"Bishop's Bible Illustrations" by Margaret Aston

CITATION: Aston, Margaret. The Church and the Arts: Papers Read at the 1990 Summer Meeting and the 1991 Winter Meeting of the Ecclesiastical History Society. Ed. Diana Wood. Oxford, UK: Published for the Ecclesiastical History Society by Blackwell Publishers, 1992. Print.
Understanding

• Question: How did the Elizabethan Church and Continental artists develop the illustrations in the Bishops' Bible?
• Answer: Archbishop Parker suffered frequent delay in the production of the '68 and '72 editions due to the Continental circulation of borrowed woodcuts; only after significant delay in '72 did Parker commission new illustrations.
• Method: Aston essentially composes a narrative covering the majority of editions between 1565 and 1576. Archivally, Aston connects the '68 and '72 editions to the Biblische Figuren des Alten und Newen Testaments, gantz künstlich gerissen by Virgil Solis.
• Assumptions:
• Sententiae: In the first place we might wonder whether the change of illustrations resulted from puritanical censorship. We know the view of some of the censors, for the Second Admonition to Parliament in 1572 included an acid comment on pictures in the 15688 Bishops' Bible. ... namely, when the Lord spoke from the fire in Mount Horeb, 'ye sawe no maner of image'; to which Bishop Alley's note read: 'Meaning that plagues hang over them that wold make any image to represent God by'. (271-2)

Overstanding

• Assessment: Aston's detailed examination of the illustrations is commendable--particularly for crossing language lines and investigating Virgil Solis' printed legacy.
• Synthesis: I haven't yet read much on the Bishops' Bible, but Aston's description of the interaction between English publishers and Continental toolmakers generally anticipates with the description outlined by Darnton in "What is the History of the Book? Revisited."
• Application: The application is pretty profound: the Established church is clearly involved with print ornamentation at the highest levels, and the relevant executives were willing to "play ball" with secular Continental books, even on a loaned basis. The arrangement seems to indicate a naive understanding of the Continental book trade. English authorities would be unlikely to make a similar deal after the Buckingham cartoons caricatured an English authority in the Continental print.

Edward II by Christopher Marlowe

PRIMARY SOURCE: The troublesome raigne and lamentable death of Edward the second, King of England: with the tragicall fall of proud Mortimer: Written by Chri. Marlow Gent
Context

• Publication:
  Published by bookseller William Jones (2) and printed by Robert Robinson in 1594. Registered to Jones in 1593, though later transferred to Barnes, Bell, and Haviland & Wright: four editions with a different publisher or printer each time. Printed in a quarto format that dropped from 48 leaves to about 40 in later editions. Performed by Pembroke's Men in 1591-2, though Greg lists Queen Anne's Men and the Red Bull theater.
• "As it was sundrie times publiquely acted in the honourable citie of London, by the right honourable the Earle of Pembrooke his seruants."
• "Imprinted at London for William Iones, dwelling neere Holbourne conduit, at the signe of the Gunne. 1594."
• EEBO link.
• Scholarship: This is Marlowe's historical drama, drawing exact phrases from Holinshed. Formally, scholars appreciate the play's clarity and consistent characterization. Stylistically, there is less strutting and ranting than in Marlowe's antihero plays. The central homoerotic relationship exemplifies DiGangi's contention that transgressive class relations, rather than homoerotics, were seen as disruptive in early modern England. Despite Edward's failures as a king, he still draws significant sympathy in captivity.
• Why I'm reading it: The Canon

Content

• Form: Tragic History in 5 acts. 
• Genre: History (annals), tragedy.
• Summary:
1. 
   
1. Gaveston returns to England against the objections of the lords. Though they threaten rebellion, Edward loves Gaveston. A priest threatens to drive Gaveston back to France.
2. The bishop is in the Tower & Queen Isabella leaves for the forest. The lords decide to eject Gaveston and thus provoke Edward into civil war.
3. Gaveston marks his enemies at Lambeth.
4. The conspirators seize Gaveston from the king's side. They take him away and plan to rebel. Instead of overthrowing the king outright, they plan either assassination or popular rebellion.
2. 
   
1. Spenser aligns himself with Gaveston.
2. Edward obsesses over Gaveston's return rather than French invasion. Mortimer wounds Gaveston. Edward bans Mortimer from court and so begins the rebellion. Just then, Mortimer learns that the Scots are holding his uncle for ransom, a ransom that only the king could pay. Spenser becomes Edward's minion.
3. The conspirators plan to ambush the king.
4. The king's company flees the ambush. Edward overlooks Queen Isabella, who commends Mortimer to slay Gaveston.
5. The conspirators refuse to return Gaveston to Edward.
3. 
   
1. Warwick takes Gaveston back.
2. Edward makes Spenser his new favorite. France retakes Normandy. Edward hears that Warwick killed Gaveston and swears vengeance. The lords request that Spenser be banned.
3. They fight.
4. Mortimer and Kent are captured.
4. 
   
1. Kent and Mortimer leave for Queen Isabella in France.
2. Kent and Mortimer meet Queen Isabella.  The French promise aid but the young prince believes Edward will win.
3. Edward's spy reports the events of the last act.
4. Queen Isabella and Mortimer give speeches for invasion.
5. The King's party flees for the Queen Isabella.
6. Queen Isabella captures Kent and Spenser's father.
7. Queen Isabella's men capture the last of the King's party, e.g. Spenser.
5. 
   
1. Edward is imprisoned and laments haughtily. He refuses to resign, then relents.
2. Mortimer sidles up to Queen Isabella's authority. He installs a puppet as successor. The prince knows they're liars. Mortimer orders his seizure, and so loses both Queen Isabella  and the Prince as his allies.
3. Captors torture Edward. The Prince is seized.
4. Mortimer gloats. He orders Kent murdered.
5. Edward endures imprisonment. He fears for his life. Lightborn kills him and Gurney kills Lightborn.
6. Edward III swears vengeance on Queen Isabella and Mortimer. He orders a lord to kill Mortimer and sends Queen Isabella to the Tower.
• Other notes:

“The Reformation of Images and Some Jacobean Writers on Art” by Karl Josef Holten

CITATION: Holten, Karl Josef. “The Reformation of Images and Some Jacobean Writers on Art.” Functions of Literature: Essays Presented to Erwin Wolff on His Sixtieth Birthday. Ed. Ulrich Broich. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1984. Print.
Understanding

• Question: How did Jacobean art writing bridge the needs of a culture and the development of a culture's institutions of knowledge (funktiongeshichte)?
• Answer: After the royal iconography of the Elizabethan era, Jacobean writers of art defended aristocratic art using Italo-philic/-phobic discourses and Tertullian's writings on church art.
• Method: Functionalism. As stated above, funktiongeschichte seeks to explain literary genre as a bridge between the needs of a culture and the developments of a culture's philosophy and institutions of knowledge. Erwin Wolff and Rudiger Ahrens think this is what Sidney developed in his apology.
• Assumptions: Obviously, the entire functionalist agenda relies on two atomistic poles of "the needs of a culture" and "a culture's philosophy." I expect that New Historicism struck functionalism like a ton of bricks.
• Sententiae: "To have a story painted, for memory's sake, we hold it not to be unlawful." (146)

Overstanding

• Assessment: An unusual essay from a field of research unfamiliar to me. It presents an opportunity for perspective to me, a person who values formal approaches to literature, to reconsider my formalist assumptions and their relevance in the aftermath of New Historicism.
• Synthesis: At least another contributor, Rudiger Ahrens, indicated that functionalism has a novel reading of Sidney's Defense. That is, Sidney bridged early modernity England's needs for poetry with the humanistic developments of the Renaissance.
• Application: I can't say I find much use in functionalism, but the article introduced me to several interesting details, such as a story about Elizabeth's crucifix disappearing from her chapter at intervals, or Peacham's defense of aristocratic drawing based on Tertullian.

Back from hiatus

I'm back and I'll stop posting silly things, I promise.

Art in the Age of Greasy Surfaces, Pt. 3

This is part of a three-part series relating contemporary aesthetic philosophy to early modern print culture. I freely admit that I have never taken a class in philosophy, art history, or multimodal composition. Please excuse my amateurish attempts at all three.

3. Everything New is Old Again

The medium is the message, right? In McLuhan's thought, media have certain agentic qualities that I'd like to relate to the preceding two blog posts.

I have a few propositions. First, the digital era is a subset of the alphabetical era. This comes from my limited understanding of McLuhan. Second and subsequently, digital networks are a subset of ontological networks. This comes from Harman. Third, networked ontologies--in the sense of Harman's OOO--express their depth through their inexhaustibility. Inexhaustible ontologies imply that technical collaborations are not unique to digital "collaborators," as Sterling proposes.

Let me explain.

The California job case, above, resembles the typecases used by early printers like Aldus or de Worde. These printers represented knowledge in a significantly different way than what had come before in European society--disconnected from either a time or an acoustic space (as in the bardic transmission of information), or a particular, identifiable scribal hand (as in the secretarial transmission of information)--and our contemporary digital technologies amplify print modes of signification--again, across time and space, and distinct from personal allographs (the same differences, as it were).The digital turn promotes the digits 0 and 1 to represent the rest of the case, provided sufficient encoding. That encoding provides the illusion of Sterling's "virtual buddies," but only because machines can "read" certain kinds of alphabets and digits. Yet I contend that this is a narrow view of both reading and human-machine interaction. "Translation" is Bruno Latour's term for any interaction between actants, which Whitehead might otherwise call "prehension."

Digital networks, touch-sensitive screens, internetworked computer systems--these strike contemporary first-worlders as technologies apart and above technologies like the printing press, yet none of these are infused with any magical, vital phlebotinum. Computers operate in meatspace, even though humans can't normally sense the electronic exchanges that occur in microprocessors. Microprocessors made of processed metals and plastics that come from conflict-ravaged resource-rich countries. Your iPhone connects you to Foxconn as materially as fox.com.

Both digital texts and print texts are, after all, inexhaustible. Humans can perceive them in a handful of ways (digital texts can be perceived in a few more, since they might interfere with the relay of interior sensory information: eg, a pacemaker interacts with pulmonary stretch receptors through electronic pulses), but we can also discover our own ignorance through the progress of technology. Radiography, for example, revealed elements of printed texts only visible as high-frequency light or magnetic topology--translated by our technologies into lower-energy light for ocular input. These modes of perception display interactions between texts and other objects not designed for functional purposes. If we impute agency to things whose interactions exceed our designs, and if we discover that the material print--just like Sterling's virtual buddies--exceeds our designed interactions, then we ought impute agency to the material print. Just as the depth, alienation, and inexhaustibility of digital texts led Bruce Sterling to treat them as "collaborators," so too can print technologies be understood as such.

What's the pay-off for this high-fallutin' argument that can be mis-read to say that books are people? First and most flippantly, this provides us a presentist sympathy to the early moderns who discussed printed books as people with souls, voices, etc. They were not cavemen, unprepared for their own technological creations. Second and more seriously, the theories discussed provide us a consistent materialist account of the interrelation between political or economic history and literary history, via bibliography. Third and most seriously, these posts suggest that we treat persons in the circuit of early modern book production and survival not only as collaborators with other humans, but also with materials. The archivalist cuts deals with paper: if the archivalist provides suitable climates, the paper will slow its acidification. Paper shows its agency in its depth of material interactions, namely, its oxidization in certain climates. Likewise, the printer collaborates with his greasy surfaces. A bad batch of paper can ruin an edition, and that paper can show its agency with high or low pliability, or overly smooth felting, or several other characteristics that only illustrate the inexhaustibilty of paper's being.

To copy-change Sterling,

The real issue now is this intimate participation of machinery in cultural production. Practically everything we did in the early modern era that was novel, and different, and challenging, had some kind of material flavor.Forms of creative practice have arisen that are co-discovery with matter. They’re brain-bibliography mashups and hybrids.

Venus and Adonis by William Shakespeare

PRIMARY SOURCE: Venus and Adonis (1593)
Context

• Publication: Probably composed between June 1592 and May 1594, during a plague closure. Entered with the Stationers' on April 18, 1593. Printed by Richard Field, a fellow Stratfordian.By 1600, Venus and Adonis became a widely quoted poem, integral to Shakespeare's transition from dramatist to poet. Venus and Adonis was positively noted by Gabriel Harvey and many Cambridge undergraduates. EEBO link.
• Scholarship: Scholars read Venus and Adonis to understand Shakespeare's Ovidian and Renaissance influences, and to treat the issue of erotic love in Shakespeare's poetry.
• Why I'm reading it: The Canon.

Content

• Form: Iambic pentameter in six-line stanzas, ABABCC
• Genre: Heroic romantic poem.
• Conceit: Adonis is a delight to all, but doesn't desire love. Venus goes to meet him during a hunt, and forces him to listen and recline with her. Adonis doesn't reciprocate her affection, and breaks away to go home--but his horse runs away in romance. Venus appeals again to him, but faints after he scorns her. He aids her, she recovers, and Venus forsees Adonis' death. Adonis refuses her advances again, and refuses earthly lust in favor of heavenly love. Venus follows the sounds of the hunt and comes upon a wounded dog and a dead Adonis. Venus then curses love, at which time Adonis evaporates and is replaced by a purple and white flower.
• Other notes: Most of the amorous arguments are recycled from the sonnets, especially the self-consuming waste and self-consuming selfishness.
  
  Written with notes.

The Reformation of the Image by Joseph L Koerner

CITATION: Koerner, Joseph L. The Reformation of the Image. Chicago: University of Chicago press, 2008. Print.

Understanding

• Question: What did Protestant iconoclasts do with art?
• Answer: Protestants interject texts into visual representation, distancing the representation from its represented, just as they struggled with the paradox in Christ's broken-iconicity.
  "... I shift the focus from the iconoclasts' complaints to the images the iconoclasts themselves produce... I discern an iconoclasm in the Christian image itself." (80)
• Method: Koerner evaluates the underpinnings of German Protestant visual arts, especially those by Cranach the elder, through a litany of paintings, pamphlets, altarpieces and architecture.
  Koerner also briefly mentions a collaboration with Bruno Latour, invoking Latour's translational semiotics to highlight a paradox central to iconoclasm: the iconoclast believes in the fundamental connection between represented and representation, yet the representation never gets to the represented directly.
  In each chapter, Koerner moves from an ecumenical and established, but ultimately empty, site of iconoclasm outward to new sites of signification in society.
• Assumptions: Koerner responds to a view of the Reformation as antithetical to art, a view that is apparently a well-established as trope in art history. 
• Sententiae:
• Indeed the whole picture with its pairing of image and text, object and word, act and exegesis, reads like the key to such an exam [as the catechism]. here stand distinguished and explain the legal, social and doctrinal bases of the evangelical church. (21-22)
• In its profusion in Lutheran pictures, language itself reveals an opacity at odds with a hermeneutics of inner sense. Like the crosswords of letters common in early Lutheran school primers, the inscriptions in Reformation art, often illegible or abbreviated, recall that, for a culture of limited literacy, writing functioned as a token, rather than as a vehicle of sense. (36)
• [Franz von Sickingen] affirms an exclusive space where images can be appreciated for their 'art and beauty' alone. Church is for everyone but its seductive pictures belong in 'beautiful chambers' of nobles like himself. This has been a dominant story of the origin of the category 'art.' Transferred from church to collection, images become neutral objects of aesthetic experience. (59)
• People had long believed that harm or help could come from seeing a thing, that the eye either touched the object's surface through extramission or was intromissively touched by the eidola emitted by the object, and that the eye was itself the soul's window... Seeing the host achieved a Communion as effective as eating it. (71)
• Basil's formula, invoked by Christian iconophiles since the Byzantine image controversy, does not merely tell people how they ought to pray. It describes what prayers to images of Christ, the Virgin and the saints will always automatically do. Add to this the diagram of the semiotic circuitry of pictures, Emser and Eck add variations on the doctrine--as canonical as the image-prototype distinction itself--of the threefold function of church pictures, as Bibles for the illiterate, memory aids and incitements to devotion. This is what images do for Christians. Not the abomination of those perennial Others, the idolaters; the use of images is rule-bound and reasonable. Unfortunately, this rationality-conviction is challenged on two fronts. On the one hand, the abominable idolaters would surely also reply that they can distinguish between the gods and their statues. On the other hand, the iconoclast will know all these alibis and more, but not believe them. (97)
• Images are tautological. They show what they show--that a wound is there, not what the wound means. (139)
• The word 'mysticism' comes from myo, meaning 'to close the eyes.' ... In the language of Meister Eckhart, image 'de-image' [sic] (entbilden). They allow the mystic to encounter Christ negatively, in the blackness of death, and in the uncanny darkness of Christ's empty grave. (140)
• The premier image-maker of northern European culture in 1500, Durer recognized that pictures are, at best, mediators, affectincg without determining what their viewers see in them. Or as Bruno Latour puts it, 'Images count... because they allow one to move to another image, exactly as frail and modest as the former one--but different.' 
• The notion that thoughts are pictures is powerful and old. It stands suspended in the word 'idea,' which, deriving from the Greek 'to see,' is etymologically linked to eidolon or 'visible image.' Plato and Aristotle famously compared the mind to a wax tablet into which sensible objects impress their form; the Church Fathers used the word eikon to denote paintings and sculptures as well as thoughts, concepts, and analogies; and even the young Wittgenstein espoused a picture theory of meaning (which he later worked hard to dismantle). Pushed to an extreme, the theory that words make mental pictures suggests that pictures are the better medium. The eighth-century patriarch Nicephoros, writing against iconoclasts, argued that words and pictures were equally images of reality. But since words, to be understood, had to be translated into images (through a thought-process Nicephoros called analogismos), they were less direct and comprehensible than graphic representations which were images already. More so than sermons or writ, icons could offer unmediated knowledge of God. (162-3)
• When, in his 1525 treatise on measurement, Albrecht Durer showed how to make high-up inscriptions legible from the ground, the text he used for his illustration was the VDMIE motto in German... each element of which is sized relative to a positioned beholder. Words cannot 'remain eternal' if they are to stay readable from different points of view. Northern European art's first writer on perspective therefore teaches a method for writing in perspective. Erasmus evoked a similar condition of language as surface or inscription when he cited two types of illegibility: one where the alphabet is foreign and the letters do not 'look back at us'; the other, where the words are far off and eyeglasses are necessary. Although the text on Durer's monument affirms the absolute reference of the words--'the word [that] is Christ'--his perspectivist scenography, treating words as things, reveals the contingency of their inscription. (284-5)
• The founder of modern hermeneutics and the renewer of Luther's faith, Friedrich Schleiermacher, banned from poetry all verses 'that look like an axe or bottle.' In his view, picture poems conveyed messages through their external form; they therefore violated the primacy of inner sense that hermeneutics assumed--religiously--for language. (295)
• [Reactionary legal theorist Carl] Schmitt attributed to Protestantism the replacement of this realist politics [that the Church solely represents Christ] by a fiction of personal responsibility and impersonal representation. Displaced to the abstract principle of 'the people,' representation became empty: 'a plurality of copies' substituted for 'a unique existence,' as Walter Benjamin wrote from quite the opposite politics. (364)

Overstanding

• Assessment: Like Duffy's, this is a book so large I couldn't do it justice. Nevertheless, I can attest to Koerner's exhaustive research and effective inversion of "iconoclasm" as a trope among art historians.
• Synthesis: In my notes for O'Connelll, I had over-read a claim that the sight of Christ's suffering implicated the viewer: Koerner's introduction to the eidolon provides the means of visual empathy; the eidolon provides the limit. It seems that sacramental sight was in decline in the late middle ages, and it's highly doubtful that the same ideology could be transferred by early modern audiences to the play-house.
• Application: Koerner's treatment of the intra-Reformation feuds, especially between the Lutherans, Zwinglians, and Calvinists provides a provocative jumping-off point for analyzing and distinguishing the  Dutch refugee printers in early modern London. Did the Calvinists flee Geneva to maintain their craft of engraved printing? Did the Lutherans continue to proselytize with illustrated pamphlet covers?