Visual Rhetoric and Early Modern English Literature by Katherine Acheson (review)

This book is a product of Katherine Acheson’s study of the visual organisation of knowledge in early modern Europe, and her interest in how diagrammatic forms such as tables, charts, and maps might be profitably used for unravelling complex visual structures in literary texts of the same period.

There are several fascinating chapters that demonstrate extensive research of primary texts and materials, and in each instance Acheson’s argument is illuminated with numerous high-quality illustrations. Structured with clarity and logic, the visual and textual components fit neatly into the general topics of ‘space’, ‘truth’, ‘art’, and ‘nature’. Acheson does not intend to give a comprehensive survey of literary texts that demonstrate a connection with diagrammatic forms, but aims to provide a methodological foundation that can be applied more broadly. She has selected texts by Andrew Marvell, John Milton, and Aphra Behn on account of their strong engagement with early modern print culture, and their familiarity with various available methods for structuring and representing knowledge.

The first chapter explores the various forms of schematic illustrations used in books on military strategy and tactics popular in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and how they used abstract, two-dimensional models for representing men, equipment, and landmarks. Acheson demonstrates that these books shared a number of features with manuals for garden design produced during the same period, with each relying upon a set of culturally derived ‘coding orientations’ for communicating meaning to the early modern reader. The neutral, overhead perspective typical of these works is demonstrated in relation to Marvell’s poem ‘Upon Appleton House’, which gives a perspectivally complex account of retired English general Lord Fairfax’s estate as a militarised garden. Acheson offers an exciting new reading of this perplexing poem based on the conceptual ties between these two genres.

The second chapter looks at the popularity of the dichotomous table for structuring material, and imparting knowledge in a circumscribed way. Acheson observes that these tables were used in fields as diverse as theology, philosophy, history, and medicine, with taxonomic diagrams and genealogical trees being a few examples. A discussion of the genealogies of the scriptures that were frequently inserted or bound into the Bishop’s Bible leads to a discussion of logic and method in John Milton’s Protestant poem Paradise Lost. A poem occasioned by the question of what cased Adam and Eve to fall, it provides an excellent context for comparing the cause and effect argument asserted by God, with that of Satan, whose argument disrupts and complicates the possibility of a meaningful relationship.

Chapter 3 traces similarities between seventeenth-century drawing books, which became increasingly commercialised and mediated by technology, and writing manuals, also seen as a practice requiring the use of instruments. Acheson discusses ekphrastic poetry as a common form in which painting and writing come together, while ‘competing’ to prove themselves a superior technique for truthful representation. While the first part of the chapter makes some interesting points, the examples drawn from Marvell’s ‘Last Instructions to a Painter’ (1667) lack depth, and are somewhat disappointing. The competition between poetry and painting is foregrounded in the poem, but this is one of many rhetorical techniques used, and does not sufficiently support her claim that Marvell considers poetry more truthful than painting because it is less mediated by technology, with the voice of the poem’s speaker also being extensively mediated by the hand of the poet. Acheson begins by drawing a comparison between the techniques of writing, painting, and empirical science, which was also mediated by (optical) instruments, in order to discuss the relationships in Marvell’s poem. This is followed by a discussion of similarities between poetry and empirical science, and the conclusion that Marvell is critical of the use of the microscope and telescope because they create distorted and grotesque images. To make such claims, however, is to misinterpret the analogy...