This attractive collection focuses on images printed in Britain in the seventeenth century. The idea behind the collection, as Michael Hunter explains in the introduction, is to give the same attention to seventeenth-century printed images as has been granted to those of the sixteenth century. Hunter's introduction provides a nice overview of recent work in early modern British visual culture, culminating in a description of the “British Printed Images to 1700” project. The collection gathers work by some of the most important scholars of early modern print and visual culture.
The first section of the collection focuses on the impact of the Reformation on printed images. In the first chapter, Margaret Aston examines the fate of the trigram for Jesus (IHS) as it evolved through early Reformation printed images, focusing on how the Jesuit adoption of the trigram complicated its use by Protestants cautious to avoid any suggestion of sympathy with the Jesuit cause. In the following chapter Richard Williams considers the possible censorship and self-censorship of sixteenth-century printed illustrations, taking as his example the editorial history of “Elizabeth's prayer book,” first printed by John Day in 1569, and demonstrating that Stationers were attentive to both the possibility of controversy and the tastes of their customers. Tara Hamling then discusses the use of printed images as templates for domestic decorative art used for private Protestant devotion, revealing that, in practice, British Protestants continued to use visual materials for devotional purposes at the same time as they adhered to prohibitions against the abuse of images that were thought to lead to idolatry. Alexandra Walsham's essay completes the section with a fascinating discussion of the role of prints in the struggle over church buildings. As Walsham explains, some saw memorial prints of ruined monastic buildings as mnemonic warnings against the abuses of the corrupt popish church, while others sought the preservation of a high form of Christian piety in images that restored the ruined buildings to their former grandeur.
Lori Anne Ferrell's essay on diagrams leads off the second section on “Printed Images in Science and Cartography.” Her essay argues persuasively for increased attention to non-pictorial visual material in printed books. The following two essays focus on scientific illustrations and printed maps. Katherine Acheson discusses the apparent contradiction in the use of Gesner's mid-sixteenth-century zoological illustrations by later writers purportedly committed to the accuracy of firsthand scientific observation. Simon Turner then details how crucial Wenceslaus Hollar's maps and views of London are for an understanding of the city before and after the Great Fire of 1666. Finally, Matthew Hunter's impressive essay, on the role of the printed image in scientific discovery, highlights the ambivalence of natural philosophers toward printed images that arose from the fallibility of the printed impression to accurately represent natural phenomena.
The following section, on “Printed Images and Politics,” begins with three essays on the representation of politically volatile historical figures in seventeenth-century prints. In re-dating a satiric print to the 1620s (previously thought to have been produced during the commonwealth period), Malcolm Jones indentifies a facet of Jacobean political satire in the portrayal of the Jesuit Gunpowder Plot conspirator, Henry Garnet, and King James's Spanish ambassador, the Count of Gondomar. Alastair Bellany then looks at portraits of the Duke of Buckingham as political statements, followed by Helen Pierce's tracking of the satirical image of Roger L'Estrange as a large spaniel dog, or “Towzer.” In his chapter on the Leviathan frontispiece that completes the section, Justin Champion emphasizes the degree to which the iconographic tradition was deployed in the visual prints of the later seventeenth century as means of representing in shorthand the various positions that emerged from the complex political controversies of the period.
The essays in the final section are loosely gathered under the topic “Printed Images and Aspects of Late Seventeenth-century English Culture.” Ben Thomas offers an excellent essay on the early history of mezzotint, and David Alexander's discussion of later seventeenth-century line portraits includes an appendix, chronologically listing David Loggan's engravings that will be of interest to print historians. Gill Saunders's chapter offers a fascinating survey of how the printed decorative arts were used for wallpaper and lining paper, while Angela McShane and Clare Backhouse demonstrate how the study of broadside ballad imagery can serve to illuminate our understanding of early modern English tastes in fashion.
The essays in this volume are wide-ranging and carefully researched, offering a variety of approaches to the examination of early modern printed images. The book represents a major contribution to the study of early modern print culture — especially the printed image in seventeenth-century Britain — which will appeal to scholars interested in the role of print in early modern Britain's religious, social, cultural, and political history.
