Alison Adams's edition of Georgette de Montenay's Emblemes, ou devises chrestiennes presents an unprecedented work of emblematic literature in more than one respect. Composed by a Protestant woman shortly before the French Wars of Religion, dedicated to the Calvinist queen of Navarre, Jeanne d'Albret, and intended to serve as “aguillons,” or goads, to slumbering souls (140), this collection of one hundred religious emblems is structured around biblical allusions. Besides displaying, as Adams indicates, a degree of thematic unity relatively absent from previous emblem collections, Montenay's Emblemes are also the first to have been made with copper plates, a technique that allowed for more detailed engravings.

Adams frames and curates this innovative, distinctive, and, for contemporary readers, cryptic text with hermeneutic care and, for the most part, historical precision (in a footnote on page 136, in what appears to be a syntactic lapse, Jeanne d'Albret is identified as Francis I's sister). Adams begins her introduction emphasizing the collaborative nature of the emblematic genre by highlighting the roles played not only by the author, but also by the Emblemes’ publisher, Philippe de Castellas, and its engraver, Pierre Wœiriot. Adams then traces an amended history of the Emblemes centered on the Copenhagen copy from 1567, rectifying the chronology of a work previously thought to have dated from 1571 and prompting more accurate readings of it.

By examining the author's life and the timeline through which the Emblemes emerged (its textual composition having been completed by 1561 and its having had an initial impression and limited distribution in 1567), Adams also revises past interpretations of the work, in particular previously inferred historical references to, for instance, the Wars of Religion and what may have been overstated interpretations of the work's Calvinist thrust. The Emblemes’ dedicatee, for instance, officially confessed her Protestantism in 1560, a detail that lessens the hypothesis of a decisive theological influence exercised by her over the author. Adams's introduction also proposes a guide to deciphering Montenay's work “entre texte et image” (“between text and image,” xxxvi) by providing a clear and useful description of the emblems’ functioning and of the nonlinear reading required.

After the introduction, the Emblemes are presented in two main parts, a format allowing various reading paths. The first part contains a reproduction of its first edition, combining elements drawn from three copies: the preliminary texts from the Copenhagen copy, the one hundred emblems from the 1571 Glasgow copy, and the postliminary texts from the 1571 Bodleian copy. This facsimile is mirrored in the second part by its transcription and commentary. In this second section, each emblem's textual elements are accurately transcribed and, to enhance navigation, after each transcribed motto, the emblem's corresponding page in the first part is referenced in parentheses. These transcriptions are followed by a series of illuminating remarks on each of the emblems’ textual and visual components (motto, huitain, and pictura), leading to a final note considering the emblem in question in its totality as well as in connection to other emblems within the same collection and also to those by other authors. Encompassing biblical, historical, literary, linguistic, and bibliographic questions, Adams's commentaries are particularly worthwhile. Sufficiently thorough while relatively concise, these accomplish the double feat of rendering an exemplar of this enigmatic genre accessible to a wider readership while also preserving an appreciation of its intricate and often elusive meanings. When acknowledging uncertainty on the latter, as with the picturae on emblems 31 (197) and 80 (266), Adams invites the reader to engage in further research.

The edition ends with a bibliography listing both recent scholarship and other early modern emblem collections available on the French Emblems at Glasgow website (https://www.emblems.arts.gla.ac.uk), of which Adams is the project director. The bibliography is followed by a thematic index, a table of mottoes, and a table of contents indicating emblem numbers and corresponding pages, all of which contribute to the text's overall readability. Adam's apt edition of this outlier within the field of emblematic literature constitutes both a valuable addition and an appealing entry point to the genre.