Tamara A. Goeglein
Franklin & Marshall College
The Department of Rare Books and Special Collections of Princeton
University Library holds one of the world's best collections of emblem books, a
collection indebted to the Princeton Emblem Project begun in 1977 by William S.
Heckscher and later catalogued by him and Agnes B. Sherman in Emblem Books
in the Princeton University Library Short-Title Catalogue (1984). In May 2004, I
was able to use this collection through a Friends of the Princeton University
Library Research Grant that was funded by the Council of the Humanities, and,
in what follows, I will report on my research.
I am now writing a series of essays on early modern emblem books, and,
over the course of this series, I am trying to discover how early modern readers
read them. These emblem books exploited the new print medium by juxtaposing
symbolic pictures with epigrams in order to create a multi-media experience for
their readers. The link between the visual text and the verbal text was often a
puzzle, not unlike what we find today in a good political cartoon where the
caption sends its readers back up to the drawing to discover the visual punch
line. But, such a blithe analogy between our ways of reading and earlier ways of
reading can be deceptive and can conceal more than it reveals about past reading practices and the habits of mind that cultivated them. My long-term research is trying to recover what articulations there may be between an emblematic modus legendi and other visual literacies embedded in early modern intellectual culture.
For the period of my research fellowship, I focused on the extent to which
emblem books are explicitly and implicitly related to the art of memory (ars
memorativa), which was one of the five parts of classical rhetoric that enabled an
orator to remember accurately his long speeches by cultivating visual mnemonic
techniques.
The art of memory has a long, venerable history as it moves from ancient
Greece and Rome into the European Middle Ages and Renaissance. Memory
systems are based principally in vivid images (imagines) and visualized spaces
(loci). Memory treatises, such as such as Gulielmus Gratarolus' Castel of
Memorie (1562), John Willis' Art of Memory (1621), and Thomas Watson's
Compendium Memorić Localis (1585), instructed their readers to imagine a
memorial space, a location such as an amphitheater into which those memorial
objects (imagines) symbolizing portions of an oration could be placed. The
orator would systematically place the symbols in his space, and, later, as he
delivered his speech, he would imaginatively retrace his steps, remembering the
order and the substance of his speech as he encountered one symbol after the
next. The way mnemonic images are supposed to operate in "memory theaters,"
as they were called, is similar to the way emblematists propose their pictures
work, because emblematic literacy requires remembering the picture as the mind
circulates through it and the words on the page.
The questions that guided my research at the Princeton University Library
were these: to what extent might a sixteenth- or seventeenth-century reader of
emblem books transfer the arts of memory to his experience of emblems? To
what extent was he encouraged to do so by the emblematists? What, if anything,
do emblem theorists say about the role of memory in fashioning and interpreting
emblems? What metaphors for remembering are explicitly adopted in emblem
books or implied by emblematic modes of reading? How might the emblematic
mise-en-page replicate the imaginative circuit traveled by the orator as he
recovered the speech inscribed in his memory theater?
It is possible to trace a connection between the ars memorativa and the ars
emblematica at the level of metaphor since both use metaphors of drama to
describe their habits of mind. "Memory theater" is as commonplace in memory
treatises as it is in emblem book titles, such as Jean Jacques Boissard's Theatrum vitae humanae. William Heckscher notes in his Princeton Alciati Companion that "theatrum" often referred to a Renaissance lecture hall for visual instruction, such as an anatomy lesson, or to a place for visual display, such as a museum. Theatrum was also synonymous with pegma ("showpiece"), which was often used to describe dramatic scaffolding, such as a stage. The portable memory theater pictured in John Willis' memory treatise looks like a pegma drawn straight from the pages of a modern-day "do-it-yourself" carpentry book. Pegma also referred to a mobile structure for display, such as a curiosity cabinet, or to a piece that fastened something together, such as a clasp or a "collection" of emblems, or even to a bookshelf. An early modern theatrum likewise referred to a library or, by extension, to a quiet retreat for contemplation. These metaphors of dramatic display and visual education highlight modes of thought
figuratively associated with the art of memory and with emblem books, namely reading, reflecting, and remembering.
A number of emblematic theoretical writings underscore the memorial
virtue of the emblem. Claude Mignault of Dijon, whose critical commentary was
eventually printed with Andreas Alciato's Emblemata (Antwerp: Plantin, 1577),
states:
We approve an orator, poet, historian, philosopher, or any other
writer if he sparkles and shines with notable maxims like stars,
which on being read somewhere are marked with the sign of a
finger or horizontal pen so that they are more easily committed to
memory, and come to mind more readily when they are needed.
Mignault goes on to compare this kind of memorial marking with an emblematic
picture accompanied by its textual inscription, though he argues that emblematic
memory is not impressed by the visual mark alone. Mignault suggests rather
that the juxtaposition of image and word-the emblematic unit-enables the
mind to remember its moral lesson:
The emblem, either because of the picture, which is the subject, or
through the explanation given by the poem or through the
inscription, has some facility in which the mind can be at ease.
Mignault, as many early modern emblem theorists, underscores the bimedial
semantic of the emblem, namely that it is composed of a word and an image
together. The word in an emblem was often called the "spirit" and its image the
"body," as Mignault writes, "the analogy between the spirit and the body should
be appropriate. (By 'spirit' I mean the motto, contained in one, two, or, at most, a
few words; by the term 'body' I wish to designate the image itself.)"
This body-spirit metaphor structures the design of the religious emblem
book Ashrea (London, 1655), whose title page explicitly links emblems to the art
of memory: "Ashrea: Or, The Grove of Beatitudes, Represented in Emblemes:
And, by the Art of Memory, To be read on our Blessed Savior Crucifi'd: With
Considerations and Meditations suitable to every Beatitude, and to the holy time
of Lent." Opposite the title page is pictured a crucified Christ on whose body the
reader is to impress Ashrea's arboreal emblems just as an orator is to inscribe his memorial space (locus) with mnemonic images (imagines). Not only has the
body of Christ become a memorial space for pious meditation, but the overall
scheme of Ashrea also adapts the emblematic spirit-body metaphor to its subject
matter-the Word (spirit) made Flesh (body) in Christ. This conceptual
transference of emblem theory to Christian theology can be seen, literally,
because the emblematic body of Christ is labeled from head to foot with banners
textually inscribed with the spiritual beatitudes that are then keyed to specific
tree emblems found in the book. The act of reading the tree emblems amounts to
planting a symbolic grove of trees that serves as a contemplative garden and as a memorial space to return time and again. The complex emblematic scheme of
Ashrea could only be bizarre, if not incomprehensible, to a reader unfamiliar
with the art of memory.
Most emblem books are neither as explicitly related to the art of memory
as Ashrea nor as theoretically concerned with how emblems work as Claude
Mignault. Still, my research in Princeton's emblem collection is leading me to
believe that an emblem book invites its reader to enter into its "perspective
field," which smacks of a memorial location (locus), and to transfer its "prepackaged" emblematic pictures (imagines) into the reader's own memorial space.
Religious emblem books most obviously place their reader in a meditative
posture: the emblems in Herman Hugo's Pia Desideria, for example, are
imagined as the "divine addresses" of the reader. Many emblematic pictures,
moreover, are framed by elaborate scrollwork that underscores the image as an
object, as an object that can placed within the reader's own memory to serve as
the catalyst for an interior monologue or as a conversation with the divine. The
three theological virtues-faith, hope, and charity-appear repeatedly as a visual
motif in religious emblem books and require readers to interpret their
iconography as a meditation on St. Paul's words in 1 Corinthians 13:13.
Emblematic frontispieces of books invite their readers to enter into the
dramatic space and thus into the spiritual realm pictured before their eyes. A
good example of this is the frontispiece to the Bishops Bible (1568) which pictures Queen Elizabeth as Hope flanked above by Faith and Charity-this bible is currently displayed in the Princeton University Library exhibition, "The Bible in
English: Before and After the Hampton Court Conference, 1604," mounted in the
Main Gallery of The Firestone Library. While such Tudor royal iconography
undoubtedly signals the "hope" Queen Elizabeth brought to the religious
turmoil of the English Reformation, it also evokes the dramatic architectural
space of memory theaters. Readers confronted with such emblematic
frontispieces are positioned much as an orator walking through his memory
theater recalling his speech from the symbolic images. The frontispiece of
George Wither's Emblemes (London, 1634-35) goes so far as, I believe, to picture the reader inside the emblematic landscape. At one point in his journey to the top of the mountain where vistas of spiritual truth await him, an allegorical
figure, poised with hand over heart, seeks the aid of the personified Faith, Hope,
and Charity. We might say that an actual reader of Wither's Emblemes is to
emulate this allegorical double ganger even as he is to memorize this heuristic
frontispiece. In his memory treatise, John Willis specifically recommends title
pages and emblems as good mnemonic devices, because emblematic pictures
and words enable an orator to remember both conceptual and verbal ideas: "For
in all Emblemes, the picture occupying the vpper part of the table, is a Relatiue
Idea; and that which is written vnderneath, a Scriptile." Although the act of
reading leaves few traces, I am increasingly confident that the art of memory
informs the early modern experience of emblem books, and I am grateful to the
Friends of the Princeton University Library for awarding me a research grant to
study this history of reading.
libraryf@princeton.edu
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