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.