Corpus Librorum Emblematum: The Jesuit Series Part Two ed. by Peter M. Daly, G. Richard Dimler (review)

218 LETTERS IN CANADA 2000 definitive study of A Mirror for Magistrates is its brevity, which may soon be redressed by readers with a renewed interest in this poem. (MICHAEL ULLYOT) Peter M. Daly and G. Richard Dimler, editors. Corpus Librorum Emblematum: The Jesuit Series Part Two University of Toronto Press. lviii, 274. $125.00 This volume is part of a larger project designed to give access to the Jesuit tradition of emblems, a central matter in the system of education which has been important since the foundation of the Society in the sixteenth century. This project is, in turn, part of another enterprise, the Index Emblematicus, an edited collection of the major works of Renaissance emblem literature. The general editor of the Index, Peter M. Daly, is the foremost student of the emblem. His coeditor, Richard Dimler, is himself a Jesuit and also a considerable student of the form. The volume, admirably clear in its presentation, in word and image, of a bibliographically complicated subject, will be useful, with the rest of the set, for scholars concerned with the importance of the emblem tradition in early modern history, philosophy, the arts, and literature. As the editors note, >the Jesuits produced more work in this genre than did any other identifiable group of writers ... and in all major European vernacular languages as well as in Latin.= In an account of the exhibitions at the Jesuit college in Brussels from 1630 to 1685, Karel Porteman comments on the emblem in Jesuit studies, underlining the >rhetoric of visuality,= a phenomenon demonstrated by Jesuit college theatre in the emphasis on mastery of the arts of persuasion, and in exhibitions of emblems, those combinations of word and image which demand concentration, decoding and internalization. Literary theorists long ago found analogies between the movement of certain baroque poems and the Spiritual Exercises. We have probably neglected other ways in which the emblem tradition not least in the decorative arts, affected imagination. Those trained to read it were both constrained to the visual and oral terms, to sort out meanings personally and to make applications. In an earlier article on the emblem, >Imitatio, Inventio and Jesuit Emblem Theory,= in Gyorgy Szonyi=s European Iconography (1996), Dimler relates the emblem to argutic rhetoric, or the curt style. The >orator=s aim,= he says, > is not to instruct and teach, but to use the striking trope and the marvelous image.= Brevity, he adds, becomes the mark of the courtly style B appropriate for rulers and/or those who would communicate with them. Ignatius Loyola >early on linked the establishment of Jesuit schools in the sixteenth century with overall goals of the Catholic secular rulers in combating the rise of protestants in their territories.= The power of the elite rested in part upon control of an arcane set of images and HUMANITIES 219 symbols. The Society was possibly more dangerous in this way than in the more obvious kinds of craft often attributed to it. If readers look at the emblems in the Jesuit Series as simply pictures with mottos, they miss the point. Seen as a whole, the emblems constitute an enormous body of educative devices designed to appeal to eye, ear, and mind. Learning to command this body lent, in turn, an enormous command over moral precept and doctrine, made by the learned for the elite. Some of this research is now available on the Web, where a modern technological device, which allows for close study by enlargement, works with materials related to the earlier science practised by those who saw the use of these earlier sources of unexploded energy in managing the political world through encoded morality and theology. Now that the labours of Daly and companions are establishing a body of images and commentary from the emblems, it will be possible to trace them not only in printed books and in the words about them, but also in the decorative arts. As John O=Malley=s recent collection of essays on the Jesuits= arts, science and culture has shown, the Society was aware of how their way of taking over each of these might produce doctrinal effect. We need to study these matters in the...