Emblems in Scotland: Motifs and Meanings by Michael Bath (review)

From its Latin and Greek roots, the sense of ‘emblem’ was ‘inlaid work’; by the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, it was ‘symbol’, ‘type’. In that linguistic evolution, as Michael Bath notes in his Preface, Alciato’s Emblematum liber (1531)—its use of a woodcut illustration of moral, proverbial or political ideas, with a Latin motto above, and a verse epigram below—was crucial as the model for the many later emblem books (Whitney, Montenay, Batilly, Farley, and Quarles).

The foundation of Bath’s study is the magnificent Stirling Maxwell Collection of emblem books at Glasgow University Library. His eight chronologically arranged essays reflect this Scottish context, especially in architectural example. In their explorations of the use and transmission of emblems, however, the essays range widely across different terrains, including cultural and political relations, Christian iconography, court ceremonies, and Modernist garden design. Translations throughout, of the Latin, Greek, and French inscriptions and distichs quoted in the text, notes, and captions, are of great assistance, as are the numerous well-placed illustrations.

The first chapter examines the meaning of a fool’s-capped man, who lurks behind King Herod’s shoulder, within the fifteenth-century Crucifixion scene painted on the rood screen at St Marnock’s Church, Fowlis Easter, Angus. Bath’s many European examples of similar figures are contextualizing. In his discussion of the ‘Jester Figure’ (pp. 7–22) switching between the word ‘jester’ (a professional fool) and ‘fool’ (simpleton or, biblically, an impious person), both twists and informs the argument.

The emblematic links between three women, Christine de Pisan, Georgette de Montenay, and Esther Inglis, are the matter of Chapter 2. Bath draws on the previous work of Alison Saunders, Alison Adams, and Marie-Claude Tucker, adding to it, notably on portraiture (pp. 31–34); and with Susan Groag Bell’s innovative research on the City of Dames tapestries, his observations usefully confirming hers.

In Chapter 3, Bath identifies Guillaume de la Perrière’s Morosophie (‘The Wisdom of Folly’, 1553) as the hitherto unknown source of a motto over the now-demolished fireplace at Castle Ruthven (Huntingtower). The accompanying woodcut introduces a wider discussion (acknowledging Saxl and Iwaki) of the topic Veritas filia temporis. There are valuable Scottish examples here, and in the related study of the more doctrinally difficult emblem, In utrumque paratus, including Skelmorlie’s funerary ceiling (1636), and Rossend Castle’s painted ceiling.

Chapter 4 examines ceremonies associated with royal baptisms (James VI, 1566; Henry, 1594), the first through its illustration of the phrase Anglici caudati (‘all Englishmen have tails’), the second via William Fowler’s True Reportarie. There is confusion at p. 87. Bath cites a letter of 1517, from James V—or, since James was then five, Governor Albany—to Pope Leo. It refers to matters relating to the previous Pope, Julius, who died in 1513, and to the king’s older half-brother, Alexander Stewart, killed at Flodden in 1513, thus not alive in 1517 as Bath assumes.

The country house built at Pinkie in 1613 by Alexander Seton, Earl of Dunfermline, and its relationship to its historic site (where the 1547 battle repudiated the Treaty of Greenwich and union with England), is the subject of Chapter 5. Attempting to understand the man and his villa, Bath has identified Seton’s books (Vredeman, Du Cerceau, Vaenius, Blaise de Vignière, Lebey de Batilly and others) and studied the villa’s external inscriptions and the Long Gallery’s painted Neostoic emblems.

Chapter 6 begins with a rare contemporary (1618) response to the use of emblems: the account of how Church of Scotland minister, Patrick Simson, was encouraged on his deathbed by his brother to remember those emblems decorating the walls of his manse (Holy Rude Kirk, Stirling). His recollections included their source, ‘Pierus’, Pierio Valeriano’s 1556 Hieroglyphica (an expansion of Horapollo’s Egyptian lexicon to incorporate the major Christian iconologies). Bath shows how the (reformed) climate...