Illustrating the Past in Early Modern England by James A. Knapp

CITATION:  Knapp, James A. Illustrating the Past in Early Modern England. Burlington: Ashgate Press, 2003.
Understanding

• Question: How did the visual page change English historiography in the Elizabethan period?
• Answer: The visual page helped distinguish the emerging categories of objective history and imaginative arts. 
• Method: After engaging numerous assumptions and commonplaces regarding the early modern visual page, Knapp analyzes statements regarding text and image surrounding Sidney's Apology, Foxe's Actes and Monuments, Holinshed's Chronicles, and Derricke's Image of Ireland.
• Assumptions: Knapp responds to many assumptions regarding early modern printed image, but most importantly, Knapp participates in a historiographic tradition which locates the Elizabethan episteme in the middle of a shift from visual to textual modes.
• Sententiae: "Hilliard's aesthetic vision conflicted sharply with the Protestant critique of worldly materiality and the Reformation's thoroughgoing emphasis on the world. Hilliard's response was to establish a place for the miniature in an age of iconoclasm by reserving such dangerous images for the ruling class." (78)
  "But if history has a claim on the truth of objective reality, the arts, concerned with fictive imagination, apparently operated in a different representational register... For Sidney, only poetry dealt with a subject truly free from earthly matters." (111)
  "... Sidney co-opted the language of visual representation as a metaphor for poetic practice. As a metaphor for the creative process, the reference to the visual is a reference to a mode rather than a thing, and the mode of poetic seeing is much more easily assimilated into a Protestant ethics of virtuous action." (118-119)
  "Three longstanding misconceptions guide Wooden's assessment [of Actes and Monuments]: 1) that images were intended to extend a book's message to a wider audience, 2) that woodcut illustrations could 'speak'  to the unlettered, and 3) that such images were thus 'accessible to all who could look.'" (124)
  "While, in 1563, the interrelation of text and image specific to a particular episode helped to individuate even the smaller cuts, the repetition of the endless variety of smaller cuts in 1570 lead to an emphasis on the martyrs' similarities--similarities that mark the outlines of an emergent Protestant community." (160)
  "Sidney's problem with the historians is with the polyphonic nature of their texts..." (175)
  "Helgerson describes the relation of chronicle and chronography as a representational division of labor, between the spatial part (made visible by descriptions of known localities, and ultimately the land) and the temporal whole (represented in the chronicle of kings which comes to stand for the state)." (186)
  "Rather than offer a 'visual translation,' [of Holinshed's Chronicles] a parallel representation in a different medium, the cuts enable the multifaceted text to function contrapunctally." (205)

Overstanding

• Assessment: Knapp engages at length in his introduction and first chapter with issues close to my own projects. I can't overstate how much I'll quote-mine this book and citation-mine his bibliography.
• Synthesis: Knapp draws extensively on King's account of Tudor iconography and to Aston's response to King's treatment of Foxe. Anticipating my future reading, Knapp also responds to Collinson's treatment of Protestant iconophobia. Lastly, Knapp draws on Watt's work on price, to which Evenden and Freeman also responded.
• Application: I have a few possible responses to Knapp's groundwork:
  1. Knapp's treatment of price (p. 54-56) needs to be reconsidered in light of Evenden and Freeman's smackdown on Greenberg, Watt, et al.
  2. Knapp's assumptions regarding epistemic shift must be considered in light of economics and reader response. Whether or not the shift signified in Sidney's Apology translates into popular culture must be determined, as well as the significance of this shift in light of other consumer media (eg theater).
  3. Knapp's claims regarding nascent Rawlsian progressivism have great consequence for the Jacobean and Carolignean periods. I suspect that the Stuart era strains his (and Patterson's) Whiggish history to its limit, and accordingly complicates the antecedent claim of an epistemic shift.

Illustrating the Past in Early Modern England by James A. Knapp [Sententiae from Introduction]

[I love this book so far. There's so much in the introduction that it deserves a separate post for its sententiae.]
CITATION: Knapp, James A. Illustrating the Past in Early Modern England. Burlington: Ashgate Press, 2003.

• Sententiae:
  "By figuring the material traces of early modern visuality as afterimages, it is possible to emphasize what is lost to historical inquiry without denying the way in which the present is haunted by its memory of the past. Because material artifacts seem to ground our inquiry at the same time that they demand our interpretations, the temptation to imagine the historical endeavor as one of voyeuristic reconstruction--of the challenge to explain the inarticulate presence of the past--is often overpowering." (2)
  "Textual purification--or more precisely, the tendency to treat images and text in isolation--appeared early in the history of textual theory, and it has been a staple of editorial practice from its inception... [T]he editorial history of some of the most important sixteenth-century illustrated books has been profoundly affected by a cultural turn, roughly beginning at the end of the sixteenth century, away from images, an era, if you will, after images [sic]." (5)
  "The present study addresses [Paul] Ricoeur's epistemological difficulty by beginning from the premise that what we see when we look at the pages of early modern books is not the same as what was seen by the first generation of those book's readers--that the epistemological basis for interpretation has shifted with the passage of time." (6)
  "The peculiar quality of the 'rare' book in the twenty-first century is a feature of its lack of familiarity, a feature, in other words, of its historical alterity. But of course this quality would have been imperceptible to the early modern viewer/reader. The gain in looking at something that is removed from the history it purports to convey derives less from some inaccessible historical authenticity (whether or not the artifact is real) than from our understanding of the ways in which such material interlopers enable an articulation of the present sense of the past." (7)
  "But at the opening of a new millennium, it appears that an emergent emphasis on the visual may soon displace the former hegemony of the verbal, print based, narrative forms in the realm of cultural production, creating the possibility of non-narrative, non-linguistic interactions with and representations of the past." (8)
  "Ian Donaldson points out the irony that the flood of work on the history of the book is indebted to the digital technologies that have bade the statistical collation and comparative analysis of books in distant locations a reality." (11)
  "This interpretive pitfall is even more likely to occur when dealing with the visual features of early modern books, especially illustrations, as they seem to offer both a palpable materiality and a mimetic transparency that is often lacking in historical texts. The widespread practice, on the part of historians and literary critics in particular, of using early modern visual material for its referential value--a woodcut of a Roman mass to show 'what a mass looked like'--is just one example of the difficulty of avoiding the temptation to believe that we see the past as it was in the visual traces of the material record." (11-12)
  "Almost forty years ago, Marshall McLuhan (following Walter Ong) characterized print as a visual medium. Moreover, he saw in 'electronic circuitry' (at that time particularly radio, television, and telephone) the potential end of 'typographic man' and the return to the full sense world that reigned in pre-print culture. Interestingly, the introduction of computer technologies, the next stage of electronic media, has re-embedded text in a visual medium, the illuminated computer screen." (13-14)
  "Though most accept the view that the 'fabric' of medieval culture was visually inflected in comparison with the Word centered culture of the English Renaissance, medieval and early modern scholars alike have begun to question the usefulness of such sweeping generalizations." (17)
  "I argue that more effort is required to distinguish the use of the archaic--abundant in the period--from the influence of the residual. For example, Spenser's use of the archaic (that which harks back to an earlier age) is primary in The Shepreardes Calender, where the visual illustrations and the generic structure explicitly call on a form that can be identified as past... But I contend that another crucial aspect of The Faerie Queene, its density of visual imagery, is a component of a residual visuality that continued to influence Spenser's production despite his immersion in the dominant iconophobic culture of the Reformation." (20)
  "In both the visual and the verbal sense the import of an illustration resides in its ability to 'clarify,' a concept which is penetrated with the language of vision in its own right... The concept of illustration was by no means limited to visual material in the sixteenth century, as teh subject to be illustrated often governed the form of the illustration. If one were to illustrate the grace of God, to take an obvious example, a picture would not do." (23)
  "Thus in the experience with the illustrated text, there are two crucial factors related to the distinct modal qualities of visual and verbal representation: first, through their proximity to text, the meaning or function of visual illustrations is contingent on the text in which they are printed, and second, visual representations depend on formal characteristics... unlike those of language--characteristics governed by both the symbolic language of visual composition and the phenomenological attitudes of the perceiver (including their sense of the epistemological status of referentiality)." (24)
  "This assertion [from Luborksy, "Connections and Disconnections"] that disjunction occurs in this last instance is based on the assumption that sixteenth-century readers imagined direct illustration as the illustrative ideal, and that they merely accepted general illustrations as a practical compromise." (26)
  "The models of disjunction described by Luborsky and [Marian] Rothstein both assume that the connections (or disconnections) made in the mind of the early modern reader are recoverable through an examination of the formal qualities of the books in question, that the image-text relation was circumscribed by the printing industry and the textual tradition. However, if there was a transition from a visual culture to a culture of the word in the sixteenth century, then the changing attitudes towards the visible world and to the nature of vision must be considered at least as important as the 'fit' between words and images in the very limited worlds of particular books. Thus, on the other hand, the most interesting aspect of these books  from the point of view of literary and cultural criticism would seem to be the possible ways in which connections and disconnections between images and text might alter our understanding of early modern English attitudes towards the visual and the ideal." (26-27)
  "For the sixteenth-century historical observer, the question was not 'What happened?' but 'What is the lesson in this episode of history?'" (32)
  "Rather than reproduce the trends set on the Continent, English illustration followed a unique pattern of development... The changing character of English book illustration over the course of the century reflects both the responsiveness of the trade to religious and political developments of the age and the importance of the visual page in shaping and reflecting such developments." (38)
  "Rather than capturing the natural relation of objects in a single visual field--a use of single-point perspective often taken as symptomatic of the birth of the subject in early modern culture--perspective is employed in the engravings to differentiate temporally distinct episodes in Ariosto's cantos by placing them in relation to one another spatially." (43-44)

"Decoding the Leviathan: Doing the History of Ideas through Images" by Justin Champion

CITATION: Champion, Justin. "Decoding the Leviathan: Doing the History of Ideas through Images." Printed Images in Early Modern Britain. Ed. Michael Hunter. Burlington: Ashgate Press, 2010. 255-275. Print.
Understanding

• Question: How did visual representations of religious institutions shift between 1651 and 1714?
• Answer: British printed images moved from Protestant attacks to more accepted diversity. Religious attacks and satires shifted from sectarian focus to personal caricature. 
• Method: Champion analyzes a succession of title-pages, especially Hobbes', and satires for their emblems and narrative structure.
• Assumptions: Hobbes responds to a scholarly tradition that identifies "fear of popery" in early modern discourse.
• Sententiae: "Recovering, historically, this sense of meaning manifest in print is complex but involves reconstructing the readers' capacity for interpreting the relation of iconic components. The scribal 'Instructions' [Anthony Cooper, 3rd Earl] Shaftesbury prepared (for circulation to printers and others) allow unfamiliar readers (past and present) to decode the prints." (269)

Overstanding

• Assessment: It's slightly misleading to identify this as an essay on Hobbes, as the title does. But Champion nevertheless makes a bold (if not entirely convincing) argument for evidence of tolerance in the age of the Popish Plot, the Glorious Revolution, etc.
• Synthesis: Champion's argument is orthagonal with Pierce's account of Whiggish satire. Both parties recognize the development of anti-Tory caricature and satire, but Pierce attributes this to continued Protestantism that was amplified by emergent Parliamentary politics, whereas Champion sees tolerance and diversity in counter-Republican philosophy promoted by Hobbes.
• Application: The real issue at stake between Pierce and Champion is whether the prominence printed image corresponds with increased Parliamentary discord, and such an effect might be observed in the late Carolignian period--a worthy task both for expanding the range of inquiry and for resolving the Pierce-Champion dispute.

"Noble or Commercial? The Early History of Mezzotint in Britain" by Ben Thomas

CITATION: Thomas, Ben. "Noble or Commercial? The Early History of Mezzotint in Britain." Printed Images in Early Modern Britain. Ed. Michael Hunter. Burlington: Ashgate Press, 2010. 279-296. Print.
Understanding

• Question: How was mezzotint conceived in early modern Britain?
• Answer: Mezzotint was presented as an exotic trade in order to conceal its function.
• Method: Thomas collects records about mezzotint, its tools, its uses, and investigations into its origins. He describes the reaction from the Royal Society as initially open to the novelty of mezzotint, but soon after concerned with analytical observations.
• Assumptions: Thomas responds to a history of technology wherein technologies (like mezzotint) are rapidly introduced and publicly practiced. More importantly, Thomas works within a fraught system of commerciality and nobility. In the Restoration, the two terms become increasingly ambiguous, and the trades and sciences invoked do not help providing a clear distinction.
• Sententiae: "While it is certainly suggestive to find Huygens, the author of a treatise on light, and Boyle, who theorised that dark colours are related to rough surfaces, taking an interest in the first purely tonal printmaing method, it is also clear that prints were a peripheral concern for most royal society members." (293)

Overstanding

• Assessment: Thomas' essay pushes in a few too many directions at once for an explicit thesis: he doesn't fully address the implications of the mezzotint for the history of science, he concludes that it was not discussed in terms of the history of the trades, he does not discuss in great detail how it moved from commercial viability to un-viability. In part, this is because of the fraught nature of terms like "noble" and "commercial," which are not strongly linked to the trades or sciences that Thomas invokes.
• Synthesis: Thomas' essay seems at a glance like a compliment to Hunter's "Theory of Impression": both relate the Royal Society to the printed image. However, Hunter's essay addresses the philosophical implications behind scholarly images, whereas Thomas' essay shakes off such an association (as in the sententious quote).
  This essay also works alongside Fowler's thesis in favor of Renaissance Realism, insofar as one recognizable element of realism (light) was recognized and manipulated by the early moderns.
• Application: The economics of mezzotint seem to remove it from popular culture, but it would be interesting to see whether mezzotint prints were imitated and adopted for forms of lower culture, in the manner described by St. Clair for book sizes.

"The Devil's Bloodhound: Roger L'Estrange Caricatured" by Helen Pierce

CITATION: Pierce, Helen. "The Devil's Bloodhound: Roger L'Estrange Caricatured." Printed Images in Early Modern Britain. Ed. Michael Hunter. Burlington: Ashgate Press, 2010. 237-254. Print.
Understanding

• Question: How did an English tradition of caricature develop surrounding Roger L'Estrange?
• Answer: Whigs responded in kind to caricatures approved by L'Estrange as Licenser of the Press, but the caricature eventually outlasted visual media.
• Method:  First, Pierce juxtaposes the representation of L'Estrange circa the Popish Plot with the general development of English caricature. Second, Pierce researches the afterlife of L'Estrange's caricature.
• Assumptions: Pierce implies the development of animal caricature was a recent development in 17th century Britain, which is likely to be contradicted by Medievalists and Classicists.
• Sententiae: "During the late 1670s and early 1680s the role of printed ephemera in the shaping of popular political opinion in England was a significant one."
  "Wallis had several aliases for L'Estrange and often described his antagonist using the disparaging nickname of 'crack-fart'. This particular epithet... was an enduring one; in a letter of 1672 to Elias Ashmole, the astrologer William Lilly complains about the involvement of 'Crackfarts' in the licensing process for one of his almanacs." (245)

Overstanding

• Assessment: Pierce writes an admirable balance of formalist history (regarding the development of caricature) and New History. She understates the importance of L'Estrange for other researchers, but that's probably a lesser sin than overstatement.
• Synthesis: Like Bellany, Pierce recounts the illustrated conception of a political figure; unlike Bellany, Pierce describes images as reciprocally influential on and influenced by popular concepts.
  Also, Pierce deals with the aftermath of the 1678 Popish Plot--which is loosely analogous to the context analyzed by Jones for Canker Wormes; moreover, the two situations are similar because the paranoid anti-Jesuitical fervor of the 1620s (the aim of Jones' argument) is comparable to the fallacious anti-Catholic hysteria of the 1670s (the context of Pierce's argument).
• Application: Pierce's inclusion of the anti-Catholic parade suggests a new source of popular symbology that may be rooted in printed image-text. An analysis of the anti-Catholic figures in that procession may reveal the influence of print image on popular culture. Moreover, such an analysis of such an inventory may reveal a more concrete influence (from images onto the rest of popular culture) than evidence from playhouses or playing company properties.

"Politics, Print Images and the Royal Favourite in the 1620s" by Alastair Bellany

CITATION: Bellany, Alastair. "Buckingham Engraved: Politics, Print Images and the Royal Favourite in the 1620s." Printed Images in Early Modern Britain. Ed. Michael Hunter. Burlington: Ashgate Press, 2010. 215-235. Print.
Understanding

• Question: How did print images respond to the popular conception of the Duke of Buckingham?
• Answer: Print images variously endorsed Buckingham's courtly persona, maturity, or martial skills. 
• Method: Bellany seeks to "capture fully the political significance of printed images of the duke [by] locat[ing] them within the complex dynamics of specific political contexts that could shift, complicate, and multiply any one image's political meanings." He surveys a progression of print images of the Duke as an expansion of early modern political history.
• Assumptions: Bellany subscribes to a view that aims to expand the variety of aesthetic artifacts under consideration in "the new political-cultural history". Yet he's ironically mute regarding the restrictions on the means of production surrounding these artifacts: there is no discussion of the expense, sales, or circulation of any of these illustrations.
• Sententiae: "The equestrian motif is key to the image's political meanings: the rider on horseback was a palyvalent image of government, widely used in this horse-centered culture to represent imperial, monarchic, chivalric, military, and aristocratic power... So standard was the imagery that the [Willem] de Passe engraving itself was twice recut to represent new figures: in the early 1630s Buckingham's body and face were replaced  by those of the Marquis of Hamilton, then fighting in the Swedish army in Germany, and after 1653 Hamilton's head and collar were replaced by Oliver Cromwell's." (223)
  "A rather different printed product is the single-sheet broadside published by the cheap print specialist John Wright... But placed in a commanding typographic position is a stock woodcut image of an (anachronistically) armoured knight on horseback, intended to depict Buckingham whose titles and offices were listed prominently above. Similar generic woodcuts of knights on horseback illustrated a variety of cheap print in this period... Wright's woodcut was a stock image, not an engraved portrait, but it may nevertheless have served to associate Buckingham visually with a popularly genealogy of mythic and historical chivalric forbears." (227) 

Overstanding

• Assessment: This is a article with a relatively small audience and application, and an article without an exceptionally theoretical or provocative thesis. It is proficient in its readings and coverage, but it seems like background research for a larger project. The most notable finding regards the re-use of de Passe's engraving for Carolingian and Republican causes.
• Synthesis: Like King, Bellany describes printed images as consequent to or contingent upon politics, culture, and other components of history. But unlike King, Bellany does not trace out the roots of Buckingham's representation in religious or civic traditions. Like Pierce, Bellany traces the representation of a powerful political figure through a print-illustrative tradition. But unlike Pierce, Bellany does not consider the printed image as reciprocally constituitive in Buckingham's reputation.
• Application: It would be interesting to trace the consequences of Buckingham's representations: Did the publishers profit in patronage for their propaganda? Did Buckingham's rivals and detractors engage with this sort of printed image, or did they patronize caricature artists? And how were the adapted images of Hamilton and Cromwell received with the same sartorial trappings as Buckingham?

[Back from Hiatus] "Emblematic Identities in Late Jacobean Print" by Malcolm Jones

CITATION: Jones, Malcolm. "The Common Weales Canker Wormes, or the Locvsts Both of Chvrch, and States: Emblematic Identities in Late Jacobean Print." Printed Images in Early Modern Britain. Ed. Michael Hunter. Burlington: Ashgate Press, 2010. 193-213. Print.
Understanding

• Question: How ought The Common Weales Canker Wormes be contextualized with the discovery of an additional impression?
• Answer: The  recently discovered impression may be dated to the mid-1620s, at which time the emblematic identities concentrate anti-Jesuitical fervor on Henry Garnet.
• Method: Jones first dates the impression to the mid-1620s through the analysis of references, clothing, and Anglo-Spanish relations; second, he identifies Garnetian mythology in the emblem of the Jesuit "G"; third, he relates the imagery of the ambassador "I" to Don Acuna, count of Gondomar, through surviving satire and a title-page (explicitly naming Gondomar) from which the ambassador was apparently drawn.
• Assumptions: Jones' essay responds to Alexander Globe's Peter Stent London Printseller, in which Globe identifies an impression of Canker Wormes from the 1670s with controversies relating to the Diggers, the Commonwealth, and controversies regarding L'Estrange.
• Sententiae: "Even Homer nods, however, and in this essay I shall produce evidence to suggest that when Globe catalogues it as 'A commonwealth satire, engraved anonymously c. 1650', he was misled by the title into thinking it belonged to the Commonwealth era ushered in by the execution of Charles I in 1649, and that the actual date of its original issue was c. 1625 (and thus must have been acquired by Stent, whose recorded activity begins only c. 1642, from some earlier publisher)." (193)

Overstanding

• Assessment: This is an extremely bold essay: it dramatically revises some rather elementary bibliographical work established by another scholar, and it asserts instead an unknown publisher, printer, etc. In place of Globe's concrete legal evidence, Jones makes his argument on the basis of allusion and caricature.
• Synthesis: Jones obliquely deals with visual satires licensed by L'Estrange, thus relating to Pierce's essay on Towzer. Jones elects not to pursue this connection as part of his revisionist essay, but he might resuscitate Globe's interpretation as a Restoration re-appropriation of Jacobean imagery. That is to say that Jones' argument does not entirely invalidate Globe's, and that Globe may be have correctly identified the reader response (relating to Diggers and the Commonwealth) to Canker Wormes in the Restoration.
• Application: Even if L'Estrange did not approve of the original impression of Canker Wormes, then it would be interesting to review L'Estrange's notes on and around the re-licensing of this image in light of Pierce's argument--that L'Estrange licensed illustrated caricature as a form of attack on the emergent Whig. Such an analysis would demonstrate that L'Estrange and the Tories were constructing a revisionist Tory history--even in the proto-history of parliamentary partisanship. 

"The Theory of Impression According to Robert Hooke" by Matthew Hunter

CITATION: Hunter, Matthew. "The Theory of Impression According to Robert Hooke." Printed Images in Early Modern Britain. Ed. Michael Hunter. Burlington: Ashgate Press, 2010. 167-190. Print.
Understanding

• Question: How did the technology of print enable new thinking regarding perception?
• Answer: Following from Aristotelean philosophy and Dutch experiments in scientific printing, Hooke's theory of perspective adopted the metaphoric vehicles of printing.
• Method: Hunter introduces a pair of Dutch impressions in order to introduce the problems of objective represenation, problems of both the "semantic" (relating to objects in the real world) and "syntactic" (relating to the instruments of the impression and intermediary transfers). Hunter then considers two print experiments highlighting the problems of syntactic inaccuracy (De Jode's engraved portrait of Browne, Papin's Digestor), and one invention relating to semantic accuracy (the Albertian veil). Hooke encountered problems with the immediacy of observation and representation through his remarks on print. Thus Hooke's human theory of perspective included the problems of copying and correcting.
• Assumptions: Hunter assumes a degree of epistemological continuity between Hooke and other Continental thinkers, despite the Hooke's orthagonal thought.
• Sententiae: "First, working in a range of impressed media, experimentalists aimed to ensure that their prints actually registered the relevant, intended markings designed into matrix or mould; they wanted to ensure that a given printed image constituted a good impression... I will refer to this relation between the printed mark and printing matrix as the 'syntactical' problem of the impression. Secondly, Royal Society Fellows also sought to secure strong relations between their printed impressions and various real-world targets. They wanted to claim that their impressions accurately represented natural or artificial phenomena -- a relation that I will call the 'semantic' problem of the impression." (170)
  "In his epochal De Pictura of 1436, Leon Battista Alberti had announced early modern Europe's most famous artistic aid: the 'veil or grid-like mesh of fibres through which Alberti advised the artist to view objects. As with other drawing books developed in the eraly Royal Society, the Arbertian veil facilitated the creatioun of outlines, the reliable boundaries of seen bodies in which the graphic denotation of more evanescent visual data could be gathered. Evelyn's philosopher-artist, by contrast, does not look through the screen at the target-object, but observes the object as modulated by it." (176)

Overstanding

• Assessment: Hunter's most vulnerable point is in the interpolation of print terminology on Hooke's lectures on perspective. He might benefit from the comparison of Hooke's prints to Newton's own reluctance to print his observations on vision. I will definitely have to revisit Hunter's essay for his method of interrelating philosophical issues of science with bibliographic matters of print. He makes a juncture that I'd like to parallel in my own research.
• Synthesis: Naturally Hunter, Turner, and Acheson all deal with naturalists. Whereas Acheson theorizes on the detached epistemologies of images to texts, and Turner reconstructs a naturalist epistemology from the production of an image, Hunter views the image as prior to the production of text--in this case, Hooke's lectures--or at least interactive between both fields. That is, Hunter uniquely proposes that print text and image can each advance and mutually contribute to theories of human perspective.
• Application: The biggest challenge following Hunter is to consider how to apply his methods to the theories of perspective advanced in print drama  and poetry. For the most part, such a research project could re-interpret shifts--in the format of verse following the adoption of print--with a view towards the graphic design of texts and the aspiration to understand an early modern theory of perspective.

"Hollar's Prospects and Maps of London" by Simon Turner

CITATION: Turner, Simon. "Hollar's Prospects and Maps of London." Printed Images in Early Modern Britain. Ed. Michael Hunter. Burlington: Ashgate Press, 2010. 145-166. Print.
Understanding

• Question: How were Wenceslaus Hollar's maps composed and published?
• Answer: Hollar was Continentally trained, intermittantly patronized, and scientifically observant.
• Method: Turner considers Hollar's context and challenges as represented in his maps. First, he compares Hollar's Four Seasons to his Strasbourg Views to establish Hollar's education. Second, he compares Hollar's representations of the Globe Theater in London with its contemporary location, to undermine Hollar's claims to accuracy. Third, he compares Hollar's maps, patronized by the Earl of Arundel, with his commercially successful illustration for John Ogilby's Virgil and other classics. Fourth, he compares multiple post-fire maps of London to demonstrate Hollar's comprehensive view of London.
• Assumptions: First, Turner relies on Hollar's dedication to naturalists--eg Hooke--to establish his affiliation with naturalist observation, rather than relaying information about Hollar's own compositional habits.
 Second, Turner relies on a tradition of scholars who base their knowledge of London on reconstructed property measures--a method that is likely to overlook the historical subaltern who constructed an independent London which was lost in the Great Fire. 
• Sententiae: "The work of Mills and Oliver survives: the accuracy of the measurements and the wealth of personal information -- in tandem with the maps -- has been of enormous benefit to historians, particularly those interested in the book trades who, using the publishing  imprints in the books themselves as a starting point, have been able to reconstruct the precise details of the size and various occupancies of shops and related businesses." (154)

Overstanding

• Assessment: I'm more concerned with the possible oversight of historical subaltern geography than with any of Turner's workmanlike article. Turner's thesis certainly does not outstrip his claims, but that thesis does not prominently invite future research.
• Synthesis: Hollar's maps seem to take the opposite qualities of Aston's tetragammatological texts: neither popular nor contested nor powerfully iconographic. However, Hollar's maps at least equally well defined the controversies of early modern London.
  Turner treats Hollar's mythological figures in a fashion similar to Acheson's iconographic illustrations, suggesting that early modern illustrations included multiple layers of representational space, ranging from the strongly objective (map) to the mythical (Mercury). This implicit finding is slightly more refined than Fowler's thesis, insofar as realism can coexist with allegory, yet not impinge upon it.
• Application: The most obvious project following Turner is to examine the politics implicit in Hollar's maps. Or following Fowler, another project would relate the Hollar's visual perspective on London with the dramatic construction of perspective on London--on stage and in print.

"Gesner, Topsell, and the Purpsoses of Pictures in Early Modern Natural Histories" by Katherine Acheson

CITATION: Acheson, Katherine. "Gesner, Topsell, and the Purpsoses of Pictures in Early Modern Natural Histories." Printed Images in Early Modern Britain. Ed. Michael Hunter. Burlington: Ashgate Press, 2010. 127-144. Print.
Understanding

• Question: How do early print illustrations reveal analytical attitudes in naturalist texts?
• Answer: Print illustrations that were re-used or imitated as icons rather than as information.
• Method: Acheson traces the imitation of a single beaver illustration--originally printed in The Historie of the Foure-footed Beastes--and compares the replication of this image in juxtaposition with texts based on original observation.
• Assumptions: Acheson presumes some kind of epistemological continuity between print images and texts.
• Sententiae: "It is evident from these examples that Gesner's works were being used as copy-books from which patterns for the appearance of animals were derived: the use-value of the illustrations, that is, is taken to be the extent to which they could provide a template for reproduction, rather than the extent to which they complemented or supplemented the information provided in the texts they accompanied." (138)

Overstanding

• Assessment: The consequences for this research are understated in this article, which may be necessary due to the small sample size of texts. Nevertheless, the research is rigorous and provocative.
• Synthesis: Acheson treats imitated image from the opposite perspective as Aston and Ingram or Evenden and Freeman: that is, Acheson treats imitated images as a germinal icons for future researchers, rather than as citations establishing authority.
• Application: The first test for Acheson will be to widen the sample size and look at the manuscripts of other naturalists--did they similarly treat images as icons, rather than indexes of observation. The second test will be to apply Acheson's notion of image to other print images--like the penitent man copied by Foxe and discussed by Aston et al.--to establish the extent to which image is detached from a textual episteme.

"Page Techne: Interpreting Diagrams in Early Modern English 'How-To' Books" by Lori Anne Farrell

CITATION: Farrell, Lori Anne. "Page Techne: Interpreting Diagrams in Early Modern English 'How-To' Books." Printed Images in Early Modern Britain. Ed. Michael Hunter. Burlington: Ashgate Press, 2010. 113-126. Print.
Understanding

• Question: How did early modern books encourage techne?
• Answer: Early modern diagrams encouraged techne, the practical application of ideas, through diagrams visualizing geometry, geneology, geology and theology.
• Method: Farrell examines print elements of four separate books for signs of reader interactivity.
• Assumptions: Farrell attributes interactivity to basic eye motion, arguing that Euclidean lines are "read". Furthermore, Farrell doesn't distinguish between different kinds of diagrams and the possibly different literacies involved in geneologies and geography.
• Sententiae: "Since the publication of his [Walter Ong's] Ramus: Method and the Decay of Dialogue (1958), nonetheless, nearly every abstract design in an early modern English book has been assigned to the default category 'Ramist diagram' (the others simply dodge comment altogether), a less-than-helpful tribute to the staying power of what is now a 50-year-old thesis." (114)

Overstanding

• Assessment: Farrell's piece is light on the semiotics of charts, save for a secondary source on pop-up books, and similarly light on actual evidence of readerly interactions. The thesis occupies an an uncomfortable mid-point between theory of design and historical bibliography.
• Synthesis: Farrell covers John Day's Elementes of Geometry, which also made an appearance in Evenden and Freeman. But Farrell doesn't engage with the depth of bibliography available regarding Day, and similarly, she doesn't engage with Aston's essay on the tetragammaton while examining the representation of God at the head of a diagrammatic family tree.
• Application: I find more of a challenge in Farrell's subject matter than her methods. How can semiotic/formalist questions about diagrams and meaning engage meaningfully with the bibliographic/historical evidence? This is one of the big questions I'll have to chip away at gradually.

"Censorship and Self-Censorship in English Book Illustration", by Richard L. Williams

CITATION: Williams, Richard L. "Censorship and Self-censorship in Late Sixteenth-century English Book Illustration." Printed Images in Early Modern Britain. Ed. Michael Hunter. Burlington: Ashgate Press, 2010. 43-63. Print.
Understanding

• Question: Were print illustrations subject to the same censorship as print books?
• Answer: There is no evidence that print illustrations were submitted to a censor, thus self-censorship appears to have been the primary motive for the adaptation of print illustrations.
• Method: First, Williams reviews the consensus opinion regarding the censorship of early modern English books. Second, Williams reviews several print illustrations of Christ to discern the limits of English iconophobia. Third, Williams points to controversies surrounding printed image, and fourth, he points to Day's Christian prayers and meditations as a demonstration of self-censorship.
• Assumptions: First, Williams does not concern himself with the censorship of plays, which would make the Master of the Revels the primary censor over visual representation in early modern England. Second, Williams only touches on a handful of altered illustrations, casting doubt on the universality of self-censorship.
• Sententiae: "The implication from this episode is that, although there does not appear to have been a standard practice across the trade, it was often the case that the author fo a book had no prior knowledge of the pictorial embellishments that the printer might intend to use, even at the proof stage of pre-publication. Presumably, in such circumstances, a censor would be similarly left in the dark. Therefore it would appear that the opportunity for censorship of such illustrations in books would come post-publication." (52)
  "Careful observation of the scene of the Creation of Eve which appears at the top of the right border at sig. i iiiii^r [of Day's 1569 Christian prayers and meditations] reveals that the upper part of the anthropomorphic representation of God the Father creating Eve from ADam's side has been cut away from the block and replaced with the tetragammaton in a cloud. The cut follows a semi-diagonal angle that intersects with Eve's forehead. The lower part of God's body, however, remains unscathed with the leg bent at the knee visible to the left of Adam's shoulder." (54)

Overstanding

• Assessment: One issue that Williams dodges is the priority granted to title-pages. Yes, he acknowledges that title-pages are useful because they are representative of much larger editions and editions that didn't survive. However, the title-page itself has a privileged position in the determination of an edition, because bibliographers treat the title-page as a unique indicator of intent. That said, it's unclear how the consensus of bibliographers treats illustrations as indicators of intent or edition.
  As a side-note, I should add the possibility, raised in tandem by Aston and Williams, that . As a thought experiment, a publisher might intend to print a book that is exactly the same as Fifty Shades of Grey with the letter "S" replaced with the number 6. But if spell-check or some other accident of the printing press were to intervene, then you would have two exactly identical books still treated as different editions because of the priority of intention. I realize that such a thing will never happen outside of a Borges short story, but it's an interesting thought experiement to test out the premises of a bibliographic system.
• Synthesis: Williams draws heavily on Aston's arguments regarding the tetragammaton, as well as her treatment of Foxe's role in researching illustrations. Williams writes contemporaneously with Evenden & Freeman, and thus can't comment on their research second-guessing Aston's story about Foxe's visual research.
• Application: First, Williams seems to grant a huge boon to anyone studying print illustration. That is, we have the un (externally) censored texts!  But second, there's the lurking possibility that the Master of the Revels exercised some indirect control over the visual imagination of early modern England. Third, Ingram & Luborsky should provide a launching point for an expanded inquiry on Williams' suggestion--that is, we can use the Guide to try to spot cases of revision between editions, and to help determine whether such revisions are self-censorship.

"Symbols of Conversion" by Margaret Aston

CITATION:Aston, Margaret. "Symbols of Conversion: Properties of the Page in Reformation England." Printed Images in Early Modern Britain. Ed. Michael Hunter. Burlington: Ashgate Press, 2010. 23-42. Print.
Understanding

• Question: How did English Protestants visually represent God?
• Answer: They drew on the Continental tradition of the tetragammaton, rather than the Christogram.
• Method: Aston draws on Ingram and Luborksy's Guide to review illustrated Bible title-pages, and compares reactions to the adoption of anthropomorphic images, the tetragammaton, and the Christogram.
• Assumptions: Aston announces that the tetragammaton appeared in German print six years before the Coverdale Bible (24), with the assumption that Hans Holbein could have encountered these prints in that (relatively short) time--not mentioning manuscript precursors to the German prints.
• Sententiae: "This title-page [for the 1641 edition of Acts and Monuments] became an issue at Archbishop Laud's trial. He turned to it with an attack that seemed to bolster his own defense, in responding to charges about his restored imagery in the chapel windows at Lambeth...  It is quite likely that Laude was in effect saying, why should I be deemed guilty of restoring an old image of Christ when the new edition of the Acts and Monuments holds just such an image? This would have been extremely apropos, to say the least, at a time when imagery of Christ was being attacked and broken, on a scale comparable... to what had taken place a hundred years earlier." (37-38)

Overstanding

• Assessment: One thing I'd like to see addressed that was missing was the nature of the tetragammaton as xylography: was the tetragammaton inserted with drop-caps, as Evenden and Freeman observe regarding many of the martyrs' names, or was it xylographic, eliminating the need for costly Hebrew type? I suspect the latter.
• Synthesis: Aston curiously collapses the layers of representation for the cover of the Great Bible, arguing that Henry VIII represents the Heavenly Father, rather than a Solomonic divine ruler (as King would argue [and as Aston argued with Evenden]).
• Application: There are interesting formal and political offshoots from this. On the one hand, if the tetragammaton was composed xylographically out of economic necessity, then this may point to a reading of early modern image-texts as not necessarily more expensive, but possibly cheaper, forms of printing. On the other hand, Aston's reference to Laud is fascinating, indicating the degree to which title-pages served as popular propaganda in the Early Modern period.

"The Iconography of the Acts and Monuments" by Margaret Aston and Elizabeth Ingram

CITATION: Aston, Margaret, and Elizabeth Evenden. "The Iconography of the Acts and Monuments." John Foxe and the English Reformation. Ed. David Loades. Brookfield: Scolar Press, 1997. 66-142. Print.
Understanding

• Question: Did the illustrations of Acts and Monuments support or undermine the authority of the text?
• Answer: The images of Acts and Monuments draw authority and legibility directly from Continental iconographic traditions.
• Method: Drawing both on Ingram and Luborksy's Guide to English Illustrated Books 1536-1603 and continental iconography, Aston and Evenden isolate similarities between prints in Acts and Monuments and print or painted icons which Foxe or Day might have encountered.
• Assumptions: First, Aston and Evenden are responding to a tradition that places Foxe and Day in the context of English Calvinist iconophobia. Second, Aston and Evenden establish the method--later questioned by Evenden and Freeman--which follows Foxe's own claims for authenticity from illustrative evidence.
• Sententiae: "Foxe was anxious that his readers should know his material was drawn from authentic church record... Marginal notes in the second edition... reflect the activity of the martyrologist (and his assistants) in the archiepiscopal archive after his return home. This woodcut is part of the authenticating process: picture verifies adjacent text; there is a 'go and see for yourself' challenge to doubters." (71)

Overstanding

• Assessment: This is a less exhaustive bibliography than Evenden's later collaboration. Accordingly, some of Aston & Evenden's connections seem lacking--how did Foxe or Day contact these sources, and why? Such questions are addressed more fully by Evendon & Freeman. And the "so what" for this smaller-scale bibliographical research announces that Foxe drew on Catholic/Continental forms of iconography--a consequence that isn't entirely unpacked by the end.
• Synthesis: As I noted above, this essay provides an important background for Evenden and Freeman, as well as context for King. Like King, Aston and Evenden spell out the broad exchange of icons between Protestant and Catholic eras/areas. Also like King Aston and Evenden comment on the Solomonic quality of Henrician iconography.
• Application: One of the major unresolved questions from this project seems to be the Calvinist iconography created by Foxe and Day, and its consequences for later Laudian controversies. Beside that, it would be interesting to trace the influences of Continental sources in other English prints, especially regarding the cross-channel imports of illustrated tracts.

New Sources / Excuses

Michael Hunter's introduction to Printed Images in Early Modern Britain: Essays in Interpretation is a motherlode of sources. Here are some sources I'll have to add to the list:

Prints and Visual Communication / William M. Ivins Jr.
The Comely Frontispiece / Margery Corbett and Ronald Lightbown
Peter Stent, London Printseller / Alexander Globe
The Print in Stuart Britain / Antony Griffith
The Printed Image in Early Modern London: Urban Space, Visual Representation and Social Exchange / Joseph Monteyne
The Print in Early Modern England: An Historical Oversight / Malcolm Jones
Connections and Disconnections between Images and Text / Ruth Luborsky

I'll also need to check out ICONOCLASS, "the iconographic system developed by Dutch art historians over the past half-century which offers a complete classification of the subject matter of Western art."

Lastly, I want the record to show that I've spent the past five days attending a wedding, a funeral, driving a jillion miles, tractoring around North Dakota, contracting tetanus, getting a tetanus shot, and living in a tent.

Religion and the Book in Early Modern England, by Evenden and Freeman

CITATION: Evenden, Elizabeth, and Freeman, Thomas S. Religion and the Book in Early Modern England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Print.
Understanding

• Question: How was Acts and Monuments researched and printed?
• Answer: Through a trans-continental network of religious and economic affiliations centered on John Day and John Foxe.
• Method: Through historical and bibliographic correlations, Evenden and Freeman can date and contextualize most developments in the proto-history of Acts and Monuments, then compare that development with later editions.
• Assumptions: Several of Evenden and Freeman's interpretations hinge on the correlation of events without necessarily defining a path between them. See Sent. (214-5). Furthermore, in some questions of degree, Evenden and Freeman split the difference between--presumably reliable--secondary sources.
• Sententiae: "The event, however, that had the biggeste impact on the illustrations of the second edition was the publication of the papal bull Regnans in excelsis  in February 1570, which excommunicated Elizabeth and released her subjects from their allegiance to the queen. There can be little doubt that the section added at the end of the first volume of the second edition was a response to Pius V's recently articulated claims of plenary authority over the English Church. This section was probably the last of the edition to be printed. Furthermore there is every indication that it was compiled in considerable haste. The pagination for the section is not irregular -- it is non-existant. Furthermore, the last page before this section is page 922, while the second volume commences with page 923." (214-5)
  "Phrases such as 'lavishly illustrated' and 'extensively illustrated' used to describe the 'Book of Martyrs' suffer from the disadvantage of being inexact... In the first edition there are 53 illustrations with 57 occurrences; in the second edition there are 105 illustrations with 149 occurrences. In the third edition the number of woodcuts increases slightly to 107, with 150 occurrences, while the 1583 edition has the lowest number of actual illustrations, 100, but there are 153 occurrences." (204-5)
  "Greenberg estimates that 'illustrations boost[ed] the cost [of Acts and Monuments] by 100 percent' (Greenberg, 'Community of Texts', p. 708). Greenberg does not give a source for her assertion, but she is almost certaintly drawing this from Tessa Watt, who mantained that the expense involved in hiring illustrators ''was reflected in the oubling of the normal prices when a book was illustrated; a practice sanctioned by a Stationers' Company ordinance of 1598'. Tessa Watt, Cheap Print and Popular Piety, 1560-1640 (Cambridge, 1991) p. 147. First of all, it should be noted that Greenberg is taking an observation made about cheap print and applying it to an expensive volume, whose economics were necessarily quite different. Watts does not make this critical distinction, either. Watts cites Francis R. Johnson's article, 'Notes an English Retail Book-prices, 1550-1640', The Library, 5th series, 2 (1950), pp. 84 and 90. However, Johnson is describing an ordinance of 1598 which regulated the maximum price that could be charged per sheet. This price was determined by the amount of type on a page. Simply because woodcut pictures, which obviously reduced the amount of type on a page, were not of uniform size, they could therefore not be easily regulated and so illustrated books were exempted from this ordinance. Thus Watts is in error by stating that a doubling of illustrated book prices was sanctioned by this ordinance; in actual fact, the ordinance did not affect illustrated books at all. Furthermore, Johnson actually states that 'the average illustrated book was priced 75-100 per cent higher than other books of the same number of sheets': Johnson, 'English Retail Book-prices', p.90 (our emphasis). Apart from the fact that 75-100 per cent is not the same as 100 per cent, the question is, what is th 'average illustrated book'? Clearly, the ordinance was aimed at cheap print and, equally clearly, the sample books mentioned in Johnson's article are predominantly cheap books. Of course an illustration would dramatically increase the price of a small, inexpensive book because the other costs involved would not be that high. Equally clearly, if the book was a large, expensive book, such as the Acts and Monuments, illustrations would certainly increase the price but they would not necessarily double it." ([footnote 16] 190-191)

Overstanding

• Assessment: I'm going to have to come back to this book time and again, I anticipate. Evenden and Freeman synthesize an incredible amount of secondary research surrounding Acts and Monuments, sometimes stripping away received knowledge. Specifically, their treatment of the price of print illustrations (above) is awesome, and I'm really grateful I read the footnotes. I'll probably mine all of these footnotes before exams are through.
• Synthesis: Evenden and Freemen respond at length to John King's treatment of Book of Martyrs, turning from the sociology of the text (and all the accompanying overtones of Chartier / McKenzie) to its research and print history. I'm still hammering out the significance of this broader shift, but one specific point of comparison draws out the difference between Evenden & Freeman vis-a-vis King. King reiterates the finding, popular in the wake of Ingram and Luborsky, that illustrations were commonly re-used. But Evenden and Freeman take pains to enumerate print images that could not have more than one use (202). This correction is part of their commitment to understanding economic and social networks surrounding books, specifically, explaining large folios (like Acts and Monuments) as prestige projects enabled by early monopolies and supported by patronage.
• Application: First, Evenden and Freeman have set the standard for all early modern bibliographies. Second, this book has opened up the question of ililustrated price to new inquiry, especially along a research path that breaks from the conceit of an "average illustrated book." Third, this book suggests an alternative to my prior conception of re-used illustrations. The natural corrolary on re-use is prestige. Large illustrated folios maintained their prestige (out of reverence to patrons, or to the project itself) with utterly unique woodcuts: no museum hangs stock images, no matter how cheap.