STOICISM AND ITS METAPHORS IN EARLY MODERN EMBLEM BOOKS

2021 ◽  
Vol 29 (1) ◽  
pp. 145-176
Author(s):  
Alexander Makhov ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Visual Language ◽  
Visual Metaphor ◽  
Human Soul ◽  
Social Doctrine ◽  
Emblem Books ◽  
Abstract Ideas ◽  
Ars Inveniendi

The moral and social doctrine of Stoicism, well known among Early Modern humanists, was popularized in the emblem books of the time. The tool of this popularization was the visual metaphor capable of conveying abstract ideas through concrete images. The main stoic notions (such as virtue, apatheia as a complete freedom from passions, constancy, patience, etc.) have found extremely diverse metaphorical equivalents in the visual language of emblems, where inanimate objects (e.g. rock, flint, anvil, tongs, cube, scales) as well as living creatures (kingfisher, turtledove, bear) could equally function as metaphors. Emblematics, being a kind of ars inveniendi, acted as a mechanism for inventing new metaphors to express old meanings. However, some traditional metaphors dating back to antiquity (for example, Plato’s comparison of the human soul to a chariot pulled by two horses – “reason” and “emotion”) were also rethought in the spirit of the Stoic doctrine.

Moscow: The Third Rome

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nick Mayhew
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
19Th Century ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
16Th Century ◽  
Human Soul ◽  
The Third ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
Imperial Ideology ◽  
The City ◽  
Modern Russian

In the mid-19th century, three 16th-century Russian sources were published that alluded to Moscow as the “third Rome.” When 19th-century Russian historians discovered these texts, many interpreted them as evidence of an ancient imperial ideology of endless expansion, an ideology that would go on to define Russian foreign policy from the 16th century to the modern day. But what did these 16th-century depictions of Moscow as the third Rome actually have in mind? Did their meaning remain stable or did it change over the course of the early modern period? And how significant were they to early modern Russian imperial ideology more broadly? Scholars have pointed out that one cannot assume that depictions of Moscow as the third Rome were necessarily meant to be imperial celebrations per se. After all, the Muscovites considered that the first Rome fell for various heretical beliefs, in particular that Christ did not possess a human soul, and the second Rome, Constantinople, fell to the Turks in 1453 precisely because it had accepted some of these heretical “Latin” doctrines. As such, the image of Moscow as the third Rome might have marked a celebration of the city as a new imperial center, but it could also allude to Moscow’s duty to protect the “true” Orthodox faith after the fall—actual and theological—of Rome and Constantinople. As time progressed, however, the nuances of religious polemic once captured by the trope were lost. During the 17th and early 18th centuries, the image of Moscow as the third Rome took on a more unequivocally imperialist tone. Nonetheless, it would be easy to overstate the significance of allusions to Moscow as the third Rome to early modern Russian imperial ideology more broadly. Not only was the trope rare and by no means the only imperial comparison to be found in Muscovite literature, it was also ignored by secular authorities and banned by clerics.

Word and Sign in Elizabethan Conflicts with the Devil

1999 ◽  
Vol 31 (2) ◽  
pp. 238-256
Author(s):  
Kathleen R. Sands
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Psychological Impact ◽  
Elizabeth I ◽  
The Sun ◽  
Emblem Books ◽  
Modern Mind ◽  
Clifford Geertz ◽  
Landed Gentry ◽  
The Devil ◽  
The Phoenix

Gloriana, Britomart, Astraea, Belphoebe, the Sun in Splendor, England’s Moses, the new Deborah, the Phoenix—Elizabeth I possessed a generous wardrobe of public personas. Monarchy, chastity, divinity, and other intangibles played in the early modern mind as images, personifications, embodiments—the invisible rendered visible. As Clifford Geertz has observed, the Elizabethan imagination was “allegorical, Protestant, didactic, and pictorial; it lived on moral abstractions cast into emblems.” These emblems were culturally ubiquitous, appearing in books and broadsides, painted and carved portraits, architecture, tapestry, jewelry and clothing, armor and weapons, monumental funerary sculpture, wall and ceiling decoration. University students neglected Aristotle in favor of fashionable continental emblem books, and the taste for embellishing houses with emblems extended from the monarchy and aristocracy to the landed gentry and the rising middle class. Peter Daly stresses the psychological impact of emblems on the early modern mind when he observes that emblems were “as immediately and graphically present in this period as illustrated advertising is today.”

Reading Books in Natural Philosophy: How Conrad Gessner‘s Commentary on De Anima (1563) was Annotated and Interpreted

2017 ◽  
Vol 93 (2) ◽  
pp. 69-89
Author(s):  
Anja-Silvia Goeing
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
Human Soul ◽  
De Anima ◽  
Preventive Healthcare ◽  
Modern Natural ◽  
The World ◽  
The One ◽  
Object Of Study

Conrad Gessner (1516–65) was town physician and lecturer at the Zwinglian reformed lectorium in Zurich. His approach towards the world and mankind was centred on his preoccupation with the human soul, an object of study that had challenged classical writers such as Aristotle and Galen, and which remained as important in post-Reformation debate. Writing commentaries on Aristotles De Anima (On the Soul) was part of early-modern natural philosophy education at university and formed the preparatory step for studying medicine. This article uses the case study of Gessners commentary on De Anima (1563) to explore how Gessners readers prioritised De Animas information. Gessners intention was to provide the students of philosophy and medicine with the most current and comprehensive thinking. His readers responses raise questions about evolving discussions in natural philosophy and medicine that concerned the foundations of preventive healthcare on the one hand, and of anatomically specified pathological medicine on the other, and Gessners part in helping these develop.

scholarly journals Wheresoever the Body Is: Image, Matter, and Corporeality on Shakespeare's Stage

2018 ◽  
Vol 5 ◽  
pp. 11
Author(s):  
Matthew Wagner
Keyword(s):  
Visual Culture ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern England ◽  
The Body ◽  
Complex Relationship ◽  
Specific Kind ◽  
The Past ◽  
Emblem Books

What does the visual culture of early modern England, and the ways in which that culture articulated specific notions of corporeality, tell us about the actor’s body on Shakespeare’s stage?  This article locates one answer to that question in the popular emblem books and the somewhat more rarefied cosmographical treatises of the day.  Digging in these sources reveals an understanding of the body that is grounded first and foremost in corporeality – the body, before it was anything else, was matter.  As such, I argue that the actor’s body on the early modern stage served as an instance of irrefutable and irreducible materiality, ‘lending’ its materiality to the abstractions and absences that Shakespeare’s theatre so readily ‘bodied forth.’However, as a wealth of scholarship on the body has suggested over the past few decades, things are not this simple.  The body appears in these arenas as a very specific kind of matter, and matter itself is shown to have a complex relationship to ‘form’, or the immaterial realities of life.  I argue here that the nature of the body-as-matter, and indeed of matter itself, is fruitfully understood in terms of two related early modern concepts: prima materia, and man as microcosm.  These ideas were most in circulation in the distinct but kindred fields of alchemy and cosmography, and their visual manifestations offer a perspective on the theatrical body that does not reduce the body to simplematter, but still acknowledges its profound materiality, and the effect that the body-as-matter has on stage-work as a whole.

Spenser’s Phaedran Calender

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kenneth Borris
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Intellectual Biography ◽  
Emblem Books ◽  
National Significance ◽  
Shepheardes Calender

Focusing on Spenser’s Shepheardes Calender, this chapter newly shows that one of the texts most marginal in previous readings, Plato’s Phaedrus, is one of the Calender’s foundational references. There Plato defines and coordinates love, beauty, the soul, its prospects, and the modes of revelatory furor, including the lover’s and the poet’s. Whereas the Calender’s Platonic affinities have typically seemed too vague to merit investigation, attention to the poem’s flight motif, to the precedents for its pictures in early modern iconography and emblem books, and especially to the quasi-emblematic interplay of the Maye eclogue’s poem and its illustration featuring two winged coach-horses shows that those Phaedran doctrines energized Spenser’s notions of poetry’s inspirations, power, and national significance. These findings profoundly change understanding of the Calender, Spenser’s literary development, and his intellectual biography.

Verkörperung – Entkörperung bei Rembrandt

2017 ◽  
Vol 80 (3) ◽  
pp. 349-391
Author(s):  
Marianne Koos
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Dead Body ◽  
Human Soul ◽  
Body Color ◽  
Historical Sources ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
Gerhard Richter ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Late Group

Abstract This article analyzes the painterly formation of pictorial subjects of embodiment and disembodiment since the early modern period. Starting with Gerhard Richter, Quattrocento painters, and Titian, it focuses on Rembrandt and his late group portrait The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Deijman (1656). The subject of this picture is a dissection of a man’s brain – and hence the surgeons’ search for the seat of the human soul and the motion of life. In the motif of the corpse, Rembrandt performs a radical operation with paint layers that historical sources described with the terms “doodverwe” and “lyffverwe” (“dead color” and “body color”). Rembrandt’s pictorial formation is a distinctly complex answer to the soulless, lifeless corpse’s state of being, which has been reduced to no more than an image. At the same time, the dead body is the place in which Rembrandt reflects the act of painting as a way of working with the tension of embodiment and disembodiment, of giving and taking life, with color.

Emblems

2019 ◽  
pp. 755-778
Author(s):  
Valérie Hayaert
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
The Body ◽  
Visual Images ◽  
Legal Ethics ◽  
Mnemonic Devices ◽  
Emblem Books ◽  
Fertile Ground ◽  
History Of ◽  
Professional Ethos

The early modern tradition of the emblem book offers a fertile ground to uncover the renewal of legal ethics during the Renaissance. Andrea Alciato was first and foremost a lawyer, and juridical themes abound in his Emblematum libellus. Later emblematists forged visible figures of norm and law, which stage and enact the rites and harmony of a living legal visual tradition. Inserted into the body of law reference texts or used as ingenious mnemonic devices, emblems played a role in the ars memorativa deployed by legal educators. In the case of Johannes Buno, visual images were designed especially to help fix the order of titles in the Digest and their contents. Emblems and symbolic places would serve as topical frameworks, headings for the reference texts, and notable visual commonplaces to highlight important issues. The emblematic quality of memory images was valuable for the jurist, who could reconstruct an entire legal text, speech, or case. The importance of emblems in transmitting law and the imaginary representation of legality was key to building a professional ethos in the humanist respublica jurisconsultorum. Emblem books provided shared judicial values, norms of conduct, and signs of office. The early history of legal emblems requires being attentive to the profound multivalence of their form and structure: their prolixity of applications and the variegated ways in which images and texts illuminate each other and provide numerous examples of making, seeing, and saying judicial ethics.

Becoming an Antwerp Humanist: The Culture of Friendship and Patronage in the Circles of Benito Arias Montano (1568–1598)

2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (3) ◽  
pp. 270-298
Author(s):  
Guy Lazure
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Cultural Diplomacy ◽  
Philip Ii ◽  
Republic Of Letters ◽  
Emblem Books ◽  
The Republic ◽  
Vast Network

Abstract When the Spanish humanist Benito Arias Montano (c.1525-1598) arrived in Antwerp in1568 to work as editor of the new Polyglot Bible printed by Christophe Plantin, he was introduced to some of the leading members of the Republic of Letters of his time (such as Abraham Ortelius and Carolus Clusius), with whom he exchanged letters, books, portraits, and other tangible tokens of friendship until his dying day. From this hub of intellectual and typographical activity, Montano circulated devotional emblem books across a vast network of Catholic and Protestant scholars, politicians and ecclesiastics. These “instruments of friendship” established his reputation as a man of letters while serving the interests of both king Philip II and Plantin that ranged from cultural diplomacy to editorial and commercial strategy. This study highlights how, in addition to correspondence, the circulation of books, images and objects were essential tools of early modern scholarly practices and learned sociability.

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