John Manning. The Emblem.

London: Reaktion Books Ltd., 2002. 398 pp. index, illus, bibl. $35. ISBN: 1-86189-110-5. This learned and witty survey of emblematics from the sixteenth through the late nineteenth centuries provides an updated general introduction to the field that supersedes anything available to date. Manning does not attempt to provide his study with a cumbersome historical frame, but instead divides the subject thematically. The first three chapters discuss the origins of the emblematic forms, emblematic rhetoric, and the taxonomy of knowledge in Renaissance emblem books. The following five chapters treat themes such as children, sacred and profane love, fame and public relations, licentious allusions, scatological double entendres, and the carnival themes such as the world upside down, before concluding with the representation of death, dying, and the Last Judgment in emblems.

The work is lavishly illustrated. But this rich iconography is not without its problems. First, the author claims that most of these illustrations come from books in his possession. Not surprisingly, the editorial decision to avoid expense this way influenced the shape of the corpus under consideration. Of course, that is always a problem with emblem studies because so many emblem books were produced, and in so many editions, and because so few libraries contain really representative collections of emblem books. Manning probably presents a wider corpus than most writers do and introduces emblem scholars to books they did not know or had not considered as carefully as they should have, but he barely mentions Spanish emblems and says nothing about emblems in the New World, either in the States or in colonial Latin America. Using his own books leads him to choose, for example, an 1818 edition of Quarles for one of his illustrations, with no rationale for using that edition, nor any explanation.

Likewise, in his appendix, Manning gives selections of emblems from three different emblem books. But he does not tell the reader which edition of Quarles he is using there, and he tells us too little about his reasons for using Tozzi's 1618 edition of Alciato. In particular, he does not explain very well where the short commentaries in that edition originate. I believe they come from Plantin's editio compendiosa of 1584, with some minor additions from other Plantin editions. A more thorough positioning of these samples would have made them more useful.

Although the other sample comes from Charles de La Rue's Idyllia, Manning devotes relatively little space to French emblematics in his text. His corpus, apart from Alciato and the other humanists writing in Latin, is solidly English, Dutch, and German. There is nothing wrong with this decision, but in a book entitled The Emblem, readers should be aware that the corpus is somewhat idiosyncratic. More serious, Manning pays very little attention to the impresa, the other major emblematic form and often considered superior to the emblem by theoreticians like Tesauro.

The best parts of the early chapters are the discussion of the history of the illustration of Alciato's emblems, a subject Manning knows better than just about anyone else, and his study of the taxonomy of knowledge in chapter 3. Among the thematic chapters, the most interesting and original deals with the scatological double entendres and innuendos that lie very close to the surface of many emblems. The origin of this material and the justification for including it in this study may be found in the Saturnalian nature of Alciato's emblems. The emblem was to be an occupation of leisure time, of carnival and the Saturnalia; it is the otium that followed negotium, and this understanding freed it for all kinds of ludic and subversive incursions upon the serious business of moralizing that has been the only side seen by too many scholars. The case Manning makes is a very strong one, buttressed by the contemporary commentators on Alciato's emblems. No one has previously bothered to read the Latin of Alciato and his commentators closely enough to see the double meanings they dearly intended. This fascinating chapter, however, raises two questions. First, did all emblematists engage in such play, or only the humanists from the sixteenth century? Second, why did printers not censor more of these scatological references? The famous emblem 80, Adversus naturam peccantes, was omitted from every edition of Alciato for some seventy years or more; why were others not similarly censored, the way editors censored Martial's scatological epigrams that provided emblematists with models for this kind of writing?

These are some of the questions raised by this extremely stimulating book, and if the first part of my review seemed critical, it is because Manning did not explain sufficiently what he was about. This fine book has already received much deserved praise, and will surely receive much more as it serves to stimulate new work in the field. It will provide an excellent, if slightly distorted, introductory view for newcomers to the field. It is also a book that needs to be pondered by Neo-Latinists, students of children and children's literature, and indeed anyone interested in early modern European culture. This is a truly new look at emblems and emblem books by a knowledgeable and eloquent specialist in the field.

DANIEL RUSSELL

University of Pittsburgh