The Jesuit Series. Part 1: A-D (review)

This magisterial section of Daly and Dimler's bibliography of Jesuit emblem-books, covering a mere seven (in the Latin alphabet, six) letters of the alphabet, contains as much matter for admiration and meditation as many completed monographs on the arts and cultures of the early modern world. This is genuinely an outstanding achievement, adding to the achievements which have gone before, increasing anticipation of what is to come.

As well as being a wide-ranging collection of bibliographical specifics and encyclopedic information about the present locations of emblem books, considered in a splendidly wide sense (thus including festival decorations and books of iconographic theory), this book gives a real sense of the range of uses to which verbal and visual languages were put in the seventeenth century. It is of interest to all historians of early modern culture, not only to specialists in Counter-Reformation history and the history of the emblem. As so often, the old Society of Jesus provides a particularly keen focus: so much of the Society's mission involved the explanation of the theories of one social group to another that their writings are vital witnesses for the contemporary historian. In their activities as educators of urban adults, they taught the elite arts of emblematics and rhetoric, they taught oratory and emblematics in their colleges, they functioned as one of the primary points of contact between the Old World and the New.

All these activities are represented in the careful descriptions included in this richly illustrated book. It is impossible in a review of this length to give any comprehensive idea of the sheer range of material which is covered, from emblematically-expressed doctoral theses (like the wonderfully titled Via Lactea candidus ad felicitatem trames), to laudations of bishops and dukes on their taking office, to emblematic celebrations of canonizations and ecclesiastical festivals (Francesco Intorcetta's Emblems celebrating the intercession of St Rosalia at Palermo sound particularly attractive), to emblems displayed at the funerals or marriages of local magnates, to handbooks of rhetoric and poetics such as the widely disseminated Ratio discendi et docendi of Joseph de Jouvancy or the De l'Art des Devices of Pierre le Moyne.

The letter H has inevitably brought one of the most challenging tasks of this whole project: the Pia Desideria of Herman Hugo, SJ was one of the most widely distributed, most widely translated and imitated religious books (not just emblem books) of the seventeenth century. The bibliographers rise to it splendidly, in 143 dense pages which describe editions in all the major European languages, printed over the course of more than a century. Wisely, Daly and Dimler confine themselves to direct imitations of Hugo's work. It would have been literally impossible to include all works which derive from it more remotely: there were in print in England as late as the 1880s versions of emblem books which have the Pia Desideria as their source, interestingly by that date printed especially for the Protestant Dissenting market. A true index of the spread of imagery from the Pia Desideria is that in so remote a place as the Viking cathedral of Kirkwall in the Orkney Isles, there are late seventeenth-century grave slabs, partly consisiting of grim, brusque Latin verses but bearing also relief carvings of the child-soul of Hugo's emblem-pictures.

When this series is complete, it promises to be very much more than a superbly accurate and comprehensive bibliography of Jesuit emblematics: it will be a guide to the activities of one of the crucial cultural forces not only in early modern Europe but in Asia and the Americas, it will be a history in epitome of early modern verbal and visual culture.