The volume is a cross-section of contributions to the Glasgow International Emblem Conference 1990, and demonstrates the range of research currently under way into the emblem tradition in the Renaissance and Baroque periods and the variety of its development across the centuries in many European countries. The seventeen papers are arranged here in broad national and thematic groupings, showing the emblem tradition in France, Italy, the Low Countries, Germany, Britain, within the field of alchemy, and extending into wider European traditions. The volume is generously illustrated, and an index is provided for the orientation of the reader. An impression of the richness of the European emblem tradition is given for the general reader, whilst the specialist is provided with a comprehensive insight into the many and varied strands of current emblem research and the diversity of approach adopted by scholars internationally.

The main aim of the work is to present emblematics in Hungary in its European context, and to show the reciprocal influence between that phenomenon and mainstream literature. The description of the theoretical and historical development in Hungary is supplemented by a series of case studies examining the effect of emblematics upon various literary genres. The final chapter analyzes the link between literary emblematics and the visual arts by looking at a specific example. As in most European countries, emblematics in Hungary is part of a complex labyrinth of literary modes of thought and expression. A relative poverty of theoretical writing went hand in hand with a considerable range of emblematic practice. The emblem proved to be a transitional form between the period when signs and motifs were regarded as having specific and fixed meanings and the modern period when we have developed a different and shifting concept of language and meaning. At the same time as emblems began to penetrate the more popular levels of national culture and literature, they also became more specialized. Hungarian emblematics used, for the most part, existing pictorial and textual combinations of pictures and texts. They employed the emblem notably in genres and texts of the genus demonstrativum, which referred to matters which were topical at the time.

In recent years many historians have argued that the Reformation did not - as previously thought - hamper the development of Northern European visual culture, but rather gave new impetus to the production, diffusion and reception of visual materials in both Catholic and Protestant milieus. This book investigates the crosscurrents of exchange in the realm of illustrated religious literature within and beyond confessional and national borders, and against the background of recent insights into the importance of, on the one hand material, as well as on the other hand, sensual and emotional aspects of early modern culture. Each chapter in the volume helps illuminate early modern religious culture from the perspective of the production of illustrated religious texts - to see the book as object, a point at which various vectors of early modern society met. Case studies, together with theoretical contributions, shed light on the ways in which illustrated religious books functioned in evolving societies, by analysing the use, re-use and sharing of illustrated religious texts in England, France, the Low Countries, the German States, and Switzerland. Interpretations based on points of material interaction show us how the most basic binaries of the early modern world - Catholic and Protestant, word and image, public and private - were disrupted and negotiated in the realm of the illustrated religious book. Through this approach, the volume expands the historical appreciation of the place of imagery in post-Reformation Europe.

Petrarch’s revival of the ancient practice of laureation in 1341 led to the laurel being conferred on poets throughout Europe in the later Middle Ages and the Early Modern period. Within the Holy Roman Empire, Maximilian I conferred the title of Imperial Poet Laureate especially frequently, and later it was bestowed with unbridled liberality by Counts Palatine and university rectors too. This handbook identifies more than 1300 poets laureated within the Empire and adjacent territories between 1355 and 1804, giving (wherever possible) a sketch of their lives, a list of their published works, and a note of relevant scholarly literature. The introduction and various indexes provide a detailed account of a now largely forgotten but once significant literary-sociological phenomenon and illuminate literary networks in the Early Modern period. A supplementary Volume 5 of Poets Laureate in the Holy Roman Empire. A Bio-bibliographical Handbook will be published in June 2019.

Essays offering new insights into important topics and figures in German literature, from the middle ages to the present day. The essays in this volume, contributed by well-known Germanists and those working in the field of comparative literature, take fresh looks at key figures and issues in German literary and cultural studies, from the medieval to thepost-modernist period.

This volume, first published in 2007, examines the role of religion as a vehicle for cultural exchange.