This book examines scriptural authority and its textual and visual instruments, asking how words and images interacted to represent and by representing to constitute authority, both sacred and secular, in Northern Europe between 1400 and 1700. Like texts, images partook of rhetorical forms and hermeneutic functions - typological, paraphrastic, parabolic, among others - based largely in illustrative traditions of biblical commentary. If the specific relation between biblical texts and images exemplified the range of possible relations between texts and images more generally, it also operated...

In bringing together work on optic theory, ethnography, and the visual cultures of Christianity, this volume offers a sense of the richness and the complexity of early modern thinking about the human eye. The seven case studies explore the relationship between vision and knowledge, taking up such diverse artifacts as an emblem book, a Jesuit mariological text, Calvin's Institutes, Las Casas's Apologia, Hans Staden's True History, the Codex Telleriano-Remensis, and an exegetical painting by Herri met de Bles. Argued from different disciplinary perspectives, these essays...

This volume consists of essays that pose fundamental questions about the relation between verbal and visual hermeneutics, especially as relates to biblical culture. Exegesis, as theologians and historians of art, religion, and literature, have come increasingly to acknowledge, was neither solely textual nor aniconic; on the contrary, following from Scripture itself, which is replete with verbal images and rhetorical figures, exegesis has traditionally utilized visual devices of all kinds. In turn, visual exegesis, since it concerns the most authoritative of texts, supplied a template for the...

Anthropomorphism - the projection of the human form onto the every aspect of the world - closely relates to early modern notions of analogy and microcosm. What had been construed in Antiquity as a ready metaphor for the order of creation was reworked into a complex system relating the human body to the body of the world. Numerous books and images - cosmological diagrams, illustrated treatises of botany and zoology, maps, alphabets, collections of ornaments, architectural essays - are entirely constructed on the anthropomorphic analogy. Exploring the complexities inherent in such work, the...

The doctrine of the Incarnation was wellspring and catalyst for theories of images verbal, material, and spiritual. Section I, "Representing the Mystery of the Incarnation," takes up questions about the representability of the mystery. Section II, "Imago Dei and the Incarnate Word," investigates how Christ's status as the image of God was seen to license images material and spiritual. Section III, "Literary Figurations of the Incarnation," considers the verbal production of images contemplating the divine and human nature of Christ. Section IV, "Tranformative Analogies of Matter and Spirit,"...

Personification, or prosopopeia, the rhetorical figure by which something not human is given a human identity or 'face', is readily discernible in early modern texts and images, but the figure's cognitive form and function, its rhetorical and pictorial effects, have rarely elicited sustained scholarly attention. The aim of this volume is to formulate an alternative account of personification, to demonstrate the ingenuity with which this multifaceted device was utilized by late medieval and early modern authors and artists in Italy, France, England, Scotland, and the Low Countries....

The Jesuit investment in images, whether verbal or visual, virtual or actual, pictorial or poetic, rhetorical or exegetical, was strong and sustained, and may even be identified as one of the order's defining characteristics. Although this interest in images has been richly documented by art historians, theatre historians, and scholars of the emblem, the question of Jesuit image theory has yet to be approached from a multi-disciplinary perspective that examines how the image was defined, conceived, produced, and interpreted within the various fields of learning cultivated by the Society:...

‘Quid est sacramentum?’ Visual Representation of Sacred Mysteries in Early Modern Europe, 1400–1700 investigates how sacred mysteries (in Latin, sacramenta or mysteria) were visualized in a wide range of media, including illustrated religious literature such as catechisms, prayerbooks, meditative treatises, and emblem books, produced in Italy, France, and the Low Countries between ca. 1500 and 1700. The contributors ask why the mysteries of faith and, in particular, sacramental mysteries were construed as amenable to processes of representation and figuration, and why the resultant...