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

Katherine acheson explores the visual culture of books in early modern Britain—meaning in this case books printed up to 1680—to provide a framework for reading seventeenth-century English literature. She undertakes a survey of non-representational images to investigate their structure and the ways in which they convey information. Such images are conventional, and by analogy with verbal languages operate only if their vocabulary and syntax are common currency. Her thesis is that the visual language or codes of technical illustration engendered patterns of thought that influenced literary composition. She asserts that: ‘As in literary genres, these codes are formal, and can be transferred to media outside the ones in which they originate’. These formal conventions ‘can therefore shape the presentation of ideas and concepts in works of literature that belong to the same culture’. In each chapter she looks for the influence of the modes of thought operating in technical imagery in poems by Marvell, in Milton’s Paradise Lost, and in Aphra Behn’s prose fiction Oroonoko.

The four chapters, headed ‘Space’, ‘Truth’, ‘Art’, and ‘Nature’, deal with different genres of illustrated books, bringing together categories that are usually discussed separately: gardening books and military books in Chapter 1, writing books and artists’ manuals in Chapter 3. The first finds common ground in the illustrations in books on gardening and military tactics, neatly covering the ‘militarised garden’ in Andrew Marvell’s ‘Upon Appleton House’ (1651). In the poem, Lord Fairfax

Who, when retired here to Peace, His warlike Studies could not cease; But laid these Gardens out in sport In the just Figure of a Fort.

The images in gardening and military books share techniques for conveying information. Even where they are representational they are non-naturalistic. There is rarely any question of one-point perspective, and even if soldiers, buildings, trellises or trees are shown as viewed from the side these views often morph into overhead views or plans. Formations of trees or of soldiers look very similar as patterns of dots or abstract shapes, or, in the military manuals, letters from the type-case (surprisingly the use of letterform diagrams is unique to military manuals). The images can combine icons—for example cannons, tents, trees—with purely abstract symbols and line diagrams. Gardening and warfare are opposed in literature, an opposition between the order and harmony of the garden and the chaos of war. Acheson argues that the illustrations link the two, and Marvell’s poem does the same. For example, the abrupt changes of scale and viewpoint in Marvell’s visual metaphors resemble the conceptualisation of space and the ordering and control of nature found in these books.

Scholars are increasingly looking at tables and other data-displays as part of scientific illustration, and Acheson devotes her second chapter ‘Truth’ to the widespread use of dichotomous trees and tables. These give structure to the arguments and doctrines of the books that contain them. Pointing out that Milton would have been familiar with printed dichotomies before he went blind, Acheson reads Paradise Lost in terms of the logic of syllogism, the basis of dichotomous trees. The work of God follows the dichotomous table, being organised and complete, while the work of the devil is disordered and incoherent. Dichotomous tables, Acheson claims, characterise the relationship between plot and narrative—they are about plot, not narrative. Satan goes in for narrative, ‘God, on the other hand, finds narrative annoying’, Acheson happily tells us, because God already has all the answers to any challenges that narrative can throw down. Narrative leads one astray, the dichotomous table tells one how to read and interpret the narrative.

Art is the topic of the next chapter, in which drawing manuals and writing books inform the reading of another Marvell poem, ‘Last instructions to a painter’ (1667). Here Acheson suggests that painting and writing are increasingly dependent on instruments, and that ‘the poem also stages the struggle between painting...