“Emblematics is a repository of the literary and iconographic common-places of the European artistic tradition, and one in which elements originating from the symbol systems of Classical antiquity, the Middle Ages, and the Renaissance are legitimized by the authority of tradition.”

– Éva Knapp and Gábor Tüskés (12)

            Semiotics and religion seem inseparable. Christianity has a rich tradition of symbols used to indicate aspects of their deity. Emblem books, a genre which flourished during the Renaissance and Baroque periods, partook in that symbolic history, as Knapp and Tüskés note in the above quote. Moreover, each symbol did not exist in a vacuum on the emblem book page, they united with other characters, objects and settings in a complex of visual semiotics. Thus, to illuminate the usage of particular emblem book symbols of God – that is Father, Son and Holy Ghost – one must examine the historical and iconographic contexts of these symbols.

            To that end, my project uses bibliographic and Iconclass metadata, examined through data visualisation tools, particularly Tableau. While the data analysis may not reveal anything dramatically ground-breaking, it can give numerical support to the arguments already made by emblem scholars. Additionally, data visualisation can entice one’s curiosity, leading to further questions and research.

            This post will discuss my general method, emblems themselves and my dataset. The next will discuss artifacts and errors, and the limitations of the data. The third will look at the prevailing trends of the bibliographic data, looking at some outliers, and showing what can be learned about a single symbol’s cultural movements in emblem books. Finally, the forth will describe my attempt to spot patterns in the iconographic context of the Iconclass notation “11A3 God’s wrath”, outlining my process step by step, and commenting on the efficacy of my method, postulating some things I could do to improve accuracy.

            Acknowledgements and Method

            Before going further; I must acknowledge the work of my collaborators on this project. The data for my project comes from Emblematica Online; the goal of the project behind that site is to make the emblem book collections of six academic institutions, from North America and Europe, readily accessible and useful to scholars; part of that goal involves the process of marking up each and every emblem. Firstly, I thank Mara R. Wade, the project’s principle investigator, along with Timothy Cole and Janina Sarol who gathered the data for me, and asked pertinent questions. I also must offer thanks to John Brosz, Research Data & Visualization Coordinator at the University of Calgary, who worked with me to wrangle the data into a format useable in Tableau.

            Because I wanted to focus on the emblematic symbols for God, I began this project by selecting sixty-one Iconclass notations for the Christian deity. Iconclass is a hierarchical system allowing scholars to mark-up images, including emblem pictura, to make their content searchable. Much more can be learned about the intricacies of the Iconclass hierarchy here.

For each of the terms I requested, the list of which is in the above image (click any image to open it in a new tab), Cole and Sarol provided me with a spreadsheet for all the emblems that start with that Iconclass notation; because Iconclass is a hierarchy, this allowed the data for “11A3 God’s wrath” to include the data for emblems tagged as subcategories of that concept – for example, “11A3(+1)”, which adds the Trinity through the “+1” key, and “11A31 ‘Flagello di Dio’ (Ripa)”, which translates to “The Scourge of God”. The idea was that a complete picture of the emblems for God’s wrath would include those emblems tagged in the subcategories. Each spreadsheet includes two types of metadata revealing context: bibliographical data – such as publication location, language, and date – for the historical/cultural context; and a list of all the Iconclass notations associated with each emblem for the Iconographic context. From this raw data, John Brosz worked with me to organise a set of data-tables that would allow each of the variables in the data to be countable, showing me how many emblems in a set were published in French, or in 1736, or in what we call Antwerp, Belgium today.

            Background – Emblems and a Limited Dataset

            Getting an accurate number for how many different emblem books exist is difficult given the uncertainty of what exactly the boundaries of the genre are. Andrea Alciato, or Alciati, considered to be the father of the emblem book genre, created what is considered to be the first emblem book in 1531. The genre remained popular until about 1750 (Cole, Han, and Vannoy 111; Knapp and Tüskés 10). However, the boundaries of the genre extend past those dates, Emblematica Online has works dated from 1508 to 1905, though whether those outliers are proper emblem books, or merely have some emblem-like aspects, likely depends on whom one asks. The emblem below is considered typical of the form, consisting of motto, pictura and epigram (usually in verse) (see Cole, Han, and Vannoy 111).

However, other forms existed, such as the below two-page spread, with a numbered list of multilingual mottos on one side and associated picturae on the facing page.

In content and tone, emblems were largely moralistic and didactic (Knapp and Tüskés 17, 38, 90; Rooley 275; Stronks 148). Yet there were also ones that dealt with profane and erotic love (Knapp and Tüskés 46; Saunders 423; Stronks 149), or even “family, school, and social life” (Knapp and Tüskés 47). The audience for the genre seems to have been wide, including clergy (Visser 163), members of the nobility, and merchants (Rooley 275); with emblem books being used for religious instruction ((Knapp and Tüskés 48), contemplation (Rooley 275), and even entertainment (Rooley 275). Because of the diversity of content, audience and form, estimating the amount of different emblem books is difficult.

            Using Emblematica Online and the work of Arnoud Visser and Peter M. Daly, I have made a rough estimate of the total amount of existent emblem books. My data set represents a tiny fraction of the whole. Visser states that over 100 editions of Alciato’s emblem books were published from 1531-1620 (Visser 162); Daly gives a count of 175 Alciato editions in total (Daly n. pag.). Emblematica Online has 65 books by Alciato, 56 published before 1620. Therefore, the site has approximately 56% of Alciato’s texts using Visser, or 37% using Daly. Assuming that such a ratio can be attributed to the entire Emblematica Online collection, undoubtedly a weak assumption at best, then one could estimate the total of existent emblem books. Emblematica Online has 1,381 books; as far as I can tell, they are all different, though they may be translations and different editions of the same work.[1] Thus, one can estimate their being between 2,466 and 3,732 existent emblem books.

Therefore, comparing the size of my data set to these estimates and the Emblematica Online collection looks something like this:

My dataset includes emblems from just 160 books; and to be clear, it does not even include every emblem from those books. Though I cannot estimate how many emblems exist in total, the Emblematica Online projects have tagged 28,313 emblems with Iconclass notations, though they have more emblems they have yet to code with metadata. Of those emblems, my dataset includes only 1,517; approximately 5.4% of those tagged, as visualised below.

My project was not designed to say anything regarding the genre as a whole; it is focused on particular symbols, and is thus not a randomised set either. My dataset, while including more emblems than I could hope to analyse through close reading, contains only a small fraction of all existent emblems. Any arguments I make in the following posts are reflective of my dataset only, contingent on the currently available emblem metadata. It will be interesting to see if the patterns hold as more emblems containing God-symbols are marked-up.

Endnotes

[1] A book being popular enough to warrant another printing in the same or another language actually supports the idea that the symbols in its emblems were a little more widespread; thus counting each edition as a separate work is appropriate for my project.

Works Cited

Cole, Timothy W., Myung-Ja K. Han, and Jordan A. Vannoy. “Descriptive Metadata, Iconclass, and Digitized Emblem Literature.” Proceedings of the 12th ACM/IEEE-CS joint conference on Digital Libraries. New York: Association for Computing Machinery, 2012. 111-20. ACM Digital Library. Web. 28 Jun. 2015.

“Contents of Iconclass.” Iconclass. RKD, 2012. Web. 13 Jan. 2016.

Daly, Peter M. Introduction. Andreas Alciatus. 2 vols. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1985. N. pag. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 22 Apr. 2016.

Devises et emblemes anciennes & modernes, tirâees des plus celebres auteurs, oder, Emblematische Gemèuths-Vergnèugungbey Betrachtung siben hundert und funffzehen der curieusesten und ergèotzlichen Sinn-Bildern, mit ihren zustèandigen teutsch-lateinisch-franzèosisch- und italianischen Beyschrifften. Augspurg [Augsburg, Ger.]: Verlegs Lorentz Kroniger und Gottleib Gèobels Seel[enfreund] Erben, 1695. Emblematica Online. Web. 18 Mar. 2016.

Emblematica Online. University of Illinois Board of Trustees, 2015. Web. 25 Apr. 2016.

Knapp, Éva, and Gábor Tüskés. Emblematics in Hungary: A Study of the History of Symbolic Representation in Renaissance and Baroque Literature. Trans. András Török and Zsuzsa Boronkay. Tübingen, Ger.: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 2003. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 20 Apr. 2016.

Rooley, Anthony. “1612—John Dowland and the Emblem Tradition.” Early Music 41.2 (2013): 273-80. Academic Search Complete. Web. 20 Apr. 2016.

Stronks, Els. “Dutch Religious Love EmblemsL Reflections of Faith and Toleration in the Later 17^th Century.” Literature & Theology 23.2 (2009): 142-64. Oxford Journals. Web. 20 Apr. 2016.

Visser, Arnoud. “Escaping The Reformation in The Republic of Letters: Confessional Silence in Latin Emblem Books.” Church History and Religious Culture 88.2 (2008): 139-67. ATLA Religion Database with ATLASerials. Web. 20 Apr. 2016.

Zsámboki, János and Jacques Grévin. Emblemes. A Anvers [Antwerp, Belg.]: De l’imprimerie de Christophle Plantin, 1567. Emblematica Online. Web. 18 Mar. 2016.

 

Finding God in the Metadata: Distant Reading and Emblem Studies by Aaron Ellsworth is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

            As I discussed in this post, Laura Mandell et al., quoting from Colin Ware, argues that the first things we see in data visualisations are “errors and artifacts”, caused by how the data is structured, by how it is collected, and even by historical events, such as a publishing house fire destroying documents (section 1). For example, I believe I fell into such a trap when I looked at the data for “11A1 God the Creator”. (Note: Please click on any visualisation to open a full-size version in a new tab.)

The above line graph shows the number of emblems published per year, and is coloured to show present-day nations, revealing what I hesitatingly described as a “French” period (1540 to 1610s), then a gap of approximately thirty to forty years, followed by a “German” period (1650s to 1780). I was particularly tantalised by the idea that the gap corresponded with the Thirty Years’ War, even though I still saw such an interpretation to be a stretch based on little evidence.[1] Not only does the ‘no emblem’ gap disappear in the data for all 1,517 emblems, but changing the type of visualisation shows that gaps between emblem publication were more common for 11A1 tagged emblems (Fig. 2).

The above visualisation, unlike the line graph, highlights the discontinuity between publications, and is thus a more accurate structuring of the data.

            So, prior to examining and interpreting the data, it seems appropriate to discuss some of the potential sources of errors and artifacts in my data, while also looking at choices made to minimise such errors, as appropriate. As such, this post will look at issues with the creation of my dataset, with Iconclass notations, with Tableau, and with the bibliographical location metadata. Lastly, I will look at what the data itself cannot reveal, showing the need for further research on the topic of the Christian denominations of emblematists.

1,517 Emblems: A Subset of a Subset – Potential for Artifacts, Potential for Accuracy

            As I noted at the end of Pt. 1, my data is a subset of the emblems available through Emblematica Online; its collection potentially being a subset of existent emblem books. Two observations must thus be made up front, regarding my choices, and regarding the prevalence of Germany. First, my selection of emblems was not random; I selected particular symbols, as indicated by certain Iconclass notations, and I did not even select all of the possible Christian religion notations. Therefore, there is the potential that my data is slanted toward my interests. However, since my choices were solely based on particular symbols, the choice should not directly affect the bibliographical data representative of each symbol. I did not remove any emblems within a notation’s dataset because of language, publication location, or even the co-occurring notations. So each requested notation’s dataset is fully representative of all the emblems that have been marked-up so far.

            Second, my data seems to be slanted towards German emblems, which could be an artifact. Looking at the overall language, location and city data for my 1,517 emblems (next three visualisations below), one thing becomes immediately clear; Germany rules!

The above three diagrams show a dominating German presence. German is the language most frequently used in these emblems, followed by Latin and then French, the latter appearing in less than half of the number of emblems German does. Over one thousand of the emblems in the set were published in present day Germany, meaning that approximately two thirds of all the emblems in this dataset come from German cities. The third visualisation shows that the four top producing cities in this set are German ones: Nuremberg, Frankfurt, Munich and Augsburg. Paris, the first non-German city, comes in fifth place. Why is this, and is it a problem?

            The prevalence of Germany could, hypothetically, be an artifact. Since my data is dependent on the emblems marked-up by the various academic institutions associated with Emblematica Online, it seems prudent to acknowledge the fact that they may have chosen which emblem books to mark-up first based on their interests. So I checked their language totals for Books and Emblems, as available from the “Filters” sidebar while browsing. According to the site, most of their books are in Latin (total = 619), whereas there are only 267 German books, less than half of the Latin texts.[2] Similarly, German comes in second in marked-up emblems; there are about 6,500 more in Latin. So it appears that my data was not shaped by any preference towards German emblem books by the scholars behind Emblematica Online.

            Indeed, further research revealed that at least some of the patterns observable in my data are accurately indicative of the history of emblem books. Emblem books were often printed in multiple editions, and translated into other languages. Andrea Alciato’s “work alone ran into more than one hundred editions within a century (including vernacular translations” (Visser 141). As father of the genre, he has received more attention. Peter M. Daly traces the appearances of Alciato’s reprints from the 1530s to the 1620s; from Augsburg to Paris, Venice, Lyon, Frankfurt and Padua (n. pag.).[3] The visualisation below shows just such a transition in Alciato’s work within my data set.

So regarding the father of the genre, my smaller data set is fairly representative of the larger picture, which bodes well for its overall accuracy.

            My data may also speak to the relationship between language and publication location. Cole, Han and Vannoy argue that emblem books “are more often written in the vernacular of the region where the book was published” (111); however, Saunders argues that emblem book publication was sometimes “international”; showing that French emblem books were first published in France, then in other European regions, such as the present-day nations of the Netherlands and Belgium (422). The following matrix visualisation shows the numbers of emblems in my data set, the x-axis showing present day nations, the y-axis showing languages.

Certainly my dataset shows that most books tended to be published in the local vernacular – eight hundred German emblems were produced in present-day Germany, and France produced 240 emblems in French – thus agreeing with Cole, Han and Vannoy. Still, neither Germany nor France produced all of the emblems in their vernaculars; for example, Germany produced 110 of the French emblems in this set, which corresponds with Saunders’ observations. As such, a little research helped show that even though my dataset seems to align with German books, that apparent ‘favouritism’ is not an artifact of the data. Since enough of the metadata seems to agree with emblem scholars, I am more confident with the bibliographical data’s overall accuracy.

Iconclass, Tableau and Location Metadata – Little Headaches

            Headache #1: Errors and artifacts in the data popped up from some other sources, and should be acknowledged, even though they were not always fully addressed. I have written previously on the issues with using Iconclass as a source of supposedly objective numerical data.[4] Essentially, how an emblem gets marked-up depends on who is doing the marking-up, which brings in the digital humanities concerns with thoroughness and consistency. In Part 4, I will look at a situation where five almost identical emblems (likely adapted from each other) are marked in two quite different, and yet wholly fitting, ways. The result is two sets of Iconclass notations for essentially the same image, with only one co-occurring notation. Thus the choices of those doing the marking-up certainly affect the data in ways I cannot completely predict and control for. Still, the notations are still the best option for numerically analysing emblem images.

            Headache #2: Tableau’s interaction with the data tables created a situation where emblems were being counted more than once because of the way different variables were sorted in the data; though I was able to minimise the potential of errors, through suggestions from John Brosz and some of my own ideas, I was unable to remove the problem completely. The problem occurred for a few reasons. First, duplication happened because some emblems are in more than one language. If an emblem had three languages, it would look like it added one emblem for each language. Such a result is desirable for the graphs dealing with languages, but not otherwise; so for those latter graphs, I essentially use a data set without language data, and that fixes unwanted duplication.

            Second, some emblems appear in multiple “Requested Notation” datasets. One of the reasons was because Iconclass is a hierarchy. I requested that the the data for a notation would include the data for all its subcategories; however, I also sometimes asked for a separate dataset for a subcategory itself. That created the problem. For example, I asked for 11C1, and a separate set for the subcategories 11C11, 11C12 etc. That means the dataset for 11C1, which contains the full dataset of 11C11, effectively duplicated all of 11C11’s emblems. This issue was fixed by filtering out all subcategories in visualisations for the whole set of emblems, leaving only those requested notations highest up in the hierarchy.

        However, some emblems were repeated in different requested notations that were not above or below each other in the hierarchy. For example, hypothetically, an emblem could be tagged with 11A1 and 11C16. There was no easy way to remove those duplicates, meaning that visualisations counting emblems for all the notations show 1,777 emblems instead of 1,517. However, the problem is removed completely when one focuses on individual requested notations; that is why I based my work in Part 3 on that view of the data, relying less on the visualisations that count emblems for all the notations.[5]

           Headache 3: Perhaps the easiest data artifact to deal with was the location metadata. The publication location data given to me, came from transcriptions from the books themselves. That means a single place name was often rendered differently because of different languages, different spellings within the same language,[6] and transcription errors. For example, present day Antwerp, Belgium was listed as “A Anvers”, “Antuerpiae”, “Antverpiae” “Antwerpen”, and “t’Antwerpen”. To deal with that issue, I “normalised” the place names to their present day anglicised equivalents,[7] since I wanted an accurate count of emblems from each city. That includes adding the anachronism of the present day ‘nations’ these cities and towns belong to, simply because it helped me to conceptualise the locations within regions. Standardising the publication locations removed what would have been an error in the data, consolidating multiple labels for the same place into one; quite akin to combining data for long ‘s’ and short ‘s’ mentioned by Mandell et al. (section 1). Any error in translation is, of course, completely mine.[8]

What the Data Cannot Say: Location + Language ≠ Religion

“[Quantitative research] provides data, not interpretation.”

-Franco Moretti (9)

            Though images and symbols for God can certainly be called religious, I am hesitant to make any claim regarding the religious affiliation of the emblematists. My dataset could be interpreted as showing the emblems to be Protestant, but such a reading is unfounded. The data shows a large proportion of German emblems in this set, both in terms of language and in terms of production location, as Figures 3, 4 and 5 above indicate (linked here on the numbers). If one assumes Germany was a solely Protestant region during the heyday of emblem books, given the strong German links with Luther and the Reformation (Oxtoby and Amore 209-13), then it looks like the majority of these emblems were Protestant ones. However, there is no metadata accounting for religion directly. Additionally, there is the problem that emblems include what could be considered religious imagery. Given the destruction of religious iconography by Protestants, specifically Calvinists, during the 16^th century (Stronks, “Literature” 227), and the tendency of Protestantism to avoid images (“Literature” 234), one may even question if Protestants would engage in emblematic visualisation of the persons of the Trinity. Els Stronks actually argues that it was Roman Catholic influence through emblem books that helped re-introduce religious imagery to Protestantism (“Literature” 228, 238; “Dutch Religious” 158). The German presence in the data, therefore, says nothing about the religious ideas expressed in the emblems.

            Further research reveals that the religious aspect of emblems is quite complex. Some works can certainly be labeled as Protestant (Visser 142); or, as in the work of János Zsámboky, aka Johannes Sambucus, be shown to have Lutheran attitudes (Visser 157). Others are the work of Catholics (Visser 142; Knapp and Tüskés 38). Indeed, the Jesuits influenced the genre across Europe, authoring and/or producing many emblem books (Knapp and Tüskés 39; Saunders 422, 426), and emblem books were used as educative texts within Jesuit Colleges, both for the study of literature and poetics and for religious studies (Knapp and Tüskés 48). Then there are the books that exhibit Christian humanism from Italy (Visser 141; Knapp and Tüskés 90), with “an emphasis on a personal, intellectual, spirituality” and “a critical attitude towards” religious institutions (Visser 143, 148).

            While some books can be thought of a belonging to one Christian denomination or movement, boundaries are also crossed. Sometimes emblematists “borrowed” emblems, to use Saunders’ term (420), from other works; taking a picture and changing the epigram and/or motto to the extent that an edition in a new language would be less a translation[9] and more an adaptation (Saunders 421; Knapp and Tüskés 89, 94, 99-100). Other times the image would be altered to change the import or effect of the emblem,[10] and sometimes new books would be printed combining emblems from multiple sources (Knapp and Tüskés 94). This practice means that religious ideas could migrate. Els Stronks discussed how Catholic emblem books influenced Protestant emblematic works within the Dutch Republic (“Dutch Religious” 143), sometimes printed in almost unchanged form (“Dutch Religious” 143, 156), sometimes with pictura, motto and epigram drastically adapted to better fit the different religious world-view (“Dutch Religious” 146). It is also entirely possible that a portion of emblem books were written to be accessible to readers of multiple Chritianities (see Visser 161). The humanist emblem books of Alciato[11] were found in both Catholic and Calvinist libraries, and read by priests and ministers (Visser 163). While it could be desirable to use the Iconclass notations with the language and location metadata to theorise the religious content of the emblems, further close reading of emblems and research into the individual creators’ religious outlook would be needed to make such arguments strong.

Endnotes

[1] Thanks goes to Dr. Michael Ullyot who tempered my enthusiasm even further, by mentioning there were very few data points for this notation – only thirty-six emblems – thus placing further doubt on the theory.

[2] Many books in my raw data were multilingual; listing two, three or more languages. Alison Saunders discusses these “polyglot productions”, noting examples from Antwerp in the early 1600s (423). So, when Emblematica Online says a book is German or Latin, that does not mean the language is exclusive; their metadata tends to list all the languages.

[3] Alison Saunders gives an almost identical list, though without dates (415).

[4] See my posts entitled: “A Problem of Standardisation” and “The Challenge of Hoover and McGann”.

[5] As you will see in Part 3, I looked at visualisations for each of the sixty-one categories separately, showing the number of emblems published in each location and each year, and in what language. Then I manually inputted relevant information, in order to examine the patterns typical of the God-symbols as a group, without the error of duplicated emblem count.

[6] The interchangeable U and V in Latin being one of the easiest to deal with.

[7] For the Latin place names I used the Association of College and Research Libraries’ “Latin Place Names” translation database. The other languages were easier to translate in general, often popping up quite easily in Google and confirmed from multiple sources, including municipal websites.

[8] I should note that the direct transcriptions are retained in the raw data; available for later double checking, in case a translation is mistaken.

[9] Still, some translations did stay close to their sources (Knapp and Tüskés 105).

[10] See Stronks, “Dutch Religious” 152 for an example that changes reader interaction with an emblem.

[11] It is even difficult to place Alciato, the father of the genre, into either the Protestant or Catholic camp, because of his humanism. He was honored for his work in law by the Vatican (Visser 154). His letters show that he had some reformist attitudes (Visser 154), at other times he vigorously defended the Catholic hierarchy and the primacy of the Pope (Visser 155-56).

Works Cited

Cole, Timothy W., Myung-Ja K. Han, and Jordan A. Vannoy. “Descriptive Metadata, Iconclass, and Digitized Emblem Literature.” Proceedings of the 12th ACM/IEEE-CS joint conference on Digital Libraries. New York: Association for Computing Machinery, 2012. 111-20. ACM Digital Library. Web. 28 Jun. 2015.

Daly, Peter M. “Bibliography of Studies of Andread Alciatus and His Emblems.” Andreas Alciatus. 2 vols. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1985. N. pag. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 22 Apr. 2016.

Emblematica Online. University of Illinois Board of Trustees, 2015. Web. 25 Apr. 2016.

Knapp, Éva, and Gábor Tüskés. Emblematics in Hungary: A Study of the History of Symbolic Representation in Renaissance and Baroque Literature. Trans. András Török and Zsuzsa Boronkay. Tübingen, Ger.: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 2003. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 20 Apr. 2016.

Mandell, Laura, et al. “How to Read a Literary Visualisation: Network Effects in the Lake School of Romantic Poetry.” Digital Studies / Le Champ Numérique 3.2 (2012): n. pag. Web. 11 Feb. 2015.

Maxwell, Robert L. “RMBS/BSC Latin Place Names File.” RBMS: Rare Books and Manuscripts Section. Association of College and Research Libraries, 2012. Web. 25 Mar. 2016.

Moretti, Franco. Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for a Literary History. London: Verso, 2007. Print.

Oxtoby, Willard G. and Roy C. Amore. “Christian Traditions.” World Religions: Western Traditions. 3^rd ed. Eds. Willard G. Oxtoby and Amir Hussain. Don Mills, Ont.: Oxford UP, 2011. 164-265. Print.

Saunders, Alison. “French Emblem Books or European Emblem Books: Transnational Publishing in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries.” Bibliothèque d’Humanisme et Renaissance 61.2 (1999): 415–27. JSTOR. Web. 20 Apr. 2016.

Stronks, Els. “Dutch Religious Love EmblemsL Reflections of Faith and Toleration in the Later 17^th Century.” Literature & Theology 23.2 (2009): 142-64. Oxford Journals. Web. 20 Apr. 2016.

—. “Literature and the Shaping of Religious Identities: The Case of the Protestant Religious Emblem in the Dutch Republic.” History of Religions 49.3 (2010): 219-53. JSTOR. Web. 20 Apr. 2016.

Visser, Arnoud. “Escaping The Reformation in The Republic of Letters: Confessional Silence in Latin Emblem Books.” Church History and Religious Culture 88.2 (2008): 139-67. ATLA Religion Database with ATLASerials. Web. 20 Apr. 2016.

 

Finding God in the Metadata: Distant Reading and Emblem Studies by Aaron Ellsworth is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

            How widespread were the emblem symbols for God? How many places were they published in? How many languages were they written in, and thus how many potential audiences could they have reached? How long did they last? My answer to these questions, based on the data, was that it was typical for a God-signifier, as indicated by an Iconclass notation, to be multilingual and pan-European, rather than limited to a single tongue or present-day nation. As shown in Part 2, within this set of emblems, German, Latin and French dominate as the most frequently used languages…

… and Germany is the region that dominates the publication of these emblems, France being a distant second.

Additionally, the symbols last quite a while, on average 135 years between first and final appearances, though very few of the signifiers do so without one or more twenty-year gaps between instances.

By and large, then, the Christian symbols for God found in the Emblem books tended to be popular, showing at least moderate levels of cultural diffusion, in terms of time, place, and language. This post will discuss the typical cultural extension shown by most of the notations; while still focusing on the odd exceptions to the norm, as those could lead to further research. I will begin by reviewing my method, then I will look at the dimension of time, followed by language and location. Lastly, I will look at the notation for the “Hand of God”, 11C12, as a test of what can be observed in the data of a single symbol. After all, the cultural diffusion of each symbol will depend on its individual publication history as revealed in the data, even if the data averages can tell us what is typical for the whole set of notations.

Method

            My dataset of bibliographical metadata for 1,517 emblems is organised into sixty-one categories and subcategories based on the Iconclass notations I decided to focus upon. Each category, labelled with an Iconclass notation, includes all emblems tagged with notations that begin with the label, thereby capturing emblems belonging to subcategories further down the Iconclass hierarchy. For example, the dataset for 11C1 includes all the emblems tagged 11C11, 11C12, 11C13, etc. along with those tagged 11C1 itself. The sixty-one categories fall into the following five major Iconclass divisions, in the following amounts:

Some of the notations, such as “11A3 God’s wrath” denote an abstract notion without specifying a signifier; thus, while I will be using ‘symbol’, ‘signifier’ and ‘notation’ interchangeably below, in some cases there may not be a single symbol for a notation; the notation indicating a type of signifier for a particular signified concept, instead.

            Using Iconclass, I examined visualisations for each of the sixty-one categories, showing the number of emblems published in each location and each year, and in what language. As an example, the following few visualisations show the data results for emblems tagged with notations beginning with “11E541”, which denotes Wisdom as a gift of the Holy Ghost (forty-three emblems in set).

While examining these visualisations, and others, I manually inputted the following information for each category: the category’s title (same as requested notation); the major category (11A to 11E); the level in the Iconclass hierarchy; number of emblems; the top three languages and locations (both by present nation and city – as mentioned in the last post, this was done to standerdise the names and conceptualise the regions that published emblems); total number of languages, nations and cities; the start date (first year the symbol appears); end date (last year the symbol appears); time span between the start and end; a yes/no indicating if there is a gap of over twenty years between emblem appearances of that symbol; and a note of the amount-of-emblems-published trend line (down=decreased over time, up=increased, flat=no change). The below shows a portion of the spreadsheet.

So I could give a general overview of the God-signifiers, I imported that spreadsheet into Tableau, and made some graphs looking mostly at time, language and location.

God Emblems Over Time

The above bar graph shows the longevity of the sixty-one symbols in emblem books. Each bar indicates a total “life span” of a symbol, from first emblem appearance to last emblem appearance. The Y-axis (and the numbers above each bar) indicates how many symbols lasted that long. So we can see, for example, that seven of the signifiers lasted between 51 to 100 years, and that twenty-five signifiers have a longer “life” of somewhere between 151 to 200 years. Since “Emblematic pictures form[ed] part of an iconographic language understood by a wide readership” (Knapp and Tüskés 12), for comparisons sake, I have annotated the graph to show two present day widely recognised corporate icons, Ronald McDonald and Mickey Mouse, who currently would be comparable to those symbols in the 51 to 100-year life-span range (though they are not finished yet). The comparison may be unfair because Ronald and Mickey have the advantage of appearing in multiple media, whereas my data only covers emblem book appearances, neglecting the existence of the same symbol in other art forms. Still, since arguably Mickey and Ronald are long lived, one could separate the bars above into three groups, with two bars to a group. There are thirteen short-lived (1 to 50 years) emblem God-symbols or about 21% of the total. Thirteen symbols have a long life (51 to 150 years); about another 21%. About 57% of the symbols have a very long life of 151 to 250 years. While there is certainly variability in life-span, the symbols generally last for quite a while.

            The still-born symbols: Three notations only have emblems in one year. “11E51 the seven gifts of the Holy Ghost represented as seven doves” occurs in two emblems, from two books published in 1551, both by Barthélémy Aneau, one in French and one in Latin. It seems safe to say that, with the present data, that symbol is unique to him within emblem books. It could change as more emblems are marked-up, of course. Similarly, there are seven emblems from a single book published in Vienna, Austria in 1681; that form the entirety of “11B33” and its subcategory “11B333”, the other two notations in the “All in one year” bar. 11B33 vaguely refers to “representations of the Trinity”; 11B333 specifies it as “representation of the Trinity: symbol (Father), person (Son), dove (Holy Ghost)”. With the current dataset, that particular signifier did not make it outside of that one book. The data itself does not give any clear indication why either of these representations did not catch on within emblem books. At present, we simply have to conclude they were just not widespread.

            Gaps: While the God-symbols tend to be long lived, that does not mean that they were constantly published within their life spans. The below graph shows the data for “11C13 tetragram (in Roman or Hebrew script) ~ symbol of God the Father”[1] and its subcategories. The x-axis shows the year of publication, and the height of the bars indicate how many emblems that include the four-letter name of God were published each year; the largest being ten emblems in 1699.

As one can see, there are several large gaps where the symbol “disappears” because it was not published in any books within the dataset. This is actually typical of all the notations. Out of fifty-eight Iconclass notations (excluding the three notations which occur only in one year), only five notations do not have one or more gaps over twenty years long. Either the gaps will be filled in as more emblems are tagged, or it is typical for the God-symbols to hibernate and reappear later. Either way, the gaps do not harm the argument that these symbols were long-lasting or culturally diffuse, simply because they came back after periods of absence. Still, the gaps could indicate a shift of focus to other topics, or a wane in a specific symbol’s popularity.

            The few without gaps: As stated, there are five notations without one or more gaps of over twenty years between publication. These five separate into two groups. The first group contains two notations which have a life span of less than twenty years (both lasting seventeen years), therefore being unable to have a gap of twenty years. These two symbols – “11D323 Christ-‘Logos’, the Word Incarnate” and “11E2 Holy Ghost represented as flames” – are not long-lived given the data; perhaps they just did not catch on with emblematists and their audiences. The more interesting group, however, is the one made up of three notations (including subcategories): “11D12 the cross ~ symbols of Christ”, “11D326 ‘Fons Vitae’, ‘Fons Pietatis’” [Christ as ‘the fountain of life’], and “11D5 mystic ideas ~ Christ”.

These graphs show that the cross appeared in emblems from 1550-1778 (228 years), the fountain of life lasted 179 years (1563-1742), and signifiers referring to mystic ideas of Christ lasted 175 years (1570-1745). These three notations are among the longest lasting and they have no gap larger than exactly 20 years for 11D12, or 19 years for 11D326 and 11D5. Thus they seem to be the most frequently and consistently used, long-lasting ways of thinking of or indicating God/Christ within emblems.

Distribution in Language and Space

            Those three notations are also among the symbols with the widest cultural distribution: emblems with “11D12 the cross” appear in nine languages, published in twenty-four different cities in eight present-day nations (plus one case where the location is unknown), emblems of “11D326” and “11D5” are in seven languages, from six different nations, published in fifteen and eighteen cities respectfully. In the bar chart below, the x-axis lists the number of languages used per notation (NOT per single emblem): 1 for unilingual, 2-5 for bilingual/moderate multilingual, and 6-9 for high multilingual. The height of the bars indicates how many notations have a certain amount of languages. So, for example, there are seven notations that have emblems published in five different languages (over the whole set of emblems, though certain emblems have multiple languages themselves).

Of these sixty-one symbols, the largest single group is made up of notations published in three languages; about one fifth of the notations. Thirty-five symbols (about 57%) could be considered to have reached a moderate amount of different lingual audiences, appearing in between two to five different languages. A smaller amount, eighteen symbols (about 30%), appear in books published in six or more languages; while only eight (about 13%) are published in one language only. It seems that translating emblems into other languages, and/or using two or more languages in a single emblem, was the norm. Given that most of the emblems appear in German, Latin and French (in that order, see Figure 1 above [or click here], which shows the number of emblems per language), it is unsurprising that those tend to be the top three languages for each notation.

By top three, I mean the three most frequently used languages within the emblems marked-up with a particular God-symbol notation. For example, the top three for 11C1 are Latin (162 emblems), German (135 emblems) and French (82 emblems), which would place it as one of the eight notations in the purple bar, third from the right, in the above bar graph. Only eight notations (about 13%) do not have German as the first, second, or third most frequent language. German is the most frequent language for over 60% of the sixty-one god-signifiers. Additionally, German is the only language to be the sole language (thus the entirety of the blue bar in Figure 14, too).[2] In seven of the German-only notations, the emblem total is below 10, sometimes all appearing in the same book. However, “11D511 the Soul as bride of Christ” appears in 28 emblems, published in four different German cities (see below visualisation) in five different books.

So German, and to a lesser extent Latin and German, dominated the language of these emblems, perhaps affecting what symbols were prominent given each language’s intended audience(s). Still, the data shows that the God-symbols crossed linguistic boundaries more often than not, mostly to a moderate extent of two to five languages, with German, Latin and French almost guaranteed to be within the list, if not on top of it.

            Different places: A similar picture emerges when looking at publication location. The below graph shows the top two frequent publication regions (x-axis), labelled according to present-day nations; the bar height showing how many of the sixty-one notations had emblems that were mostly published in those two (or sometimes one) region.

Frankly, Germany dominates. Out of sixty-one symbols, Germany is the most frequent publishing location for fifty of them. That is about 82%! For comparative purposes, France, is the most frequent present-day nation only six times (about 10%), and it is the closest to Germany in terms of total emblems published (see Figure 2 above, or click here).

            However, while German cities pumped out more of these emblems than anyone else, the symbols, just like with language, do seem to spread across Europe, sometimes to a few regions, other times quite widely.

The numbers along the x-axis show how many present-day nations published emblems for a particular God-symbol (one to nine nations per single symbol), while the y-axis shows how many notations have emblems published in the given amount of different nations.[3] For example, the orange bar indicates that fourteen symbol categories include emblems published in two, and only two, present-day nations. Moderate spread (published in two to five nations) is the case for thirty-six out of sixty-one signifiers (about 59% of them). Wide spread symbols, those published in six or more nations, about 25% of the time (fifteen notations); and only ten emblem symbols stay within a single nation (16%). The situation is similar for cities:

 

As the above shows, twenty-three god-signifiers were published in two to five different cities (about 38%); fifteen were published in between six and ten cities (about 25%); about the same amount of signifiers spread wider, coming from eleven to twenty different cities; six symbols (about 10%) come from single cities; and even fewer (three notations, about 5%) are god-symbols so widespread as to appear in emblems from over twenty cities![4] Since there are sixteen German cities, compared to the next highest about – France with four cities – it is fair to assume that multiple German cities published emblems for most of the sixty-one notations.

            While each of the notations, and the symbols or notions they represent, should be examined separately to see the extent of their cultural diffusion, one can still give an estimate for what seems to be the norm for this dataset. Using the averages of the data, the symbols seem to mostly be published in about four languages (avg.= 4.19) from locations in three or four present-day nations (avg.=3.67…), and in seven or eight cities (avg.=7.73…), some likely being German ones. However, the prevalence of Germany does not mean that the use of the emblematic symbols started there and then spread to other regions, in fact the opposite is just as plausible: that the symbols were first introduced to emblem books in other areas, say France, and were later used by Germans, among others. A different look is required.

Looking at the “Hand of God”

            Two-hundred and forty-two emblems in this dataset are tagged “11C12 hand, ‘Dextera Dei’ ~ symbol of God the Father”. One example, the below image, shows the “Hand of God” (accompanied by the tetragrammaton) pointing at or touching the heart of a man.

The Hand was culturally, widespread published in eighteen cities, representing six present-day nations – Germany (156 emblems), France (thirty emblems), Switzerland (twenty-six), the Netherlands (twenty-two), Belgium (seven) and Denmark (one) [see Figure 21 below] – and in at least six languages: Latin (ninety-two emblems), German (sixty-six), French (fifty-two), Dutch (three), Greek (three) and Italian (three) [see Figure 22 below].

Over thirty were marked up as “Multiple Languages” without specification, and sixteen emblems had no language data at all. Emblems with the “hand of God” first appeared in 1550, and appeared off-and-on for 222 years, until 1772. Thus, this symbol lasted for almost the entirety of the genre’s popular period. Using Tableau, we can look at the movement this symbol made between languages and places.

The above graph shows the languages used in “Hand of God” emblems over time. Bars, rather than a line graph, are used to show the gaps where no emblems are present in the data, such as the twenty-five year gap around 1600. This graph shows a movement from French emblems (between 1550-1590) to predominately German emblems from the 1620s to the 1730s, with two more German emblems in 1772. Latin overlaps the other two languages, existing alongside the French emblems of the mid-late 16^th century, then returning in 1612 in a set of three multilingual emblems (Greek and Italian being the other languages), and continuing into the German period. The amount of Latin “Hand of God” emblems explodes twice –  sixteen emblems in one 1676 book, and thirty-five from a 1699 book – before petering out in the 1720s. Hypothetically, the solely Latin emblems are from the works of Jesuits (though that is not necessarily true), and the French and German emblems (with or without Latin mottos) are productions with a more Protestant outlook. A closer investigation of the individual creators’ religious outlook would be needed to prove such an argument. Still, the data does indicate a move by the symbol from French to German areas.

The above graph shows the 11C12 data for present-day nations; confirming the idea that emblem representations of the “Hand of God” somehow moved from French cities (in France and Belgium) to Germany. It also adds a few other facts, for example, that Switzerland was responsible for the multilingual “Hand of God” emblems from around 1580, and that the sixteen French emblems published in 1696 (see Figure 23), were published in the Netherlands, not France.

            What caused the general move from France and Belgium to Germany and the Netherlands is harder to tell from the data alone, but the answer may be economic. Alison Saunders writes about French emblematists and publishers moving their operations from Paris to Lyon around the 1540s (416) and later to Antwerp (in present-day Belgium) in the 1560s and Leiden (the Netherlands) in the early 1600s (421-422).[5] My data follows this trend somewhat; the following graph is the same as the last one, except it adds the names of cities for most of the years.

Just as Saunders wrote, we start in Lyon after the 1540, with a move into Antwerp during the 1560s, though my data does show that emblems were still published in Lyon after. Likewise, “Hand of God” emblems first appear in the Netherlands in the early 1600s; just in Utrecht, and later Amsterdam, instead of Leiden. Saunders gives reasons for the moves; for example, Lyon in the 1540s was a cosmopolitan city, situated on trade routes and was a printing centre (416), thereby having ready access to a vaster European market. Similarly, Antwerp was seized upon for its access to the international market (421).[6] So one of the major reasons for the movement of this symbol from place to place was simply money. Saunders does not address the move into Germany, but perhaps economics may help explain that as well.

            More historical research into the regions and the individual emblematists and publishers is needed to fully explore the reason for the spread of this symbol from the French to the Germans and other peoples. Perhaps that is one of the major strengths of such a distant reading of emblems using book-level bibliographic data, it entices curiosity. Whether looking at a single God-symbol, or the trends of a larger set, the data presents one with quandaries, practically begging the analyst to engage in further research to determine the causality behind the numbers.

Endnotes

[1] The tetragram, or tetragrammaton, is the four-letter representation of the “true name of God”, rendered YHWH in Latin letters. See McKenzie 1286.

[2] The eight notations that have solely German emblems are “11B12 Trinity represented as a person with three heads” and its subcategory “11B121 ‘Tricephalus’, three fused heads or faces only (~ Trinity)”; “11B33 representations of the Trinity” and its sub category “11B333 representation of the Trinity: symbol (Father), person (Son), dove (Holy Ghost)”, which I discussed earlier because all seven emblems showing this were published in one book in Vienna, Austria in 1681; “11D324  ‘Salvator Mundi’, [Savior of Man] making a blessing gesture; an orb in his hand or at his feet”; “11D328 types of adult Christ (alone)” and its subcategory “11D3283 Christ as angel”; and finally, “11D511 the Soul as bride of Christ”. All of the category-subcategory pairs include the exact same set of emblems.

[3] There is no bar for eight nations because there were not symbols published in exactly eight nations.

[4] Those three notations are “11C1 symbols of God the Father” (more of an abstract notion, or set of signifiers), “11C2 God the Father represented as human being, usually with crown or tiara or sceptre and/or globe” and “11D12 the cross ~ symbols of Christ”

[5] Saunders also mentions a return to publishing back in Paris in the 1650s by Catholic persons and groups (425-26), which are not reflected in my data. Perhaps those emblems have yet to be marked-up, or perhaps they did not use the “Hand of God” symbol.

[6] There was also “political unrest” back in Lyon (Saunders 421), which is a potential social reason for moving.

Works Cited

Aneau, Barthélemy. Imagination poetique, traduicte en vers François, des Latins, & Grecz, par l’auteur memse d’iceux. Lyon, Fr.: Macé Bonhomme, 1552. Emblematica Online. Web. 27 Apr. 2016.

—. Picta poesis. Ut pictura poesis erit. Lugduni [Lyon, Fr.]: Apud Mathiam Bonhomme, 1552. Emblematica Online. Web. 27 Apr. 2016.

Emblematica Online. University of Illinois Board of Trustees, 2015. Web. 25 Apr. 2016.

Knapp, Éva, and Gábor Tüskés. Emblematics in Hungary: A Study of the History of Symbolic Representation in Renaissance and Baroque Literature. Trans. András Török and Zsuzsa Boronkay. Tübingen, Ger.: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 2003. ProQuest ebrary. Web. 20 Apr. 2016.

McKenzie, John L. “Aspects of Old Testament Thought.” The New Jerome Biblical Commentary. Ed. Raymond E. Brown, Joseph A. Fitzmyer and Roland E. Murphy. London: Novalis, 2011. 1284-1315. Print.

Montenay, Georgette de, and Anna Roemer Visscher. Cent emblemes chrestiens. Heidelberg, Ger.: Johann Lancelot, 1602. Emblematica Online. Web. 27 Apr. 2016.

Saunders, Alison. “French Emblem Books or European Emblem Books: Transnational Publishing in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries.” Bibliothèque d’Humanisme et Renaissance 61.2 (1999): 415–27. JSTOR. Web. 20 Apr. 2016.

Sucquet, Antonius. Andächtige Gedancken zur Vermeidung des bösen und Vollbringung des guten aus dem Buch Weeg des ewigen Lebens. Wienn [Vienna, Aus.]: Voigt, 1681. Emblematica Online. Web. 27 Apr. 2016.

Finding God in the Metadata: Distant Reading and Emblem Studies by Aaron Ellsworth is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.