Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Austin Woolrych: an appreciation
- 1 Secret alliance and Protestant agitation in two kingdoms: the early Caroline background to the Irish Rebellion of 1641
- 2 Of armies and architecture: the employments of Robert Scawen
- 3 George Digby, Royalist intrigue and the collapse of the cause
- 4 The iconography of revolution: England 1642–1649
- 5 The casualties of war: treatment of the dead and wounded in the English Civil War
- 6 ‘A bastard kind of militia’, localism, and tactics in the second civil war
- 7 Cromwell's commissioners for preserving the peace of the Commonwealth: a Staffordshire case study
- 8 Colonel Gervase Benson, Captain John Archer, and the corporation of Kendal, c. 1644—c. 1655
- 9 Repacifying the polity: the responses of Hobbes and Harrington to the ‘crisis of the common law’
- 10 Equality in an unequal commonwealth: James Harrington's republicanism and the meaning of equality
- 11 John Milton and Oliver Cromwell
- 12 From pillar to post: Milton and the attack on republican humanism at the Restoration
- 13 ‘They that pursew perfaction on earth …’: the political progress of Robert Overton
- 14 Locke no Leveller
- A bibliography of the writings of Austin Woolrych, 1955-95
- Index
4 - The iconography of revolution: England 1642–1649
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 10 November 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Austin Woolrych: an appreciation
- 1 Secret alliance and Protestant agitation in two kingdoms: the early Caroline background to the Irish Rebellion of 1641
- 2 Of armies and architecture: the employments of Robert Scawen
- 3 George Digby, Royalist intrigue and the collapse of the cause
- 4 The iconography of revolution: England 1642–1649
- 5 The casualties of war: treatment of the dead and wounded in the English Civil War
- 6 ‘A bastard kind of militia’, localism, and tactics in the second civil war
- 7 Cromwell's commissioners for preserving the peace of the Commonwealth: a Staffordshire case study
- 8 Colonel Gervase Benson, Captain John Archer, and the corporation of Kendal, c. 1644—c. 1655
- 9 Repacifying the polity: the responses of Hobbes and Harrington to the ‘crisis of the common law’
- 10 Equality in an unequal commonwealth: James Harrington's republicanism and the meaning of equality
- 11 John Milton and Oliver Cromwell
- 12 From pillar to post: Milton and the attack on republican humanism at the Restoration
- 13 ‘They that pursew perfaction on earth …’: the political progress of Robert Overton
- 14 Locke no Leveller
- A bibliography of the writings of Austin Woolrych, 1955-95
- Index
Summary
A wide variety of evidence apart from the written word can extend and enrich our knowledge of the past. Pictures, tapestries, buildings, sculpture, music, coins, tools and clothing are among the forms of evidence that historians have exploited with increasing frequency in recent decades. The fields of numismatics, musicology, art history, emblematics and other disciplines are contributing more broadly to the study of history than ever before. As this essay will show, emblematics has a particular relevance to the English Revolution.
Emblems and impresas were among the most distinctive of Renaissance art forms. Typically, the emblem consisted of a combination of motto, picture and short poem. The motto was usually a proverb or some wellknown heraldic phrase or literary quotation. Its function was didactic: the conveying of some general truth. The impresa was an emblematic device that expressed the intention or convictions of a particular individual in a personal, sometimes enigmatic fashion. In sixteenth – and early seventeenthcentury England impresas were to be found everywhere — in tapestries, jewellery, medals, coins, household decorations, masques, pageants, monumental sculpture, costumes and portraits. Several English emblem books were published during the half-century or so before the Civil War: Jan Van der Noot, A Theatre for Worldlings (1569), Paolo Giovio's The Worthy Tract of Paulus Jovius (translated by Samuel Daniel, 1585), Geffrey Whitney's A Choice of Emblemes and other Devises (1586), the anonymous P.S.'s The Heroicall Devises of M. Claudius Paradin [and] the Purtratures or Emblemes of Gabriel Simeon, a Florentine (1591), Andrew Willett, Sacrorum Emblematum Centuria Una (1591–92), and Thomas Combe, The Theatre of Fine Devices (c. 1593).
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- Soldiers, Writers and Statesmen of the English Revolution , pp. 91 - 113Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1998
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