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)