Chapter 6
The Commons in Early Modern Emblem Literature
Le commun dans la littérature emblématique de la première modernité anglaise
p. 111-127
Résumés
In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the “commons” was often considered as the “common good” or “commonweal” or “utilitas publica”, which should ensure the cohesion of a republic and the well-being of the people. English and continental emblem writers of different affiliations were sensitive to such theories of the concept, which they presented in various forms in their works. Catholic emblems and emblems produced by authors belonging to the Church of England show that denominational differences were transcended by a common approach to the concept of “commonweal”, a defence of the authority of poetry and a firm belief that emblem collections have a role to play in the construction of the res publica. However, some emblem writers suggest that the self’s place in the community is not determined exclusively by the “commons” and advocate a conception of the “commonweal” based on the consent of autonomous, responsible individuals.
Au XVIe et au XVIIe siècles, le « commun » est souvent pensé comme le « bien commun » ou « commonweal » ou « utilitas publica » qui doit assurer la cohésion d’une république et le bien-être du peuple. Les emblémistes anglais et continentaux catholiques ou appartenant à l’Église d’Angleterre sont sensibles aux théorisations du concept dont ils déclinent plusieurs modalités dans leurs ouvrages. Les recueils d’emblèmes montrent qu’au-delà de leurs différences confessionnelles les auteurs s’accordent assez facilement sur la conception du « commonweal », le magistère de la poésie et le rôle du livre d’emblèmes dans la construction de la res publica. Toutefois, certains emblémistes revendiquent une forme d’autonomie du sujet et prônent une conception du « commonweal » reposant sur le consentement d’individus autonomes et responsables.
Texte intégral
1“The commons” could be defined as a collection of concrete practices of men rooted in a cultural context shared by everyone. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, “the commons” was often thought of as “commonwealth”, “commonweal”, “common good”, and “common interest”:1 that is, a series of variants of the classical concept of “utilitas publica”, all overbrimming with tensions and complexity. Admittedly, these notions are not fully equivalent, each of them being subject to a set of different interpretations. As shown by Mark Knights, the concept of “commonwealth” was unclearly defined in the early modern period:
Commonwealth – or rather the common good, which it was used to describe – was thus a concept composed of a set of value-laden vices and virtues, associated with the public good, self-governance, honesty, godliness, communality and so on.2
Although “the commons” may appear as an umbrella term in the early modern period, the main idea at the core of it was that of a healthy state ensuring the preservation of the interests of the people, more or less in keeping with Scipio’s views in Cicero’s De re publica.3 As argued by Sir Thomas Smith in De Republica Anglorum (1583), “A common wealth is called a society or common doing of a multitude of free men collected together and united by a common accord and covenauntes among themselves, for the conservation of themselves as well in peace as in warre”.4
2English and continental emblem writers showed great interest in the various approaches to the concept of “the commons”. Despite their different religious affiliations, they generally agree that “the commons” relies on each and every individual’s active participation in a collective project aiming to establish and preserve the cohesion of a community. Emblem collections also underline the socialising function of poetry and rhetoric in the construction of res publica, later to be theorised as “the nation”. Nonetheless, some emblem writers found it difficult to negotiate adherence to, and conformity with, a collective structure in which the individual’s place is determined by his position in the social hierarchy, at a time when the burgeoning sense of a personal consciousness fashioned outside institutions and political theorisations started to emerge. Emblems can be said to reflect the early modern tensions about the construction of an autonomous self within a system based on the primacy of collective norms and standards.
Commonweal and polity in some emblem collections
3Claude Paradin’s “Te stante virebo” (Devises héroïques, 1557 – fig. 1) shows an obelisk with an ivy shoot twisting around it. The image is quite intriguing, and although the meaning is clarified in the epigram, the textual and iconic references from which it is derived provide useful hermeneutic keys for its interpretation. All emblematic images require texts to be deciphered properly, and the construction of meaning is akin to an exercise in recalling the written sources. Obelisks hark back to Egyptian antiquity and their symbolic value was reported by many early modern theorists. Valeriano’s Heroglyphica (1556), predating Paradin’s emblems by one year, describes columns as symbols of the geographical limits of an empire:
Caeterum antiquissimum fuit per columnam terminum significare […]. Eodem modo in Africa sub Atlante monte et in Asia ad Euphratem fluvium, et supra Armeniam terminus Romani Imperij columnas dixerunt.5
4Another of Paradin’s devices, titled “Plus outre”, shows Charles V’s impresa as two columns signifying the utmost boundaries of the emperor’s military conquests.6 Bearing all this in mind, the reader can interpret the obelisk of “Te stante virebo” as a figuration of monarchical power.
Fig. 1 – Claude Paradin, “Te stante virebo”, in Devises héroïques, 1557

(Paradin 1557, 72-73; image reprinted with permission of University of Glasgow Archives & Special Collections, Sp Coll S.M. 816)
Entrant dernierement Monsieur le R. Cardinal de Lorreine en son Abbaye de Cluny, estoit eslevee au portal d’icelle sa Devise, qui est une Pyramide, avec le Croissant au dessus: environnee du bas jusques en haut, d’un beau Lierre verdoyant. Et le tout acompagné, de l’inscripcion qui sensuit:
Quel Memphien miracle se haussant
Porte du ciel l’argentine lumiere,
Laquelle va (tant qu’elle soit entiere
En sa rondeur) tousjours tousjours croissant?
Quel sacre saint Liërre gravissant
Jusqu’au plus haut de cette sime fiere,
De son apui (ô nouvelle maniere)
Se fait l’apui, plus en plus verdissant?
Soit notre Roy la grande Pyramide:
Dont la hauteur en sa force solide
Le terme au ciel plante de sa victoire:
Prince Prelat tu sois le saint Liërre,
Qui saintement abandonnant la terre
De ton soutien vas soutenant la gloire.
5In an allegorical worldview based on the mundus significans principle still relevant in the early modern period, i.e. the assumption that everything in nature conveys a symbolic meaning, plants were also heavily codified. The traditional view of ivy as belonging to the group of “civilised” trees, dedicated to divinity and providing human aid, was popularised by Pliny in Natural History.7 Consequently, the ivy twisting around the obelisk can be construed as an allegory of the civilising function of the Church. Once the sources have been unveiled, the engraving of “Te stante virebo” makes sense and expresses Paradin’s idea of the commonweal as the close collaboration of monarchy and religion, a view that Richard Hooker was later to endorse in Of the Lawes of Ecclesiastical Polity.8
6Paradin’s Devises héroïques were very influential in early modern Europe and were translated into Latin and Dutch in 1562 (with a second Dutch edition in 1563), and into English in 1591. They also served as an important source of Geffrey Whitney’s A Choice of Emblemes printed in Leiden in 15869 in which the first emblem, also titled “Te stante virebo”, shows the same motif of a column surrounded by an ivy shoot (fig. 2). The emblem conveys the same political message as the French device, namely that the commonwealth should rest upon the union of monarchy and clergy, the Church of England in this case, thus regaining its full legitimate authority after the persecutions it suffered during Mary’s Catholic reign. The place of this particular emblem in A Choice of Emblemes is a clear testimony to Whitney’s praise of Elizabeth’s regime and is evidence of the collection’s political bent.
Fig. 2 – Geffrey Whitney, “Te stante virebo”, in A Choice of Emblemes and Other Devices, 1586

(Whitney 1586, 1; image reprinted with permission of University of Glasgow Archives & Special Collections, Sp Coll S.M. 1667)
A mightie spyre, whose toppe dothe pierce the skie,
An ivie greene imbraceth rounde about,
And while it standes, the same doth bloome on highe,
But when it shrinkes, the ivie standes in dowt:
The Piller great, our gratious Princes is:
The braunche, the Churche: whoe speakes unto hir this.
I, that of late with stormes was almost spent,
And brused sore with Tirants bluddie bloes,
Whome fire, and sworde, with persecution rent,
Am nowe sett free, and overlooke my foes,
And whiles thow raignst, oh most renowmed Queene
By thie supporte my blossome shall bee greene.
7It might seem awkward that a Protestant emblem should resort to Catholic sources, especially at a time of violent sectarianism, but re-using already printed material was common practice amongst emblem writers, if only because the production of engravings was a costly business. One of the most conspicuous instances of the recycling of images is Francis Quarles’ Emblemes (1635), a composite of various sources, including two Jesuit emblem collections, Herman Hugo’s 1624 Pia desideria, and Typus mundi produced by the Antwerp Jesuit College in 1627. It is striking that Quarles used the forty-five engravings of Pia desideria in the very same order as the original and made no doctrinal alteration to his sources.10
8To return to Whitney and Paradin, the recuperation of pre-used Catholic material in the English collection foregrounds a similar approach to the concept of commonwealth rooted in theology and extending beyond religious affiliations.
9According to many emblem writers, the hierarchy of beings to which everyone should submit ensures the proper functioning of a commonwealth. This idea finds its most common symbolic expression in the image of the beehive, as in Joannes Sambucus’s “Mixtus status”:
Florilegae quod apes faciunt aestate vagantes,
Illarum mixtas more sequamur opes.
Hae Regesque Ducesque colunt, his semina mentis
Aeternae, & parent legibus, arma cient.
Observant proceres, & queis meliora videntur,
Unanimes cunctis ritè praeesse volunt.
Nil sine consilio Princeps, reliquusve senatus
Suscipit, ingestum sicque tuentur opus.
Exercent Martem, sunt his simulacra quietis,
Ignavos pellunt, praemia dantque bonis.
Has tibi proponas […].11
10Sambucus (1531-1584) was a Hungarian humanist who served as court-historiographer to the Habsburg Emperors Maximilian II and Rodolph II from 1564 to 1584. He leaned toward Protestantism and showed sympathy with Lutheranism, and the emblem presents the hierarchy of bees as an allegory for the ideal government which should be imitated by human societies. In the beehive, the place assigned to each worker is determined by the laws of nature; the same is true of the commonwealth of men, whose organising principle is natural order from which no one should deviate. The generic ambiguity of the pronoun “his” in line 3 (feminine plural or masculine plural dative) allows for a double interpretation of “semina mentis aeternae” (eternal reason) as belonging either to princes and chiefs (“reges” / “duces”) or to the bees (“apes”). Like humans, bees are endowed with reason, a part of divinity planted by God in every living organism, by which man is led to accept the class distinctions at the core of the society he inhabits. The hive is an allegorical depiction of the concordance between human beings based upon social distinctions and the great order of nature, while the fact that bees never live in isolation provides further explanation for why the beehive was perceived as a model of human commonwealths. In A Theatre of Political Flying-Insects (1657), Samuel Purchas claims that “A bee like man cannot live alone”,12 and he argues that, for bees and human commonwealths alike, singularity means death. The image of the beehive, so common in early modern political tracts, evinces a strong anxiety about the possibility that the commonwealth could dissolve and leave chaos and indeterminacy in its wake. The bee allegory venerates the perfection of a well-ordered community just as much as it conveys a pre-Hobbesian consciousness of its utter precariousness.
11Emblem writers like Whitney and Sambucus take up common ideas of sixteenth-century political philosophy, as expressed in the concept of “publicke weale” defined by Thomas Elyot in the opening chapter of The Boke Named the Governour:
A publicke weale is a body lyvyng, compacte or made of sondry estates and degrees of men, which is disposed by the ordre of equitie and governed by the rule and moderation of reason. […] And they which do suppose it [Res Publica] so to be called for that, that every thinge shulde be to all men in commune without discrepance of any astate or condition, be thereto moved nore by sensualite than by any good reason or inclination to humanite.13
12Elyot contends that “commonweal” is an inaccurate translation of “Res Publica”, and that “Res Plebeia” and “Res Publica” mean quite different things, claiming that “Plebs in latin, and comminers in englisshe, be wordes only made for the discrepance of degrees”. Considering that power should be wielded by the elite, Elyot argues that the stability and preservation of the “Res Publica” can be ensured only by the combination of order, justice and reason, and concludes that scrapping order would be conducive to chaos, “whiche of some is expounde a confuse mixture”.14
13The belief in hierarchy is no impediment to the practice of benevolence, magnanimity, or even charity, three virtues presented by emblem writers as the cornerstones of human relationships. In this way, Sambucus’s “Benignitas” describes a philanthropic, self-preserving commonweal founded on friendship and selflessness:
Quanto plus terrae effoditur, scrobs crescit hiatu:
Et tumulus major prominet indicio.
Divitias aliis si quis communicat amplas,
Non fit pauperior, statque benigna manus.
Dispereant quorum numi pro numine habentur,
Vicinisque negant omine fontis aquas.
In tenebris cur non capiat sibi lumen egenus,
Num fit flamma minor? num quoque terra satis?
Κοινà φίλων dicas si Croesi ingentia tractes,
Aut bona Pactoli, possideasve Tagum.15
14Sambucus’s emblem is reminiscent of Cicero’s argument on fellowship in the first book of De officiis, a political treatise largely commented upon in the early modern period:
Sed omnium societatum nulla praestantior est, nulla firmior, quam cum viri boni moribus similes sunt familiaritate coniuncti […]. Magna etiam illa communitas est, quae conficitur ex beneficiis ultro et citro datis acceptis, quae et mutua et grata dum sunt, inter quos ea sunt, firma devinciuntur societate.16
Fellowship means mutual assistance and sharing in the pains and the growth of others. Erasmus provided a Christian reading of Cicero’s concept of civil friendship in his first adage, “Amicorum omnia communia”, where he affirms that a commonweal whose basic law is friendship amongst all its members is in full conformity with Christ’s essential teachings:
Idem ait [Plato] felicem ac beatam fore civitatem, in qua non audirentur haec verba: Meum, et non meum. Sed dictu mirum quam non placeat, imo quam lapidetur a Christianis Platonis illa communitas, cum nihil unquam ab ethnico philosopho dictum sit magis ex Christi sententia.17
Friendship is another version of love, and, according to Erasmus, a Christian commonweal should rest on the virtue of caritas. In Erasmus’s ideal Christian community, no self-interest dominates interpersonal relations since the friend is another self. “Amicorum omnia communia” is the opening adage of the 4,000 classical apothegms collected in Adagiorum Chiliades, expressing Erasmus’s view of the centrality of Christian precepts to political theory. It is interesting to note that Erasmus’s communist-oriented interpretation of Christian friendship is precisely what is condemned by Elyot in his fear of the removal of hierarchy.
15Many emblem writers use variations on Erasmus’s adage in their collections, like Andrea Alciato, Geffrey Whitney and Jean Jacques Boissard, respectively, in three emblems each of which is titled “Amicitia etiam post mortem durans”, where friendship is presented as a moral obligation. Beyond the encouragement to love and help others lies the idea of a commonweal mirroring the early Church and Christ’s relationship with his disciples. In many sixteenth-century emblem collections, political theory and Christian theology are closely embedded, and the central figure of the res publica is the artist / poet / priest acting as a civilising agent.
Art, rhetoric, and the common good
16The collaboration of poetry and power is a commonplace feature of emblematic literature. George Wither’s “When Mars, and Pallas, doe agree, / Great workes, by them, effected bee” (fig. 3) maintains that the survival of a community depends on the happy conjunction of action and artistic practice, allegorised in the dual figures of Mars and Pallas. The circular engraving from the de Passe workshop, with the motto “Arte et Marte” circumscribed in the margin, features the emotional complicity between the two figures who seem to be looking at each other; both are armed with spears and shields, and their helmets are surmounted by a bunch of feathers to signify their perfect union. The epigram advocates a balance between physical force and practical knowledge in the same way that the harmony of body and mind is necessary to ensure stability in the human psyche.18
Fig. 3 – George Wither, “When Mars, and Pallas, doe agree, / Great workes, by them, effected bee”, in A Collection of Emblemes Ancient and Moderne, 1635

(Wither 1635, Book II, ill. XVIII, 80; image reprinted with permission of University of Glasgow Archives & Special Collections, Sp Coll S.M. 1903)
It prospers ever best, in all Estates,
When Mars and Pallas are continuall Mates.
And, those affaires but seldome luckie be,
In which, these needfull Powers, doe not agree.
That Common-wealth, in which, good Arts are found
Without a Guard, will soone receive a wound:
And, Souldiers, where good-order beares no sway,
Will, very quickly, rout themselves away.
Moreover, in our private Actions too,
There must bee both a Knowledge, how to doe
The worke propos’d; and strength to finish it;
Or, wee shall profit little by our Wit.
Discretion takes effect, where Vigour failes;
Where Cunning speeds not, outward-force prevailes;
And, otherwhile, the prize pertaines to neither,
Till they have joyn’d their Vertues both together.
Consider this; and, as occasions are,
To both of these your due respects declare.
Delight not so in Arts, to purchase harmes
By Negligence, or Ignorance of Armes:
If Martiall-Discipline thou shalt affect;
Yet, doe not honest-Policie, neglect.
Improve thy Minde, as much as e’re thou may;
But foole thou not thy Bodies gifts away.
The Vertues both of Body, and of Mind,
Are, still, to be regarded in their kind.
And, wee should neither of the two disgrace;
Nor, either of them, raise above his place:
For, when these two wee value as wee ought,
Great works, by their joynt-power, to passe are brought.
17The emblem presents Mars as an allegory of “Power” (l. 4), “strength” (l. 11), and “outward-force” (l. 14), and Pallas as the goddess of “good Arts” (l. 5). Any discussion of the function of art in the seventeenth century must engage with the term itself and what it meant at that time. In its most common usage, art was practice and experience and “was used in the case of the mechanical arts to refer to the work of the human hand”.19 Art was conceived of as a multifaceted activity which Wither associates with “Knowledge” (l. 10), “Wit” (l. 12), “Discretion” (l. 13), and “honest-Policie” (l. 22). Among artists, poets occupied a prominent place, and in the words of George Puttenham, poetry is “an art of making”.20 Puttenham continues:
Poets were the first priests, the first prophets, the first Legislators and Politicians in the world, […] and Amphion and Orpheus, two Poets of the first ages […] builded cities, and reared walles with the stones that came in heapes to the sounde of the harpe.21
Poets as creators, philosophers, musicians, and civilisers feature also in Henry Peacham’s view of a well-ordered commonwealth free from the threats of barbarity:
What were the Songs of Linus, Orpheus, Amphyon, Olympus and that dittie Iopas sang to his harpe at Dido’s banquet, but Naturall and Morall Philosophy, sweetened with the Pleasance of Numbers, that Rudeness and Barbarisme might the better taste and digest the lessons of Civilitie?22
According to Peacham, the poet is first and foremost a moral philosopher, versed in the study of the three branches of ethics, economics, and politics. Peacham’s view contributed to delineating the function of poetry – and of literature, more generally speaking – and shaped Wither’s and other emblem writers’ conceptions of artists (poets and engravers alike) as participants in the political construction of a civilised commonwealth.
18Another telling example of the political function of art may be found in Peacham’s “Tutissima comes” (“the safest of friends”) (Minerva Britanna, 1612 – fig. 4). The emblem delivers a lesson of wisdom, or of prudence more exactly, if we are to follow Valerius Flaccus’s quote appearing in the paratext (“Non solis […]”). Derived from Aristotle’s view of phronesis in Nicomachean Ethics, prudence is practical wisdom, discretion, and moderation in deliberation as opposed to theoretical wisdom, which concerns principles and necessary features of reality.23 In early modern political philosophy, prudence was considered to be one of the key virtues of government. Thomas Elyot defines prudence in The Boke Named the Governour as the first moral virtue that a ruler should possess, and the famous frontispiece of John Case’s Sphaera civitatis (1588) shows Queen Elizabeth embracing a diagram of the Ptolemaic universe within which each planet represents the virtues of government, including prudence.24 Prudence is a key moral trait of good government.
Fig. 4 – Henry Peacham, “Tutissima comes”, in Minerva Britanna, 1612

(Peacham 1612, 69; image reprinted with permission of University of Glasgow Archives & Special Collections, Sp Coll S.M. 829)
Lo Pallas heere, with heedefull eie doth leade;
Ulisses in his travaile farre and neere:
That he aright, might in his Journey treade,
And shunne the traine of Error, every where:
N’ought had Ulisses, ever brought to passe,
But this great Goddesse, his directresse was.
Though Homer did invent it long agoe,
And we esteeme it as a fable vaine:
While heere we wander, it doth wisely show,
With all our actions, Wisedome should remaine;
And where we goe, take Pallas still along
To guide our feete, our eares, and lavish tongue.
Mens una sapiens plures vincit manus.
----Non solis viribus aequum
Credere, saepe acri potior prudentia dextra.
19The engraving of Peacham’s emblem depicting Pallas and Ulysses walking hand in hand is an iconic transposition of an episode in Book 7 of Homer’s Odyssey where Pallas safely leads Ulysses to Alkinoos’s palace, entrusting him not to speak to anyone on his way. Yet a more cryptic message lies beyond the literary reminiscence, as Pallas’s other name is Minerva, the goddess of skill and art who burst out of Jove’s head, fully armed and clad in armour. The name “Minerva” features in the title of Peacham’s emblem collection, Minerva Britanna, and like the Roman goddess, Peacham’s book is said to have similarly issued all armed out of the author’s own brain, in one of the Latin gratulatory poems which preface the collection:
Est PEACHAME, IOVIS cerebrum tibi, prodiit illinc
Hic liber, ingenii vera MINERVA tui,
[…]
Armatur galea, clypeo, ense, MINERVA BRITANNA,
Et contra MOMOS, est ea tuta satis.25
20In “Tutissima comes”, Pallas / Minerva embodies Peacham’s collection, as a whole, and the collaboration of engraving and epigram affirms the role of the book, and of the artist, in the practice and teaching of prudence. Bearing in mind that Minerva Britanna is dedicated to Prince Henry, the Prince of Wales whose patronage Peacham unsuccessfully tried to secure, the figure of Ulysses in “Tutissima comes” can be construed as Prince Henry’s mythological lookalike, instructed by the poet on the prudent way to manage the affairs of state. The artist is the one who can teach the prince how to use discretion to “shunne the traine of Error” and aptly govern his kingdom.26
21Peacham is even more insistent in his recommendation to use prudence when he directly apostrophises princes in “Ni undas ni vientos”. Rejecting the cover of mythological discourse, the emblem admonishes rulers who give in to their passions in the performance of their duties:
Ye loftie Pines, that doe support the state
Of common wealthes, and mightie government,
Why stoope you soon’st, unto the blast of fate,
And fawne on Envie, to your ruine bent:
Be taught by me, to scorne your worser happe,
The wave by Sea, or land the Thunderclap.27
The emblem outlines the self-control necessary for civil behaviour and the governance of the state. Princes should resist temptations, they should accept the haps and mishaps of fate, and learn the value of constancy. The idea that a good ruler should subordinate his own interests to those of the state, and that prudent governance provides some form of stability conducive to the preservation of the commonwealth, was part and parcel of early modern political philosophy. Of course, the works of Cicero, Seneca, and Tacitus were well-known to English readers who also had access to vernacular translations of continental texts like Guillaume Du Vair’s Philosophie morale des Stoïques (1585),28 Montaigne’s Essais (1580),29 Pierre Charron’s De la sagesse (1601),30 and Justus Lipsius’s De Constantia (1594) and Politica (1594).31 Peacham’s familiarity with the Classics and with Lipsius is not to be doubted, as he quotes them regularly in the paratextual notes appended to his emblems. Minerva Britanna draws on neostoic philosophy and promotes constancy as a justification for political engagement. Like Walter Raleigh, Anthony Bacon, George Saville, Fulke Greville, and many other humanists, Peacham was sensitive to the Lipsian paradigm of constancy as a bulwark against the threats of social dissolution.32
22But Lipsius was more than a source of inspiration for politics; he also promoted a particular type of rhetoric which emblem writers were sensitive to. His Epistolica Institutio was issued in Leiden in 1591 and offered a model of genus humile, or plain style, often defined as Attic, contrasting with the more florid Asiatic style and Ciceronian oratory. Lipsius’s treatise places “brevitas” among its major stylistic devices and recommends the use of paradoxes to create sprightliness and elegance in the discourse.33
23Peacham’s emblems were probably composed with Lipsius’s rhetorical precepts in mind. The epigrams are short and very clearly structured: the first stanza usually describes the engraving and the second one moralises it. The first line of “Tutissima comes” directs the reader’s eye to the image, and the second stanza provides an interpretation of the Pallas / Ulysses apologue. The style of Peacham’s emblems is concise and pithy, with an economical use of imagery and intriguing mottos, based on paradoxes (“Ex malis moribus bona leges”34) and sound effects (“In salo sine sale”35). Whitney’s emblems use the same construction with two or three six-line stanzas describing and moralising the engravings while resorting to similar rhetorical devices (“Ludus, luctus, luxus”36). A Choice of Emblemes (1586) predates the printing of Lipsius’s treatise by five years, but we know Whitney to have stayed in Leiden with the Earl of Leicester in 1586 where Lipsius had been professor of history since 1579. We also know Lipsius’s treatise to be a compendium of the lessons he taught in Leiden, which might suggest that Whitney had been in contact with Lipsius’s works when his emblem collection was issued.
24Emblems mean to instruct and call for rulers and readers to embrace virtue and values that were considered profitable in creating individuals capable of participating in the creation of a stable commonweal. Opting for a short, terse rhetoric was a means of being poetically and politically effective in order to teach civic responsibility. Rhetoric is a common good in the sense that it helps create civic relationships between all the members of the community and operates for the sake of common interests.
25Early modern emblems teach conservative values in terms of political doctrine. Yet while participating in the circulation of dominant ideologies, emblems also engage in a contestation of the very discourses that produced them.
Fresh perceptions of the self in the community
26The case of Peacham’s emblems is particularly interesting. Minerva Britanna turns into emblems some of the ideas of King James’s Basilikon Doron (1599) and was presented to the king in manuscript version in 1603. It is dedicated to Prince Henry and appears to be in line with what Michael Bath has termed “the ideology of courtly imperialism”.37 Yet “Tutissima comes” and “Ni undas ni vientos” indirectly suggest a reconfiguration of hierarchical norms in the sense that the artist is the one who can teach the ruler and fashions himself into a new self, equal to the powerful. While teaching submission to social structures, Peacham’s emblems express a form of impatience with the social standards of the community the artist inhabits. Such emblems suggest that the self’s place in the community should not be fully determined by the social class to which he belongs and that an ordered, beehive-like commonweal ruled by the elite can be an obstacle to individual development.
27In the same way that early modern emblem writers make a claim for an autonomous sense of identity, new views about legitimacy emerged in some emblem collections. Late sixteenth-century emblems hardly ever present the view that a commonwealth should rest on the freely accepted adherence to a social and political project perceived as just. Yet later in the seventeenth century, the notion that a government’s legitimacy is justified only when accepted by the people appears in some emblems, like Wither’s “That Kingdome will establish’d bee / Wherein the People well agree”:
Yea, when with Willing hearts, and Winged-speed,
The men of all Degrees, doe duely carry
Their Aides to publike-workes, in time of need,
And, to their Kings, be freely tributary:
Then shall the Kingdome gayne the gloriest height;38
28Harking back to Nicholas of Cusa,39 the concept of “the consent of the governed” infused political philosophy in the mid-seventeenth century and found its most forceful expression in John Milton’s Tenure of Kings and Magistrates (1649), printed some fourteen years after Wither’s emblems:
It being thus manifest that the power of kings and magistrates is nothing else but what is only derivative, transferred, and committed to them in trust from the people to the common good of them all, in whom the power yet remains fundamentally, and cannot be taken from them without a violation of their mutual birthright.40
29Consent-based theories of legitimacy imply a contract freely accepted by both rulers and subjects, and some early modern emblem writers were deeply sensitive to emerging views on egalitarian concerns.
30To summarise, emblems reflect changing approaches to the notion of the commons. Most emblems express a normative understanding of the commonweal, based on adherence to social hierarchy and natural order, and obedience to a God-inspired ruler presiding over a well-ordered community of people. Emblem writers across the religious divide are still attached to the unity of church and state and share common ideas about the participation of each citizen in the construction of the group. One of the tools to preserve the unity of the community is art and rhetoric, and emblems aim to teach rulers the skills necessary to be successful in private and public life.
31But emblems are also sites of transgressive marginalities, as artists ventured to construct an autonomous individuality outside the structures of power and authority. Moreover, conservative political discourses were challenged by emerging theories on the legitimacy of the commonweal requiring the consent of responsible, autonomous individuals.
32The early modern period is often considered a transitional age where a renewed interest in the Classics and the legacy of the Middle Ages coexist with colonial expansionism, new experiments and theories in science, and an intense political and cultural questioning, all forging the shape of modernity. Like other literary genres, early modern emblems reflect the many changes and transformations that occurred in the fields of religion, natural philosophy, economics and politics.
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Notes de bas de page
1In the seventeenth century the two words “commonwealth” and “commonweal” referred to the concept of the body politic administered by the king. Shakespeare and other dramatists use them as equivalents.
2Knights 2010, 429.
3“Est igitur, inquit Africanus, res publica res populi, populus autem non omnis hominum coetus quoquo modo congregatus, sed coetus multitudinis juris consensu et utilitatis communione sociatus” (Cicero [54-51 BCE] 1823, I, 27-28; in this chapter, the use of Ramist letters has been systematised); “A commonwealth, says Scipio, belongs to the people. The people is not simply an association of men, however congregated, but a community bound together by rules and dedicated to the well-being of the whole group” (Cicero [54-51 BCE] 1829, I, 25).
4Smith [1583] 1982, 49.
5“Certainly it is a very ancient thing to signify the limit by a column […]. In the same way under mount Atlas in Africa, in Asia towards the Euphrates and above Armenia, the limits of the Roman Empire were called columns” (Valeriano 1556, XLIV, 366; translation ours).
6“Pour lesquelles prouesses & dilatacion de limites temoigner, ledit Signeur Empereur porte en sa Devise les susdites Colonnes: avec espoir (comme il dit) de pousser avant, & conquester encores. Plus outre” (Paradin 1557, 31).
7See Pliny the Elder [c. 77-79] 1949, XVI, xxxii, 78 and XVI, iv, 9.
8It is generally admitted that the first four books of Hooker’s text were issued in 1593.
9Whitney’s A Choice of Emblemes is the first English collection of emblems to appear in print.
10See Bath 1994, 201; see also Höltgen 1986, chap. 1. Another telling example of recycled material is George Wither’s A Collection of Emblemes. Published in 1635, it re-used Crispin de Passe’s engravings which had previously appeared in Gabriel Rollenhagen’s Nucleus emblematum selectissimorum (1611), and we know the de Passe family to have been responsible for illustrating other emblem books.
11“Let us follow the habits of flower-gathering bees who wander in summertime: a mix of powers after their custom. They worship Kings and Commanders (to these go the seeds of eternal Mind) and obey laws and the call to arms. They watch their leaders, and those with the best opinions they wish unanimously to rule by right over all. The Prince is nothing without counsel, and the rest of the Senate undertakes [to work], and thus they observe the work laid upon them. They practise war, they provide images of peace; they drive out the idle, and give rewards to the good. Place them as examples before you” (Sambucus 1564, 108; the Latin text was translated into English by the Glasgow Centre for Emblem Studies, available online: https://www.emblems.arts.gla.ac.uk/french/emblem.php?id=FSAb076).
12Purchas 1657, 17.
13Elyot [1531] 1557, 2.
14Ibid., Aiiii. For a closer examination of Elyot’s arguments, see Rollison 2010, 281-282. The third emblem of Thomas Combe’s The Theatre of Fine Devices ([1593] 1614, n.p.), “Who doth presume above his state, / Doth still incurre the greater hate”, advises against mingling with people not belonging to the same social group, as transgressing order is a source of potential danger. Combe’s collection is a translation of Guillaume de La Perrière’s edition of Le théâtre des bons engins, printed in Lyon from 1545 to 1583.
15“The more earth one digs, the bigger the pit becomes in its opening, and the higher the pile sticks out as evidence. If someone shares extensive riches with others, he does not become poorer, and the generous hand maintains his position. May those be ruined who regard their money as god, and refuse their neighbours the water of their spring because of an omen. In darkness, why does the needy not take light for himself: Will the flame become weaker? Is there not enough earth either? Say ‘Friends hold all in common’ when you have the wealth of Croesus, or the goods of Pactolus, or when you own the Tagus” (Sambucus 1564, 39; the Latin text was translated into English by the Glasgow Centre for Emblem Studies, available online: https://www.emblems.arts.gla.ac.uk/french/emblem.php?id=FSAb024).
16“But of all the bonds of fellowship, there is none more noble, none more powerful than when good men of congenial character are joined in intimate friendship […]. Another strong bond of fellowship is effected by mutual interchange of kind services; and as long as these kindnesses are mutual and acceptable, those between whom they are interchanged are united by the ties of an enduring intimacy” (Cicero [44 BCE] 1913, 59).
17Erasmus [1500] 2011, 1 (“The same Plato says that a State will be happy and blessed, in which these words are never heard: mine and not mine. But it is extraordinary how unacceptable, in fact how detestable to Christians is that common ownership of Plato's, although nothing was ever said by a pagan philosopher that came closer to the mind of Christ”; translated by Margaret Mann Phillips in Erasmus [1500] 1964, 12).
18The emblem revisits the common idea, derived from Plato’s Republic, of an interconnection between political governmental processes, politeia, on the one hand, and self-formation based on moral regulation, on the other.
19Smith 2006, 84.
20Puttenham 1589, 20.
21Ibid., 22.
22Peacham 1634, 79.
23The distinction between prudence and wisdom is discussed by Aristotle in Nicomachean Ethics, Book VI, chap. 10-13.
24Elyot [1531] 1557, 70. In these texts, prudence owes less to Machiavelli’s subversive insights than to Justus Lipsius’s combination of reason of state discourse and Christian stoicism (see Hörcher 2019).
25“PEACHAM, JOVE’s brains is yours, this book issued from it, / The true MINERVA of your own talent, […] / She is armed with a helmet, a shield and a spear, MINERVA BRITANNA, / And against MOMOS, she is sufficiently protected” (translation ours).
26For a more complete analysis of this emblem, see Chardin 2014.
27Peacham 1612, 60.
28Du Vair’s text was translated by James Thomas as The Moral Philosophie of the Stoicks. Written in French, and Englished for the Benefit of Them Which Are Ignorant of That Tongue, London, printed by Felix Kingston, for Thomas Man, 1598.
29The Essayes or Morall, Politicke and Militarie Discourses of Lo. Michell de Montaigne; First Written by Him in French and Now Done into English by John Florio, London, printed by Val. Sims for Edward Blount, 1603.
30Of Wisdome Three Books Written in French by Peter Charron, Doct of Lawe in Paris. Translated by Samson Lennard, London, printed for Edward Blount and William Aspley, 1608.
31Two Bookes of Constancie, Written in Latine, by Justus Lipsius, Englished by John Stradling, Gentleman, London, printed by Richard Jones, at the signe of the Rose and Crowne, 1594; Sixe Bookes of Politickes or Civil Doctrine, Written in Latine by Istus Lipsius. Done into English by William Jones Gentleman, London, printed by Richard Field for William Ponsonby, 1594.
32For a thorough analysis of neostoicism in early modern England, see McCrea 1997.
33The influence of the Institutio on English writers, Ben Jonson among others, is well known (see Dunn 1956). Its impact on emblem writing has not been thoroughly documented.
34Peacham 1612, 34.
35Ibid., 86.
36Whitney 1586, 17.
37Bath 1994, 92.
38Wither 1635, Book II, 67.
39Cusa discusses this notion in The Catholic Concordance (Concordantia Catholica, 1433), more particularly in Book II, § 241: “The public good requires that rulers be established by the election and consent of the people” (Cusa [1433] 1991, 187).
40Milton 1991, 279. See also in the pamphlets and writings of some radical Protestant sects like the Levellers.
Auteur
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Jean-Jacques Chardin
Université de Strasbourg
Jean-Jacques Chardin is professor emeritus of English literature at the University of Strasbourg. He was Sterling Maxwell Fellow (2010-2011), then Honorary Professorial Research Fellow (2011-2013), at the Centre for Emblem Studies at the University of Glasgow. His research focuses on theatre and poetry in early modern England and the emblematic turn of the seventeenth century. He has published numerous articles on, among other subjects, the emblem tradition in early modern English literature.

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