority of other sources: Henry VII founded his legitimacy on the veneration of Henry VI and the degradation of Richard III; Henry VII, Henry VIII, and Philip II enjoyed the Pope's cap and sword of maintenance; the Davidic imagery of Henry VIII   extended to Edward VI; Mary I rejected Reformation books and icons in favor of conservative images; Elizabeth I erased Mary's dynastic position. 
• Method: King connects Tudor dynastic politics with references in contemporary visual arts, with an emphasis on religious woodcuts (esp. John Foxe),  literature, with emphasis on The Faerie Queene, and religious texts, especially Bibles.
• Assumptions: King reproduces Ruth Luborsky and Betty Ingram's classification of adapted, copied, emplematic, narrative, representational, and symbolic images.
  King treats sponsored, sanctioned, and spontaneous artworks as equally representative of authorized Tudor aesthetics.
• Sententiae: "These illustrations [from Acts and Monuments] differ from most prior English work in the attention devoted to detail, but they retain the tendency toward verticality that is a traditional hallmark of native design... When [John] Day commissioned woodblocks for the books he published, he played the central role of artistic 'middleman' so successfully that he gained a reputation as the publisher of the finest illustrated books of sixteenth-century England... In general, woodcut images are subordinate to the texts in which they appear. For this reason, and because the author's extensive printed commentary offers a detailed program containing many allusions to imagistic details and cross-references to the body of history, Foxe must have joined Day in planning the woodcut series. He might have designed some of the sketches for illustrations" (133-4).

Overstanding

• Assessment: King's survey provides excellent through-lines for the turbulent Tudor periods. There are moments when he explicitly repeats or re-explains Davidic imagery, but that's a minor sin.
• Synthesis: Like Fowler, King relies on the mutual intelligibility of multiple arts and texts. But unlike Fowler, King does not treat narrative or perspectival image-texts as allegorically or politically structured.
• Application: King's analysis could be extended to explain the influence of politics on structure or perspective of images and texts, on the invitation of Fowler.

Renaissance Realism, by Alastair Fowler

CITATION: Fowler, Alastair. Renaissance Realism: Narrative Images in Literature and Art. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003.

Understanding

• Question: How did Renaissance narrative anticipate realism?
• Answer:  Mimetic time, space, and identification were not confined to a point of perspective or representation, and were instead united by moralistic or allegorical themes.
• Method: While comparing drama, poetry, and visual art, Fowler separately approaches the issues of space, event, sequence, allegory, spectacle, and character; and lastly applies a combined approach to The Faerie Queene and Hamlet.
• Assumptions: Fowler responds to a tradition of literary criticism that treats novelistic realism as the true essence of realism, only accessible through the revival of classical unities. He includes visual art in his analysis because he claims it was intelligible with visual art in the Renaissance. Lastly, Fowler acknowledges that he interprets visual art only to understand visual imagination, rather than engaging with his selection in other modes.
• Sententiae: "Free temporal movement; empathy with the outer world; spectatorial involvement: all were still possible."

Overstanding

• Assessment: Fowler makes an important contribution to integrating early modern text and image, even if he makes on contributions to the early modern conception of narrative. Fowler draws in image on the basis of a "know it when I see it" approach to narrative, and totally disregards the images' stories in favor of discourse. In some schools of narrative theory, narrative occurs in the distance between tenor and vehicle, story and discourse: Fowler unknowingly naturalizes this assumption when he selects narrative images without examining his heuristics, or more importantly, when he describes Renaissance mimesis as doubly representative allegorically structured.
• Synthesis: On the one hand, Fowler's analysis seems cut against the grain of Chartier's central argument. Chartier argues that books and surrounding concepts (the author, the library) have been socially constructed throughout history. Fowler, on the other hand, treats realism and narrative as though they were codes independent of form or history.
  On the other hand, Fowler selects images and texts in a way that breaks out of several of the generic lines that Chartier might be concerned with deconstructing.
• Application: The application might be the slipperiest part of this. If the Renaissance conception of mimesis includes allegorical structure, then it's much harder to discern what's mimetic and what's not: because every instance of representation might be superimposed with a second representation, or because every instance of high-fallutin' symbolism might draw in a handful of accurate representations (eg Epicene).

The Order of Books, by Roger Chartier, trans Lydia Cochrane

CITATION: Chartier, Roger. The Order of Books: Readers, Authors, and Libraries in Europe between the Fourteenth and Eighteenth Centuries. Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press, 1994. Print.


Understanding

• Question: What institutions did Europeans invent to manage the plurality of meanings in print books?
• Answer: authors, and libraries: (1) Material social practices determine the plural and creative readings enacted by communities of readers; (2) Foucault's author-function emerged in the Middle Ages in many types of texts, and declines less rapidly than described in the sciences; (3) The advent of print shifted hopes for an exhaustive library from physical spaces to bibliographies and meta-bibliographies.
• Method: (1) Selections in collections indicate the plurality of audiences and readings available for early print works. (2) A statistical review of Petrarch's corpus shows that authorship, rather than textual identity, more strongly organized manuscript collections. (3) The emergent genre of bibliographies slowly discarded reference to physical spaces.
• Assumptions: (1) Reading practices can be reconstructed unproblematically from textual features in historical texts. (2) A critical convergence (between reader response, new historicism, sociology of texts) on authors necessitates a re-evaluation of Foucault's linkage between the author-function and power. (3) The writing of bibliographies acknowledges the necessary incompleteness of collections. 
• Sententiae: "For both the New Criticism and analytical bibliography, the production of meaning relied on the automatic and impersonal operation of a system of signs -- either the system instituting the language of the text or the one organizing the form of the printed object. Consequently, both approaches refused to consider that the manner in which a work is read, received, and interpreted has any importance for establishing its meaning, and both have proclaimed 'the death of the author' (as Barthes titled his famous essay) and stripped authorial intention of any special pertinence" (26).
  "The New Historicism is more interested in situating the literary work in relation to 'ordinary texts' (of a practical, juridical, political, or religious nature) that constitute the raw materials on which writing operates and that makes its intelligibility possible" (27).

Overstanding

• Assessment: The interaction of bibliography and structuralist readings is more amenable than it seems. The proper integration of historical information and literary readings requires systemic discernment of intra- and extra-textual agents.
• Synthesis: TBA
• Application: Chartier uses collections to point to different audiences, a tactic that flips on its head my efforts with repeated print illustrations. If print illustrations are used in multiple texts for multiple audiences, Chartier would turn the question to the image-textual elements that determine the variety of readings.
  Furthermore, the paradox of bibliography seems to be resolved by the digital archive, whereby the re-inscription of a text is its reproduction. 

Response Format

CITATION:
Understanding

• Question:
• Answer:
• Method:
• Assumptions:
• Sententiae:

Overstanding

• Assessment:
• Synthesis:
• Application:

Purpose and Practices

Purpose

I'm going to blog my notes for candidacy exam reading. My reading includes the following:

The first folio of Shakespeare / Peter W.M. Blayney 

The Religion of the Protestants / Patrick Collinson

The Elizabethan Puritan Movement / Patrick Collinson

[Other iconoclasm] / Patrick Collinson

Culture of English Puritanism / Christopher Durston and. Jacqueline Eales, eds

The Idolatrous Eye / Michael O'Connell

Illustrating the past in early modern England : the representation of history in printed books / James A. Knapp 

Religion and the book in early modern England : the making of Foxe's 'Book of martyrs' / Elizabeth Evenden and Thomas S. Freeman

Patents, Pictures, and Patronage  / Elizabeth Evenden and Thomas S. Freeman

A Guide to English Illustrated Books 1536-1603 / Luborsky and Ingram

Cheap Print and Popular Piety / Tessa Watt

*** Unseemly Pictures: Graphic Satire and Politics in Early Modern England / Helen Pierce

*** [Various articles and books] / Helen Pierce

Practices

Helen Pierce's books (***) will reference more recent scholarship, as well as scholarship from art historians, which I'll include in this list.

For each book I plan to write a brief response divided between understanding and overstanding. Understanding will describe the book's question and answer, its methods and assumptions, and understanding will include quotes that are essential for my later use. Overstanding will describe my assessment of the book, how it relates to other books, and how it relates to my project.

In the next two weeks I hope to read 10 of the above books, and 5 books off of my second-string list, below:

Bibliography and the sociology of texts / D.F. McKenzie
Marginalia : readers writing in books / H.J. Jackson
Shakespeare after theory / David Scott Kastan
Reforming the "bad" quartos : performance and provenance of six Shakespearean first editions / Kathleen O. Irace
Managing readers : printed marginalia in English Renaissance books / William W.E. Slights
Abstractions of evidence in the study of manuscripts and early printed books / Joseph A. Dane
The printing press as an agent of change : communications and cultural transformations in early modern Europe / Elizabeth L. Eisenstein
The coming of the book : the impact of printing 1450-1800 / Lucien Febvre,
Henri-Jean Martin ; translated by David Gerard ; edited by Geoffrey Nowell-S
The literary lineage of the King James Bible, 1340-1611 / by Charles C. Butterworth.
The history of the church of Englande [by] the Venerable Bede
Tudor and Stuart Britain, 1485-1714 / Roger Lockyer
The stripping of the altars : traditional religion in England, 1400-1580 / Eamon Duffy
 Shakespeare and the book / David Scott Kastan
Authors and owners : the invention of copyright / Mark Rose
Textual Shakespeare : writing and the word / Graham Holderness
The reading nation in the Romantic period / William St Clair
Piracy : the intellectual property wars from Gutenberg to Gates / Adrian Johns
The texts of King Lear and their origins / by Peter W.M. Blayney
Tudor books and readers : materiality and the construction of meaning / edited by John N. King
Documents of performance in early modern England / Tiffany Stern
Renaissance paratexts / edited by Helen Smith, Louise Wilson