Abstract
This conclusion picks up on a theme running through the volume—that of the secretive or encoded nature of counsel in the context of queenship—and explores how this plays out in the visual and illustrative counsel of Early Modern Europe. Examining emblems, woodcuts and especially the frontispiece of John Dee’s Generall and Rare Memorials pertayning to the Perfect Arte of Navigation (1577), Joanne Paul demonstrates how symbols and visual references were used to encode counsel about and for queens. She argues that investigating the relationship between queenship and counsel in this period challenges existing understandings of what constitutes “the political”, by expanding the focus to symbol, performance, rhetoric, wardrobe, architecture and other media for counsel about politics.
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Notes
- 1.
Visual displays in regards to clothing, ceremony and masques are considered, for instance by Beer (Chap. 3) and Whitelock (Chap. 11). Including “emblems” in this category is problematic, for as Peter M. Daly, The Emblem in Early Modern Europe: Contributions to the Theory of the Emblem (Farnham: Routledge, 2014), 32 suggests, the emblem consisted of both image and text, and could sometimes include only the latter. For the purposes of this piece, however, emblems will be considered that consist of both text and image.
- 2.
Peter M. Daly, The Emblem in Early Modern Europe: Contributions to the Theory of the Emblem (Farnham: Routledge, 2014), 56.
- 3.
Peter Maurice Daly, “Emblems: An Introduction,” in Companion to Emblem Studies, ed. Peter Maurice Daly (New York: AMS Press, 2008), 8–10.
- 4.
W. R. Albury, Castiglione’s Allegory: Veiled Policy in the Book of the Courtier (1528) (Burlington: Ashgate, 2014), 192.
- 5.
Daly, “Emblems: An Introduction”, 5 speaks of “the function of the emblem” being “didactic in the broadest sense: it was intended to convey knowledge and truth in a brief and compelling form that will persuade the reader and imprint itself on memory”. Karl A. E. Enenkel, “The Neo-Latin Emblem: Humanist Learning, Classical Antiquity, and the Virtual ‘Wunderkammer’,” in Companion to Emblem Studies, 144–5 likewise sees the emblem book as a visual commonplace book; “they offer the vast knowledge of classical and humanist scholarship in a nutshell, packed in small portions and presented in a very agreeable form”.
- 6.
Michael Bath, Speaking Pictures: English Emblem Books and Renaissance Culture (London: Longman, 1994), 2.
- 7.
John Manning, “Whitney’s ‘Choice of Emblemes’: A Reassessment,” Renaissance Studies 4, no. 2 (1990): 185.
- 8.
John Manning, Emblem (London: Reaktion Books, 2002), 48, 148, 226, 322.
- 9.
Alciato 1531, sig. D1v. Translation provided by “In Senatum Boni Principis” Alciato at Glasglow Emblem Project (accessed 16 Aug 2011).
- 10.
This image is also used in the editions of Alciato produced in Ausburg in 1531 and 1534.
- 11.
Kevin Dunn, “‘Action, Passion, Motion’: The Gestural Politics of Counsel in ‘The Spanish Tragedy’,” Renaissance Drama 31 (2002): 27.
- 12.
Metal-cut image, see Luborsky and Ingram 1998, vol. 1, 422.
- 13.
See Patrick Collinson, “John Foxe as Historian,” The Acts and Monuments Online, accessed 10 August 2017, https://www.johnfoxe.org/index.php?realm=more&gototype=&type=essay&book=essay3.
- 14.
Dale Hoak, “Iconography of the Crown Imperial,” in Tudor Political Culture, ed. Dale Hoak (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 94.
- 15.
Elizabeth Evenden, Patents, Pictures and Patronage: John Day and the Tudor Book Trade (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), 114.
- 16.
There is also a mid-seventeenth-century image of Elizabeth I flanked by Cecil and Walsingham on the frontispiece of The Compleat Ambassador, containing the letters of the two pictured, amongst others, by Dudley Digges. Elizabeth, however, is not “in counsel” with the men pictured, and the book is about the counsel that goes on around her and about her, rather than any she herself is involved in. Likewise the 1693 frontispiece to the Complete Journal of the House of Lords and the House of Commons Throughout the Whole Reign of Queen Elizabeth of Glorious Memory presents Elizabeth in parliament in a similar way to the council scenes in Hall, but this is almost a full century after her death.
- 17.
Could be “general”, but the French from 1560 gives “Emperiere”, or “empress”; see Randle Corgrave, A Dictionarie of the French and English Tongues (London: William Hunt, 1660), Kk 1r.
- 18.
Glasgow gives “empty” for fatuis.
- 19.
It first appears in Book VI of Plato’s Republic.
- 20.
In puppi residens clauum tenet ille quietus,/ At non quae iuuenum robora, strennuitas, /Quin multo maiora facit, melioraq[ue], solus/ Ipse sua praestans omnibus ingenio./ Res magnae haus valido, aut veloci corpore siunt,/ Verum animi sensu, consilio, imperio.
- 21.
This frontispiece has been analysed several times. See for instance Frances A. Yates, Astraea: The Imperial Theme in the Sixteenth Century (New York: Routledge, 1975), 49–50; Margery Corbett and R. W. Lightbown, Comely Frontispiece: Emblematic Title-Page in England, 1550–1660 (London; Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979), 49–56; Peter J. French, John Dee: The World of the Elizabethan Magus: The World of an Elizabethan Magus (London: Routledge, 1987), 182–7; John N. King, Tudor Royal Iconography: Literature and Art in an Age of Religious Crisis (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), 238–41.
- 22.
See the context provided by Corbett and Lightbown, Comely Frontispiece, 52. For more on the contents of the book, see French, John Dee, 182–3. Notably, there is a double-sided portrait of Christopher Hatton dating to around 1580 (the information in the painting dates it to 12 December 1581), upon one side of which is an image of Tempus as Occasio, with the poem that usually accompanies the image of Occasio, ending with the instruction to hang the image in an entrance-hall, to stir up lazy men; See C. W. R. D. Moseley, “A Portrait of Sir Christopher Hatton, Erasmus and an Emblem of Alciato: Some Questions”, The Antiquaries Journal 86 (2006): 373–9.
- 23.
John Dee, Generall and Rare Memorials pertayning to the Perfect Arte of Navigation (London, 1577), 20.
- 24.
Corbett and Lightbown, Comely Frontispiece, 49.
- 25.
Yates, Astraea, 49; Corbett and Lightbown, 50.
- 26.
Yates, Astraea, 49 suggests that the theme of the C initial is expanded “to cover the theme of [Dee’s] book”. The same claim is repeated in King, Tudor Royal Iconography, 238.
- 27.
Yates, Astraea, 49. Corbett and Lightbown, Comely Frontispiece, 50 instead suggest that she holds a sceptre, not the rudder, in her left hand. In the hand-drawing, it is more clearly the rudder.
- 28.
Yates, Astraea, 50. Corbett and Lightbown, Comely Frontispiece, 50 identify the three men as “her counsellors”; French, John Dee, 184 simply as “members of the nobility”.
- 29.
Corbett and Lightbown, Comely Frontispiece, 56.
- 30.
This drawing was catalogued amongst the drawings of Elias Ashmole and was used as a model for the frontispiece, Corbett and Lightbown, Comely Frontispiece, 51.
- 31.
As Corbett and Lightbown, Comely Frontispiece, 51 point out, whereas in the frontispiece they are “all cloaked and dressed alike”, in the manuscript drawing they are more distinctive. Both she and her counsellors are also much younger.
- 32.
John Dee, General and Rare Memorials Pertayning to the Perfect Arte of Navigation (London, 1577), 54.
- 33.
Daly, The Emblem, 99. See for instance Andrea Alciato’s Emblematum libellus (Paris, 1534), 20—the same image appears in the 1536, 1539 and 1542 editions and similar images of Occasio at sea appear in subsequent versions of Alciato’s influential emblem book.
- 34.
An image of Occasio at sea with a ship appears in the 1549, 1550 and 1551 Lyon editions.
- 35.
Tarik Wareh, The Theory and Practice of Life: Isocrates and the Philosophers, Hellenic Studies Series 54 (Washington, DC: Center for Hellenic Studies, 2013), 4. Aristot. Nic. Eth. 1104a.
- 36.
J. C. Cooper, An Illustrated Encyclopaedia of Traditional Symbols (London: Thames and Hudson Ltd., 1979), 96.
- 37.
“Emblem: In Occasionem. Sur L’occasion,” Alciato at Glasgow, accessed 11 December 2017, http://www.emblems.arts.gla.ac.uk/alciato/emblem.php?id=FALc121.
- 38.
Corbett and Lightbown, Comely Frontispiece, 56. See the pyramid emblem in Hadrianus Junius’ Emblemata (1565), which describes “The Pyramids, eternal monuments of the Egyptian kings: The clinging ivy winds round them with wandering branches. The needy populace is supported by the secure wealth of its kings: And constant strength of mind flourishes for ever”; “French Emblems: Emblem: Principum Opes, Plebis Adminicula”, French Emblems at Glasgow, accessed 4 December 2017.
- 39.
Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (Venice, 1499), http://archive.org/details/hypnerotomachiap00colo, b iiv.
- 40.
Francesco Colonna, Hypnerotomachia, trans. R. D. (London, 1592), C 3r-v.
- 41.
Peter J. Forshaw, “The Hermetic Frontispiece: Contextualising John Dee”s Hieroglyphic Monad”, Ambix 64, no. 2 (3 April 2017): 116–17.
- 42.
Dee, General and Rare Memorials, 53.
- 43.
Corbett and Lightbown, Comely Frontispiece, 51.http://www.emblems.arts.gla.ac.uk/french/emblem.php?id=FJUb014. There are similar emblems and images in other emblem books of the time as well, such as Claude Paradin, Devises heroïques (1557). See Anthony John Harper and Ingrid Höpel, The German-Language Emblem in Its European Context: Exchange and Transmission (Geneva: Librairie Droz, 2000), 160.
- 44.
Sir Edward Stafford, “Stafford to Burghley,” State Papers, 1588, 18 (23 November 1588): 344; Thomas Lyly, “Thomas Lyly to Sir Robert Cecil,” ed. R. A. Roberts, Calendar of the Manuscripts of the Most Hon. the Marquis of Salisbury, Preserved at Hatfield House, Hertfordshire, 1591–1595, 5 (1894): 91.
- 45.
SP 70/122 f.50r.
- 46.
SP 70/122 f.50r.
- 47.
SP 70/122 f.50r.
- 48.
Susan Doran, Elizabeth I and Her Circle (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 274.
- 49.
Elizabeth I, Elizabeth I: Collected Works, ed. Leah S. Marcus, Janel Meuller and Mary Beth Rose (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 189.
- 50.
Susan Doran, “Elizabeth I and Counsel,” in The Politics of Counsel in England and Scotland, 1286–1707, ed. Jacqueline Rose (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 169.
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Paul, J. (2018). Epilogue: “Publica si domini regerent moderamina cunni”: Deciphering Queenship and Counsel. In: Matheson-Pollock, H., Paul, J., Fletcher, C. (eds) Queenship and Counsel in Early Modern Europe. Queenship and Power. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-76974-5_12
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