This scintillating collection of eighteen essays explores the practices of anthropomorphism. They treat a remarkably diverse array of objects: literary and theoretical texts, paintings and prints, maps and treatises on botany and zoology, Kunstkammer objects, religious and secular illuminated manuscripts, ornaments, and architecture books. All in some way feature the association of the world with human traits. Such traits are not only physical form, but spirit and emotion, identity and consciousness. As the editors argue, a human-based taxonomy is expressed across all forms of knowledge produced between 1400 and 1700, from zoology to philosophy, to architecture and art, often “inextricable, even interdependent” (1). Hence the cunning term “lens.” This exploration of forms of anthropomorphic thought, and in particular its relation to figuration, has clear appeal for anyone interested in Renaissance culture and ideas.

The eighteen essays are organized into two main sections, “Anthropomorphism and the Order of Things” and “Figuration and Semiotic Potential,” which suggest a difference in methodology. Within these loose divisions are seven sections, grouped thematically, as their titles make clear: “Delineating the Boundaries of the Human,” “Empathy and the Constitution of the Self,” “Visualizing the Body Politic,” “Anthropomorphosis and Its Critics,” “Anthropomorphosis and Its Conditions” (the least clearly designated theme), “Figuring the Impossible,” and “Metamorphic Figuration.” This ordering of thematic or methodological approaches is understandable from a scholar’s point of view, but the compelling subjects and their cross-relationships kept bubbling irresistibly to the surface as I read. I wondered why Nathalie de Brézé’s study of depictions of the soul in religious allegories is in a separate section from Larry Silver’s essay on Bruegel’s personification of death. Why is Paul J. Smith’s analysis of landscape and body metaphors in Rabelais separated from Bertrand Prévost’s study of the association of landscapes and faces in paintings? Why is Aneta Georgievska-Shine’s reading of an album amicorum as a “kaleidoscope” of human identity not linked with Christopher P. Heuer’s study of Bruegel’s depictions of anonymous (identityless) peasants?

Of course, my imaginary rearrangements were inspired by the very fecundity of ideas and images on offer. Miya Tokumitsu explores the figure of the cannibal woman in maps, prints, and figurines as an embodiment of anxiety about foreignness. Walter Melion examines Goltzius’s engravings of beached whales (usually viewed as political portents) as refusals to personify natural wonders, saving personification for his allegories of art. Ralph Dekoninck traces the development of the impresa, reflecting the desire for the literal embodiment of ideas, in early modern symbolic thought. Essays by Elke Anne Werner, Elizabeth J. Petcu, and Michel Weemans reveal, respectively, how maps, architectural ornament, and even smoke rising from an altar are all given human form. An editorial challenge indeed. No wonder the editors refer to anthropomorphic practice as a “delirium of sympathies, of analogies, of congruences” (7). Another felicity is the appearance, in one place, of many rarely seen images: prints (genre-style emblems by Joris Hoefnagel, better known for his watercolors of plants and insects, and the humanlike tabernacle illustrating the Antwerp Polyglot Bible); drawings (Jan de Bray’s engaging chess player, and Marcus van Vaernewijck’s exquisite octopus); objects (the silver and enamel “Monkey Cup” chalice); and paintings seen in new ways (the close-up of Christ’s mouth-like wound in a Crivelli Pietà).

While the essays encompass Europe as a whole, and while Italian artworks and texts are mentioned here and there, they are, with one exception (heraldry in the Carrara Herbal of Padua) focused on Flemish, French, German, and, in one case, Spanish works. One section — “Figuring the Impossible” — is dedicated solely to Bruegel, which is a shame, since asserting the primacy of one artist over others by giving him his own wing, as it were, seems inconsistent with the volume’s project of diversity. (Clearly, as this collection shows, Bruegel was far from the only artist engaged with “figuring the impossible.”) This striking emphasis on Northern art and culture, which presumably reflects the editors’ research interests, goes unmentioned and unexplained in the introduction. It’s also worth mentioning that all the essays, written by American and European scholars, are in English, save one in French, inexplicably left untranslated. Luckily, these omissions don’t significantly diminish the pleasure to be found in this generous Kunstkammer of a book.