Volume 4 of The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain covers the years between the incorporation of the Stationers' Company in 1557 and the lapsing of the Licensing Act in 1695. In a period marked by deep religious divisions, civil war and the uneasy settlement of the Restoration, printed texts - important as they were for disseminating religious and political ideas, both heterodox and state approved - interacted with oral and manuscript cultures. These years saw a growth in reading publics, from the developing mass market in almanacs, ABCs, chapbooks, ballads and news, to works of instruction and leisure. Atlases, maps and travel literature overlapped with the popular market but were also part of the project of empire. Alongside the creation of a literary canon and the establishment of literary publishing there was a tradition of dissenting publishing, while women's writing and reading became increasingly visible.

The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain

The Latin trade

Religious books, in conventional terms, are found to have been the single most important component of the publishing trade. In England, apart from oral communication, there was a mass of both polemical and devotional material which, if published, was published scribally, surviving only in manuscript. Some of the most active preachers of the age never appeared in print, or never in their lifetimes. A large part of the story of indoctrination concerns English Bibles, and there is no better case study of the interaction of public and private interest, commerce and edification, than the English Bible. Many of the Catholic books of the devotional writers included prefaces addressed to the impartial Christian reader, and not just to the Catholics. The use of a commonplace book was typical of university-trained readers, but Nicholas Byfield's Directions for the private reading of the Scriptures, first published in 1617 or 1618, was an attempt to make the practice more widespread among lay Bible readers.

Religious publishing in England 1557–1640

The English provinces

French paper in English books

The English emblem and the continental tradition

The English Emblem Tradition

Daly, Peter M. Literature in the Light of the Emblem, Structural Parallels between the Emblem and Literature in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, 2nd edition. Toronto: U Toronto P, 1998.283 pp. $29.95 paperback. Two decades after the publication of the first edition, Peter Daly, unquestionably the dean of North American emblem studies, has reissued Literature in the Light of the Emblem. Such an undertaking may be considered a value judgement of sorts and, indeed, the well-used and dilapidated first edition in the holdings of the University of Cincinnati library is a case in point. When Daly's study was first published in 1979 scholars of early modern literary culture were riding the crests of two methodological waves. First, Wilfried Banner's Barockrhetorik (1970) linked the "baroque" qualities of literary texts once and for all to the institutional and educational backgrounds of the poetae docti. The seventeenth century was not an era of egregious ars gratia artis ornamental excess, rather it was one that privileged the activation of rhetorical affect for purposeful effect. Secondly, Henkel/ Schone's Emblemata (2nd edition, 1976), an amazingly useful compendium of emblematic imagery, became the bible of scholars who sought to understand the often cryptic imagery of literary texts. In an era when a swarm of bees nesting in a military helmet signified pax, the reference book unlocked literary meaning. Additionally, the publication of both Barner and Henkel/Schone coincided with the modern rebirth of the Herzog-August-Bibliothek as an active international research center with the attendant conferences, generous research support and publications focusing on the early modern era. Daly's first edition is an important document of that era. As a whole, the second edition is an extended Forschungsbericht still very much in the thrall of Henkel/Schone and of J6ns's work on Gryphius (1966). In an encyclopedic, critical review of the scholarship on the emblem (chapter 1), the word-emblem (2), emblematic poetry (3), drama (4) and narrative prose (5), Daly evaluates the validity of the work of others from a most well informed perspective. His intent is clear: "By comparing literature with emblembooks we may determine which words and objects were capable of visualization, and establish basic meanings associated with those objects, all of which can increase our understanding of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century literature" (205). There is no question as to the validity of the cross-disciplinary, comparatist (especially English and German literatures) approach, but what is troubling is that the five substantive chapters are here identical in content to the first edition. The 1979 printing has had an effect on emblem studies, yet the reader of the second printing would not know it. True, the original section titled "Recent Developments in Emblem Theory" (36-53) is changed to "Emblem Studies in German Studies in the 1970s" (2nd edition 42-58) and augmented by two new sections (58-72), which brings the Forschungsbericht up to date. …

Literature in the light of the emblem : structural parallels between the emblem and literature in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries

The emblem is important as a tradition and as a mode of communication. This book is part of a series of illustrated bibliographic catalogues which documents printed books of the emblem tradition. Emblem books in the strictest sense as well as emblematically illustrated works are included, accompanied by theoretical discussions, which provide many examples of actual impresa. The series is supplemented by bibliographies of the secondary literature. The emblem and impresa were an integral part of English culture in the 16th and 17th century - not restricted to products of the printing press, but also the visual arts, education and social entertainment. This bibliography surveys and describes specialized bibliographies, library collections and articles on the emblem in all its manifestations. Following the literature survey is an alphabetical listing of English emblem authors which identifies the original emblematic work and any existing microforms, modern editions and reprints; critical reviews conclude each entry. Finally, brief information is provided on the emblem books themselves in "A Chronological List of First Editions of English Emblematic Works Published up to 1990".

Peter M. Daly

Papers

The English emblem and the continental tradition

The English Emblem Tradition

Literature in the light of the emblem : structural parallels between the emblem and literature in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries

The English Emblem: Bibliography of Secondary Literature

English Emblem Tradition