L'Emblème littéraire: Théories et pratiques (review)

In May 1990, as Stéphane Rolet reminds the reader near the start of his introduction, Littérature devoted an issue to the topic of "L'Anatomie de l'emblème." Edited by Gisèle Mathieu-Castellani, that groundbreaking issue was at that time, as Rolet says, "une des rares publications françaises centrées sur l' emblème." The question of just why the field of emblem studies was relatively slow to blossom in France is treated in the final essay of this new volume by Daniel Russell, at the conclusion of an interesting but uneven collection of essays on topics ranging from emblematic precursors and the genesis of Alciato' s original Emblemata to the Spanish emblem tradition by way of such rather more specialized topics as editorial conventions in France and the particular contribution of the region of Lorraine.

The opening essay in the volume, by Alison Adams, is devoted to "La conception et l'édition des livres d'emblèmes dans la France du XVIe siècle." Adams provides a useful overview of the various roles of the emblem author in sixteenth-century France, as opposed to the influence of booksellers or publishers. Taking as her starting point Daniel Russell' s acute observation that the emblem is the work of a committee, she concludes that the author' s role, normally preeminent during the period under consideration, is for the first time contested by the added value that emblematic illustrations would bring the marketplace. Élisabeth Klecker, in "Des signes muets aux emblèmes chanteurs: les Emblemata d'Alciat et l'emblématique," reviews the Steyner publication of Alciato and Alciato' s role in the Wechel editions. Interestingly, she contends that he may have been more concerned with correcting some politically explosive passages than with fixing errors or omissions, even in pictures.

Anne Rolet, in "Aux sources de l'emblème: blasons et devises," follows Michel Pastoureau in examining some heraldic sources of emblematics. She provides a close reading of some emblems from A. Bocchi to show that a careful and accurate reading of the heraldic code is essential if readers are to grasp the intended meaning. Her thesis in this regard is similar to previous work by Alison Adams about the importance and the difficulty of successfully identifying and reading the biblical allusions so prevalent in religious emblems books, and is a welcome reminder of the sheer difficulty of doing so. In "Le cas singulier des emblèmes en Lorraine aux XVI^e et XVII^e siècles," Paulette Choné provides a fascinating study of the richness and specificity of the emblem tradition in Lorraine. Her contention is that Lorraine provided an especially fertile soil in which emblematic traditions of several kinds were able to flower, and where some of the best artists and authors of the day were able to produce works that rank as among the finest the French emblem corpus has to offer.

Christian Bouzy's essay "Emblème et propagande théologico-politique en Espagne au Siècle d'or: le symbolisme de la couronne" begins with what is to my way of thinking an overlong introduction on the state of affairs in Spanish emblem studies, before the real subject, a disappointingly short (though intriguing) study of crown emblems that could have been much more substantial and thus more persuasive. In "Ars symbolica et ars meditandi: La pensée symbolique dans la spiritualité jésuite," Ralph DeKonick summarizes the key findings of his recently published doctoral thesis. Rather than seeing in the image either the highly degraded corporeal instantiation of some long-lost ideal form or the physical incarnation of an idea, Jesuit emblematic spirituality was unique (and highly modern, one might add) in conceiving the image not as an entity in its own right but in terms of the relationships that could be established between image and reader. Sagrario López de Posa's "L'emblème...