This book covers a mix of learned articles and book reviews, which discusses academic moral philosophy and noble virtues. It includes topics about Rodrigo de Arriaga in Prague, Nicolaus Andreae Granius, and academic writing in early modern ethics. It also discusses Johann Bartold Niemeier, the Nicomachean ethics and the teaching of rhetoric at the Akademia Zamojska, and emblematic pedagogy and Nuremberg civic culture. The book captures the richness and diversity of teachings on ethics in early modern universities by clearly illustrating the workings of the teaching of ethics from the late fifteenth to the late seventeenth-century from Spain to Prague. It describes the Protestant universities in the German territories and the regions of central Europe in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.

Since its invention by Andrea Alciato, the emblem is inextricably connected to the natural world. Alciato and his followers drew massively their inspiration from it. For their information about nature, the emblem authors were greatly indebted to ancient natural history, the medieval bestiaries, and the 15th- and 16th-century proto-emblematics, especially the imprese. The natural world became the main topic of, for instance, Camerarius’s botanical and zoological emblem books, and also of the ‘applied’ emblematics in drawings and decorative arts. Animal emblems are frequently quoted by naturalists (Gesner, Aldrovandi). This interdisciplinary volume aims to address these multiple connections between emblematics and Natural History in the broader perspective of their underlying ideologies – scientific, artistic, literary, political and/or religious. Contributors: Alison Saunders, Anne Rolet, Marisa Bass, Bernhard Schirg, Maren Biederbick, Sabine Kalff, Christian Peters, Frederik Knegtel, Agnes Kusler, Aline Smeesters, Astrid Zenker, Tobias Bulang, Sonja Schreiner, Paul Smith, and Karl Enenkel.

This study reexamines the invention of the emblem book and discusses the novel textual and pictorial means that applied to the task of transmitting knowledge. It offers a fresh analysis of Alciato’s Emblematum liber, focusing on his poetics of the emblem, and on how he actually construed emblems. It demonstrates that the “father of emblematics” had vernacular forebears, most importantly Johann von Schwarzenberg who composed two illustrated emblem books between 1510 and 1520. The study sheds light on the early development of the Latin emblem book 1531–1610, with special emphasis on the invention of the emblematic commentary, on natural history, and on advanced methods of conveying emblematic knowledge, from Junius to Vaenius.

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.

The relationship between medieval animal symbolism and the iconography of animals in the Renaissance has scarcely been studied. Filling a gap in this significant field of Renaissance culture, in general, and its art, in particular, this book demonstrates the continuity and tenacity of medieval animal interpretations and symbolism, disguised under the veil of genre, religious or mythological narrative and scientific naturalism. An extensive introduction, dealing with relevant medieval and early Renaissance sources, is followed by a series of case studies that illustrate ways in which Renaissance artists revived conventional animal imagery in unprecedented contexts, investing them with new meanings, on a social, political, ethical, religious or psychological level, often by applying exegetical methodology in creating multiple semantic and iconographic levels. Brill's Studies on Art, Art History, and Intellectual History, vol. 2

The emblem, an image accompanied by a motto and a verse or short prose passage, is both art and literature: in the emblem tradition, the image presents a story – often with pictorial symbols – and the verse below it drives home the picture-story's moral instruction. It is one of the most fascinating, and enduring, art forms in Western culture. John Manning's book charts the rise and evolution of the emblem from its earliest manifestations to its emergence as a genre in its own right in the sixteenth century, and then through its various reinventions to the present day. The seventeenth century saw the development of new emblematic forms and sub-genres, and the sharpening of the form for the purpose of social satire. When the Jesuits appropriated the emblem, producing enormous quantities of material, a further dimension of moral seriousness was introduced, alongside a concentration of emblematic "wit". The emblem later came to be directed increasingly at young people and children; in particular, William Blake adopted a fresh attitude towards ideas of the child and childishness. Since then, reprints of 17th-century emblem books have been produced with new plates, and writers and artists from Robert Louis Stevenson to Ian Hamilton Finlay have used emblems in new and subversive ways.