The editors of Personification: Embodying Meaning and Emotion present the volume as reparative and provocative in its aims. They claim, in their introduction, that the rhetorical figure of personification has been largely neglected by scholars of literature and art; that critical attention to this figure has tended to serve the end of understanding another rhetorical form, allegory; that the literature on allegory has been dominated by textual scholars; and that accounts of personification have therefore tended to engage with the figure “on a technical and theoretical level only,” at the expense of the “essentially visual” appeal—the vitality and materiality—of personifications themselves (6). This volume, then, sets out to fill those gaps, both by assembling a substantial body of critical inquiry into the figure of personification, and by attending in particular to the visual experience of personification, to the dynamics and effects of embodiment itself.

One could take issue with certain turns in our editors’ opening arguments. (Is it really credible to say that scholars of literature “tend to deal with the signified” and so need visual scholars to “help provide a fuller understanding and appreciation of the signifier” [8]?) But these odd turns do little to undercut the valuable project the editors have undertaken. The visual criticism for which they call is also an affective criticism, a criticism engaged with current accounts of cognition, emotion, and the body. If, after all, the cognitive sciences are right in asserting “that all our thinking is metaphorical and embodied” (10), then personifications might play a special role in ordering various forms of thinking, feeling, memory, contemplation, adoration, and desire.

It is this provocation to which the twenty-five essays gathered here—all by art historians and literary scholars, and all focused on early modern European culture—set out to respond. Ralph Dekoninck, Aneta Georgievska-Shine, and Elizabeth Fowler attend to the forms of contemplative practice—the ductus or cursus—into which personifications in devotional contexts initiate viewers and readers. Fowler, C. Jean Campbell, and Max Weintraub read the viewer’s affective itinerary in the context of architectural spaces, spaces that direct the body through phases of apprehension and approach. Quite a number of contributions here reckon with the pedagogical and political uses of personification, from grammar schools, emblem books, and academic disputations to popular civic festivities in London and Lyon. Jean Bocharova accounts for the affective work of personification in the light of recent findings in neuropsychology.

Many of these contributors explore personification’s effects of personhood and bodily presence. Caecilie Weissert considers the erotic and maternal appeals of personified female bodies. Joaneath Spicer and Heather A. Hughes investigate the role of personification in cultural stereotyping and European colonialist imagery. Brenda Machosky and William Rhodes read the personifications of “biopolitical” forces—hunger, time—that act upon the human body itself. Several contributors attend to representations of real human persons—Mary, Saint Francis, Queen Elizabeth, Alice Chaucer—and a cluster of six essays considers the effects of personification on stage, attached to the presence of actual, acting bodies. June Waudby asks whether the authorial persona of a lyric sonnet sequence might not be read as itself an exercise in the dynamics of personification.

This volume is not a handbook of personification: its project is not systematic or theoretical. But there is rich bounty and inventiveness throughout, and the essays conjure well the diverse, sometimes bizarre, often ambiguous forms personification has taken. In these pages we meet Lady Printing Press, Lady “Himatia, or Cloathing” (356), and even Allegory herself. We find a Calvinist sonnet sequence, an image of Christ as a woman, and Dutch artists crafting icons of Caritas in the shadow of iconoclasm and religious war. We find variegated discussions of what Lisa Rosenthal describes as personification’s “delicate balancing act” (653) between reality and artifice, between materiality and immateriality. And again and again we find appreciations of what Jeremy Tambling here names as the “desire” (92) at the heart of personification: this figure’s way of impelling human bodies toward larger orders of being, toward each other, and toward the enactment of our own complexly significant, and often invisible, forms of life.