Speaking pictures: English emblem books and Renaissance culture (review)

Reviews 139 aristocratic interests, criticising not only the monks for then idleness but the prelates for the way in which 'they disdayne the auncient and true noble bloud'. Rede me and be not wrothe was wide-ranging both in its targets and its style. One of its interesting features is its satirical mis-reading of Wolsey's coat-of-arms, a piece of iconographical satire that takes its place along with linguistic, social, personal, cultural, and intertextual satire. Parker's discussion of the satirical tradition of Rede me and be not wrothe although usefully locating it within the tradition initiated by Lollardy, would have benefitted by some more extensive discussion of the larger Reformation satiric tradition. The discussion of the literary aspects of the satire is particularly unadventurous. The footnotes, although comprehensive, oftenrelyon a restricted range • of sources. It is unnecessary to gloss the line, "The dolfull destruction of noble ttoye' with the comment 'As immortalized in Homer's Illiad' (p. 171). And although Barlowe and Roye might well have liked to depict Wolsey preceded in procession by 'two great asses of silver', George Cavendish, whose Life and death of Cardinal Wolsey '(1554-57) Parker misquotes (p. 184), speaks of 'two great crosses of silver' as carried before him. James Rigney Department of English Roehampton Institute, London Bath, Michael, Speaking pictures: English emblem books and Renaissance culture, London, Longman 1994; cased and paper; pp. xiii, 311; 7 figures, 25 plates; R.R.P. £38.00 (cased), £16.99 (paper). Despite the pioneering work represented by Henry Green's Shakespeare and the emblem writers (1869), literary scholars have been slow to grasp the enormous importance of emblem studies for the exegesis of Renaissance literary works. Much about the subject is still obscure. Green's work, now coming back into favour, bad been dismissed because of its characteristic Victorian preoccupation with direct lines of transmission: the demonstrable influence of Book A upon Book B. It was not until the appearance of Rosemary Freeman's English emblem books (1948) that the genuine importance of the genre was widely appreciated. It is much to be regretted that Freeman did not live to complete her projected volume in the popular 140 Reviews Critical Idiom series since this would have ensured a wider dissemination of information upon emblem books at an earlier date. This was to be achieved with the appearance, in English, of the enlarged version of Mario Praz's Seventeenth-century imagery (1939,1975), based upon research undertaken before World War II. The movement gathered strength and speed with the monumental Emblemata: Handbuch zur Sinnbildkunst des XVI. und XVII. Jahrhunderts of Arthur Henkel and Albrecht Schone, To this point, emblem studies were principally an applied art, founded upon the excellent series of fascimUe reprints produced by the Scolar Press in the 1970s. Those of us who became interested in emblem studies in the 1960s, guiltily prompted by an uneasiness about the footnoting in august journals such as ELH, regarded, say, Whitney's Choice of emblemes as a codebook which could be consulted on an ad hoc basis for the elucidation of any particular gnomic image in Spenser or Shakespeare. There was as yet litde interest in emblems as autonomous cultural artefacts, no clear grasp of the machinery by which they were disseminated, and no understanding of then interrelatedness or of the means by which the plates were traded and transmitted. Nor was there an internationally accepted convention by which the various elements of the emblem could be codified and catalogued. This further development, which might be regarded as emblem studies per se, owes a great deal to the work of Peter M . Daley and his colleagues at McGill university. Thanks to then labours, we now have the initial volumes of the projected Index emblematicus, founded upon the deliberations of a symposium held at McGill in December 1978, together with an international Society for Emblem Studies and its journal Emblematica, now in its eighth year of publication. The work of Henkel and Schone has now been enormously supplemented by the IDC microfiche collection by W i m van Dongen (1988), although its claim to contain 'all available emblem books' should be taken with a pinch...