Personification: Embodying Meaning and Emotion

787 Pages·2016·42.027 MB·English

by  Walter Melion, Bart Ramakers

Personification
Intersections
Interdisciplinary Studies in Early Modern Culture
General Editor
Karl A.E. Enenkel (Chair of Medieval and Neo-Latin Literature
Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster
e-mail: kenen_01@uni_muenster.de)
Editorial Board
W. van Anrooij (University of Leiden)
W. de Boer (Miami University)
Chr. Göttler (University of Bern)
J.L. de Jong (University of Groningen)
W.S. Melion (Emory University)
R. Seidel (Goethe University Frankfurt am Main)
P.J. Smith (University of Leiden)
J. Thompson (Queen’s University Belfast)
A. Traninger (Freie Universität Berlin)
C. Zittel (University of Stuttgart)
C. Zwierlein (Harvard University)
VOLUME 41 – 2016
The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/inte
Personification
Embodying Meaning and Emotion
Edited by
Walter S. Melion and Bart Ramakers
LEIDEN | BOSTON
Cover illustrations: ( foreground) Johannes Wierix after Maarten de Vos, “Deathly Falsehood”, detail from
Triumphus Veritatis (1579). Engraving, 440 × 345 mm. British Museum, London; (background) Cornelis Cort
after Maarten van Heemskerck, “East and West Winds”, detail from Triumph of the World, plate 1 of the Cycle
of the Vicissitudes of Human Affairs, 1564. Engraving, 220 × 295 mm. British Museum, London. See also pages
164 and 414 of this volume.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Melion, Walter S., editor. | Ramakers, B. A. M. (Bart A. M.), 1961– author, editor.
Title: Personification : embodying meaning and emotion / edited by Walter S. Melion and Bart Ramakers.
Description: Leiden ; Boston : Brill, 2016. | Series: Intersections : interdisciplinary studies in early modern
culture, ISSN 1568–1181 ; volume 41 | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2015049887 (print) | LCCN 2016006552 (ebook) | ISBN 9789004310421 (hardback :
acid-free paper) | ISBN 9789004310438 (E-book)
Subjects: LCSH: Personification in literature.
Classification: LCC PN56.P38 P47 2016 (print) | LCC PN56.P38 (ebook) | DDC 809/.915—dc23
LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015049887
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issn 1568-1181
isbn 978-90-04-31042-1 (hardback)
isbn 978-90-04-31043-8 (e-book)
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Contents
Notes on the Editors ix
Notes on the Contributors x
List of Illustrations xvi
Personification: An Introduction 1
Walter S. Melion and Bart Ramakers
Part 1
Cognitive Perspectives on Personification
1 Personification Allegory and Embodied Cognition 43
Jean Bocharova
Part 2
Personification and the Critical Tradition
2 Dante and St. Francis: Shaping Lives, Reshaping Allegory 73
Jeremy Tambling
3 Personification, Power, and the Body in Late Medieval and Early Modern
English Poetry 95
William Rhodes
4 The Personification of the Human Subject in Spenser’s The Faerie
Queene 121
Brenda Machosky
Part 3
Personification and the Modalities of Figuration
5 Framework, Personification, and Pisanello’s Poetics 143
C. Jean Campbell
6 The Triumph of Truth in an Age of Confessional Conflict 162
James Clifton
vi contents
7 The Mystical Experience—Between Personification and Incarnation:
The Idea vitae Teresianae iconibus symbolicis expressa (Antwerp,
Jacob Mesens: 1680s) 186
Ralph Dekoninck
Part 4
Personification on Stage: Forces of Living Presence
8 From the Parade to the Stage: Evolution and Significance of
Personifications in Lyon’s Sotties (1566–1610) 211
Katell Lavéant
9 Personification in Sir David Lyndsay’s A Satire of the Three
Estates 234
Greg Walker
10 Both One and the Other: The Educational Value of Personification in
the Female Humanist Theatre of Peeter Heyns (1537–1598) 256
Alisa van de Haar
11 Dirty from Behind, Pearly in Front: Lady World in Rhetoricians’
Drama 284
Bart Ramakers
12 Mute Poem, Speaking Picture: The Personification of the Paragone
in Shakespeare’s Timon of Athens 337
Jennifer A. Royston
13 The Politics of Personification in the Jacobean Lord Mayors’
Shows 354
Susan L. Anderson
Part 5
Jesuit Approaches to Personification
14 Figured Personification and Parabolic Embodiment in Jan David’s
Occasio arrepta, neglecta 371
Walter S. Melion
contents vii
15 Double Meaning of Personification in Early Modern Thesis Prints
of the Southern Low Countries: Between Noetic and Encomiastic
Representation 433
Gwendoline de Mûelenaere
16 Vermeer, the Art of Meditation, and the Allegory of Faith 461
Aneta Georgievska-Shine
Part 6
Personifying Charity
17 Personifications of Caritas as Reflexive Figures 491
Caecilie Weissert
18 Maarten van Heemskerck’s Caritas: Personifying Virtue, Animating
Stone with Paint, Imaging the Image Debate 518
Arthur J. DiFuria
19 Abraham Bloemaert and Caritas: A Lesson in Perception 545
Caroline O. Fowler
Part 7
Personifying Life and Afterlife, Trial and Retribution
20 The Duchess and the Cadaver: Doubling and Microarchitecture
in Late Medieval Art (with Alice Chaucer and John Lydgate) 575
Elizabeth Fowler
21 ‘But You are Blind, and Know Not What is in You’: ‘A.L.’, The Fraudulent
Judge, and the Coerced Conscience 601
June Waudby
viii contents
Part 8
Personification and the Assertion of Allegorical Order
22 Precarious Personification: Fortuna in the Artist’s Cabinet 629
Lisa Rosenthal
23 Producing the Legible Body: Personification, the Beholder, and
Tiepolo’s Würzburg Frescos 655
Max Weintraub
Part 9
The Four Continents: Sources and Sentiments
24 The Personification of Africa with an Elephant-head Crest in Cesare
Ripa’s Iconologia (1603) 677
Joaneath Spicer
25 The Four Continents in Seventeenth-Century Embroidery and the
Making of English Femininity 716
Heather A. Hughes
Index Nominum 751
Notes on the Editors
Walter Melion
is Asa Griggs Candler Professor of Art History at Emory University, where he
chairs the Art History Department. His books include Shaping the Netherlandish
Canon: Karel van Mander’s ‘Schilder-Boeck’ (1991) and The Meditative Art:
Studies in the Northern Devotional Print, 1550–1625 (2009). He is editor or co-
editor of more than a dozen volumes, including Imago Exegetica: Visual Images
as Exegetical Instruments, 1400–1700 (2014) and Image and Incarnation: The
Early Modern Doctrine of the Pictorial Image (2015). He was elected Foreign
Member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2010.
During 2014–2015, he held the Chaire Franqui at the Université Catholique
de Louvain and the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven. He is the recipient of
the 2016 Distinguished Scholar Award from the American Catholic Historical
Association.
Bart Ramakers
is Professor of Historical Dutch Literature at the University of Groningen. He
specializes in the drama of the Netherlandish rhetoricians, particularly in the
relation between theatre, art, and humanism. He is the author of Spelen en
figuren. Toneelkunst en processiecultuur in Oudenaarde tussen Middeleeuwen en
Moderne Tijd (1996) and (co-)editor of several volumes, including Spelen en fig-
uren. Middeleeuws toneel in de Lage Landen (2001), Akteure und Aktionen. Figuren
und Handlungstypen im Drama der frühen Neuzeit (2009), Understanding Art
in Antwerp: Classicising the Popular, Popularising the Classic (1540–1580) (2011),
and Trading Values in Early Modern Antwerp (2014), an issue of the Netherlands
Yearbook for History of Art, of which he is an editor.
Notes on the Contributors
Susan Anderson
is Senior Lecturer in English at Leeds Trinity University. Her research focuses
on interdisciplinary approaches to performance in early modern drama and
spectacle. She is currently working on a monograph exploring the use and con-
ceptualisation of music across a range of early modern performance genres.
She is also interested in the intersections between early modern literature and
disability.
Jean Bocharova
teaches in the English Department at Mt. San Jacinto College in Menifee,
California. She is currently researching the intersections of literature, cogni-
tion, and memory.
C. Jean Campbell
is Professor of Late Medieval and Renaissance Art History at Emory University,
where she was Winship Distinguished Research Professor in the Humanities
from 2004 to 2007. Dr. Campbell’s major publications deal with art and vernac-
ular poetic culture in early fourteenth-century Italy. They include The Game
of Courting and the Art of the Commune of San Gimignano (1998), and The
Commonwealth of Nature: Art and Poetic Community in the Age of Dante (2008).
Beyond these period-specific works, she has made significant contributions to
the historiography and theoretical shape of the larger field, with articles on
image theory and poetic remembrance in Boccaccio, Petrarch, and Vasari. She
is preparing a book length study on imitative practice and pictorial invention
in the art of the Pisanello.
James Clifton
has been Director of the Sarah Campbell Blaffer Foundation and Curator
in Renaissance and Baroque Painting at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston
since 1994. He has published essays on diverse aspects of art and culture in
Italy, Germany, the Netherlands, France, and England, from the fifteenth cen-
tury to the eighteenth. His many exhibitions and exhibition catalogues include
A Portrait of the Artist, 1525–1825 (2005); The Plains of Mars: European War Prints,
1500–1825 (with Leslie Scattone; 2009); Scripture for the Eyes: Bible Illustration in
Netherlandish Prints of the Sixteenth Century (with Walter W. Melion; 2009);