The art of the emblem is a pan-European phenomenon which developed in Western and Central Europe in the early modern period. It adopted meanings and motifs from Antiquity and the Middle Ages as part of a general humanistic impulse. Technological developments in printing that permitted the combination of letterpress with woodblock, and later copperplate, images, ensured that the emblem spread rapidly by way of printed collections. With time, emblematic ideas moved beyond Europe, conveying their insights and wisdom in the compact form of the book. These same books came to influence artists and designers working in the decoration of buildings, furniture, and household items, so that emblems entered personal life; they infiltrated festive culture, too. In such environments beyond the book, emblems were transported, adapted, and embedded in new functional contexts shaped by social, political, or religious conditions, but also by architectonical and regional art historical parameters. The results of these transformations are often of an intricate and complex meaning. The combination of word and image that constitutes the emblem still has resonance in contemporary art and architecture. The study of emblems allows us to look back at the collaborative endeavours of creative minds of earlier times from across Europe and beyond. At a time when that continent is under strain, and the world in general seeks to come to terms with globalization, emblems allow reflection on strongly shared cultural values and connections.

Using the critical approach of the New Historicism and the sociological insights of Ernst Troeltsch, this study addresses the complicated issue of how the German Romantic poet, Friedrich Hölderlin, shifts religious vocabulary to the aesthetic realm, by examining his relationship to pietist groups in his native Württemberg. The study is divided into three sections: 1) a literature review and methodological statement; 2) overview of the spectrum of positions represented within Württemberg pietism, and a discussion of three pietists known to have had contact with Hölderlin in his youth and as a student; 3) analysis of a representative selection of Hölderlin's works - including his early poems, Hyperion, his theoretical writings on aesthetics, and a number of his late hymns - in light of their relation to Württemberg pietism.

This anthology of critical essays pursues a field of scholarship that has only recently caught fire: the dark side of the German Enlightenment. The most prominent of German enlightened poets and thinkers - Goethe, Schiller, Lichtenberg, Tieck, among others - were conspicuously prone to the ideology of shamans, occultists, and charlatans of modern science and psychology. And yet the studies published here for the first time argue that the fascination with magic and the occult are not symptoms of a dying age but subversively productive elements, so that the subversiveness of irrationalism may be said to have become a progressive rather than a reactionary force.

Civic virtues were central to early modern Nürnberg’s visual culture. These essays explore Nürnberg as a location from which to study the intersection of art and power. The imperial city was awash in emblems, and they informed most aspects of everyday life. The intent of this volume is to focus new attention on the town hall emblems, while simultaneously expanding the purview of emblem studies, moving from strict iconological approaches to collaborations across methodologies and disciplines.

Andrea Alciati's Emblematum Liber was an essential work for every writer, artist and scholar in post-medieval Europe. First published in 1531, this illustrated book was a collection of emblems, each consisting of a motto or proverb, a typically enigmatic illustration, and a short explanation. Most of the emblems had symbolic and moral applications. Scholars depended on Alciati's book to interpret contemporary art and literature, while writers and artists turned to it to invest their work with an understood didactic sense. This new edition of the Emblematum Liber includes the original Latin texts, highly readable English translations, and the illustrations belonging to each of the 212 emblems. The editor's introduction explains both the importance and the cultural contexts of Alciati's book, as well as its innumerable artistic applications. For instance, close study of the emblems reveals--to cite only two examples--why statues of lions are traditionally placed before government buildings, and what underlying political message was conveyed by innumerable equestrian portraits during the Baroque era. The collection includes as an appendix the formerly suppressed emblem, "Adversus Naturam Peccantes," accompanied by a translation of the learned commentary applied to it by Johann Thuilius in 1612. An extensive bibliography points the student to scholarly research specifically dealing with artistic applications of Alciati's emblems. Altogether, this new edition of Alciati's seminal work is an essential tool for modern students of the liberal arts.