Visual Anorexia in Early Modern British Print Culture

From the 1580s on, Patrick Collinson argued in 1988, Britain was ‘a society suffering from severe visual anorexia’.¹ Reformation iconoclasm, rooted in the commandment against graven images,² turned in the 1580s into iconophobia. The theologically based resistance to religious images grew into a distaste for images altogether. Protestants believed that the representation of the sacred, invisible world was ungodly. Churchgoers risked worshipping images rather than invisible realities.³ This aversion was felt intensively in Britain, where the visual culture – dependent on religious environments and patronage – remained underdeveloped, not only in sacred but also in secular contexts. Churches, domestic interiors, and books lacked decorative representational images.

This view of a visually anorexic Britain has been challenged in recent years. In her influential Cheap Print and Popular Piety, 1550–1640 (1991), Tessa Watt explored the diverse territory of cheap print and discerned a protestant accommodation of images. Cheap print eventually domesticated a protestant visual vocabulary.⁴ Recent work by Antony Griffiths, Sheila O'Connell, Helen Pierce, and Angela McShane has continued to recover printed images from the archives: the notion that England was starved of images is fundamentally misconceived.⁵ We have not been looking, or have looked in the wrong places; they have disappeared through poor cataloguing; we have not appreciated the poor survival rates that conceal the former ubiquity of now-unique images. The argument that there was a wealth of printed images has progressed with the publication of the two volumes under review, and with the database associated with Michael Hunter's collection, the AHRC-funded ‘bpi1700 project’.⁶

Malcolm Jones's The Print in Early Modern England: An Historical Oversight is formidable. It provides a taxonomy of the many kinds of prints, and insists that prints were common and familiar to readers and non-readers alike. Jones demonstrates this oversight through a copiously illuminated catalogue of genres of print. Fifteen chapters with 378 illustrations (many in colour; and it has the best endpapers of any book ever), survey such themes as: numerical series, emblematic diagrams, representations of home and foreign affairs, the civil wars, satire against various religious groups, biblical and moralistic images, titillating images of the sins of lust and folly, portents and prodigies, soteriological images, images of inversion, of women, and the mixed bag of images of society, including playful notions and games. It is less of a Linnean taxonomy than a series of illuminating snapshots – the whole is less a thesis concerning early modern English visual culture, than a thesis that such a culture existed. Congratulations are due to Sarah Faulks, the book's designer, for magnificent and meticulous work.

The force of Jones's argument lies in the wealth of illustrations and the guide to sources for further research. His account of print culture is sweeping and largely descriptive, and the framework for interpretation that he provides is focused on the mobility of visual elements (scenes, stereotypes, and genres) between various printed images and between countries. This reader felt swamped by disconnected facts, while nonetheless admiring the rich imagery: schema outlining isomorphic forms of knowledge, as trees or the bodies of philosophers or patients; satirical images and caricatures, offered as objects of pleasure or means of social correction or both; scenes from everyday life, dances, flashes of nudity, and scatological humour; above all panoramas that compress diverse materials into synchronic, non-narrative visions of a particular order of reality; all profoundly intermixing entertainment and didacticism. Jones quotes one Henrician observer: ‘Into the commen people thynges sooner enter by the eies, then by the eares’ (p. 133), and the resources in this book suggests why this might have been so.

What this thematic organisation excludes are maps and portraits, the extended scope of which might have proved overwhelming. However, given the close associations between the peritext of maps and other contemporary printed images, there are grounds for not separating these genres. The bpi1700 database suggests that portraits were the most common form of print in this period. Once again, interchanges between portraits and other modes of iconography suggest that an additional set of connections is concealed here, and analytic frameworks applied to portraiture might have been extended to visual culture more generally.⁷ Also absent is John Speed's Genealogies Recorded in the Sacred Scriptures (1611), which went through at least sixty editions before the civil wars. This makes it in some senses a ‘popular’ work. Though Jones claims that printed images are generally widespread and therefore culturally influential, he does not identify particularly popular individual images, nor offer evidence for their impact. All enumerative bibliography is troubled by survival, and images in particular have low survival rates – because they were loose sheets, large format, pasted on walls, or much loved – but it would be interesting to see quantitative comparisons between the production of images and other printed works.

It seems likely that scholarly neglect of images owes something to modern (as well as early modern) publishing. The cost of photography and of reproducing plates has been a disincentive to underpaid scholars and narrow-margin academic publishers. Digital technologies are only slowly changing this. In the early modern period, the inclusion of images made books from 75% to more than 100% more expensive.⁸ In the modern period, the figure is probably of the same order (though various sources of financial support, and the British Library's enlightened reproduction rights policy, have kept this handsome volume down to a price of £45 that belies its sumptuousness). Hence there is an historical continuity in the neglect of images in Britain, but also in the commercial pragmatics of publishing. The history of the printed image needs close attention, and scholars need to recover the distinctive visual elements of early-modern culture. However, the printed image cannot be isolated from the wider landscape of print, and the commercial and material realities that governed it.

The second title, Michael Hunter's collection, Printed Images in Early Modern Britain, originated in an AHRC project to digitise a database of images from Britain before 1700 and in conferences at Birkbeck College and the V&A; its illustrations are also subsidised by the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art. While richly illustrated (121 B&W illustrations), it offers, as the subtitle indicates, ‘Essays in interpretation’, and therefore presents a fine counterpart to Jones's catalogue raisonné. As a series of essays the volume has only a limited common purpose: like Jones's volume, it seeks to establish the richness and the ‘importance’ and ‘effectiveness’ of printed images in Britain.

There is always some difficulty in finding an apposite structure for a multi-authored book: the arrangement here assumes four sections, ‘Printed Images and the Reformation’, ‘Printed Images in Science and Cartography’, ‘Printed Images and Politics’, and ‘Printed Images and Aspects of Late Seventeenth-century English Culture’, each with four essays, which I will inventory here. Beginning a section that focuses, appropriately, on the deployment of images in religious writing, the essay by Margaret Aston examines the typography of English bibles in the sixteenth century. Richard Williams considers censorship in late-sixteenth-century book illustration, suggesting that there was little in the way of pre-publication licensing of images, and that, while it was prepared to prosecute offences, the government permitted a significant degree of laxity in book illustration and typography. This did not rule out the significant role of self-censorship, however. Tara Hamling explores how printed illustrations from protestant books of piety and moral instruction, and especially the Bible, decorated domestic walls (on which more below). She suggests (p. 79) that British religious images illustrate a small number of biblical passages, such as the Sacrifice of Isaac; sticking with the familiar may have been one approach to nervousness about religious representation. Alex Walsham's essay analyses antiquarian prints in post-Reformation Britain, and especially the way images of ruined abbeys and cathedrals express a sense of the past – she suggests that the aesthetic realm remained deeply entangled with the spiritual. This first section of essays partly concerns decorum and the proprieties of print's relationship with godliness, and partly explores the way visual culture retained a spiritual dimension. The visual, even in a iconophobic or iconosceptic context, was still in a sense enchanted, which should trouble the notion that British art emerged through a process of secularisation.

Next up is a series of essays on science, books, and didacticism. Lori Anne Ferrell's excellent contribution explores non-pictorial images in didactic books, diagrams that help organise instruction or information, from scriptural genealogies through geometry to Calvinist theology. These diagrams were Ramist in appearance though not in content, Ferrell suggests: the late-sixteenth century ‘how to’ book relied on an aesthetics of organisation (rather than illustration) to teach. Katherine Acheson looks at ‘the rhetoric of visual images’ (p. 128) in works of natural history, in particular Edward Topsell's popularisation of Gesner's De quadripedibus (1551), and the dispersal of animal images in popular, vernacular works. Simon Turner examines Wenceslaus Hollar's representations of London – in evocative prospects and maps – as part of a move towards increasingly accurate and functional street maps. Matthew Hunter's essay on Robert Hooke's theory of ‘impression’ – leaning heavily on the pun on sense-impressions and printing – looks at the seventeenth-century search for effective technical means of creating accurate and informative printed images, and for the correct scientific means of interpreting these images. Hunter's is one of the several essays that consider moving part printed images: paper technology that introduced a mechanical, non-textual element to didactic books.

There follows a series of essays on politics. Malcolm Jones also appears in this volume, offering a close analysis of a single-sheet print, The Common Weales Canker Worm (c.1625), in which he identifies hostile, anti-Jesuit stereotyping of Henry Garnet and the count of Gondomar. Alastair Bellany looks at representations of the Duke of Buckingham in the 1620s, when Buckingham was both the victim of satire and a self-conscious manipulator of popularity. Bellany explores the interconnectedness of images, the interchange between print and painted portraits, between sympathetic and scurrilous images of the duke, and between images and other media contesting within the public sphere. Helen Pierce's essay looks at images of Roger L'Estrange, journalist, polemicist, and licenser of the press – with the possible exception of Marchamont Nedham, of whom, curiously, no portrait or image is known to exist, no seventeenth-century Briton had a stronger grasp of print media than L'Estrange – and the English development of sophisticated modes of caricatura.⁹ Here the interconnectedness of print emerges – particularly the recycling of images, even over decades, as if print was a repository of memory as well as of conventions and quotations. Pierce shows how visual images engaged with other forms of polemic; Justin Champion's essay also looks at the role of images in later-seventeenth-century political argument and the history of ideas. He clearly and cogently focuses on a theme implicit in many of the essays: what is the relationship between word and image? What processes of ‘iconicity’ are involved in the representation of ideas and values through images? Do images represent ideas or can they develop them and facilitate change? Champion's meticulous reading of the visual vocabulary of the title page of Thomas Hobbes's Leviathan (1651) provides a model for such analysis.

Both Pierce's and Champion's essays raise a critical question about the interface between art history and the new history of books: to what extent is the interaction between image and political argument understood verbally? In these analyses of debates, images are predominantly treated as illustrations of words; images are interpreted through text. This reflects much seventeenth-century practice, at least in Britain. Certainly, this is the case with title pages, where the engraving or woodcut conventionally engages in a direct dialogue with the text. So, what looks like a critical focus on text, and a residual emphasis on the word above the image, may in some circumstances be appropriate and non-anachronistic. However, the possibility remains that scholarship unduly privileges the word as a means of signifying, and habitual scholarly practice decodes images rather than allowing them to speak. Do these printed images speak for themselves, or do they only open themselves through verbal translation? How conscious are they, and how conscious should we be, of their printed status? Do we risk losing sight of their visual modes of signification?

The fourth and final section is miscellaneous. An essay by Ben Thomas looks at the early history of mezzotint in Royal Society circles. This history was shaped by both interest in secret arts and distaste for the mechanical (though John Evelyn considered mezzotint as potentially a liberal art). Here we see the close importance of communication to experimental science, and the role of the ‘mechanical’ in knowledge production  – the Philosophical Transactions would have been a very different phenomenon without its plentiful and attractive illustrations. Mezzotint quickly became the province of printers rather than virtuosi, and established itself as a preferred medium for portraits; a short essay by David Alexander looks at engraved portraits in the later-seventeenth century, especially work by David Logan (for whom he provides a catalogue), but also by William Faithorne, Peter Vandrebanc, and Robert White. In a fascinating essay, Gill Saunders examines non-figurative and practical uses of printed images wallpapers, drawer liners, decorative wrappings, and linings for boxes, printed linen for embroidery; these uses complement Jones's account, in The Print in Early Modern England, of printed linings for boxes. Print was cheaper than embroidery, so it made ‘popular’ wall decorations. Perhaps because of critical emphasis on words, and because of poor survival rates, decorative printing, like jobbing printing, is neglected in favour of the interpretation of images with religious or political connotations.  Decorative and jobbing printing may have been fundamental to the commercial survival of some printers, and they merit a good deal more study. The final essay, by Angela McShane and Clare Backhouse, shows how printed images can sceptically be used for the history of fashion  – specifically the top-knot. By focusing on broadside ballads, the authors are able to move away from conspicuous fashion statements towards more everyday styles.

This is a rich and varied diet, informative, and full of interest. It affirms the diverse uses of printed images, sold as single sheets or in books. It raises, without entirely answering, questions about patterns of relationship between printed images and other books, and the place of images in the commercial patterns of the printing trade. What the essays infrequently touch upon, curiously, is aesthetics, and the relationship between decoration and function.

Several of these essays refer to regulation of the press through licensing, and in his introduction Jones suggests that printed images (and books) were subject to rigorous censorship, that the Stationers' Register is effectively a list of what censors were prepared to see published, and that this ‘machinery’ (pp. 30, 56) collapsed during the 1640s. This overstates the rigor of the principles of Stuart censorship, as well as its effectiveness in practice. It merits correction because it is a widespread misunderstanding, and because it invites further research. Jones conflates two, semi-independent licensing practices that obtained in Stuart England and Wales. The first was ecclesiastical licensing, by which the archbishop of Canterbury and bishop of London and their representatives expressed their approval of a publication before it was printed. This involved the submission of two copies of a manuscript to an official licenser; if approved, the licenser would keep one in order subsequently to check it against the printed text. It has yet to be assessed how this procedure was adapted to visual material before engraving, how precisely the engraver would need to copy the approved draft, and how much room was left for invention and adaptation. In any case, proportionally few books and images were licensed. As a method of control, it was far from absolute: what it succeeded in doing was establishing the principle that government and ecclesiastical approval was virtuous. Moreover, it provided a simple means of redress: publishers and authors could be punished for not obtaining a licence without a complicated legal case involving libel or scandalum magnatum.

Independent from licensing was entrance in the Stationers' Register and the obtaining a licence from the Master of the Stationers' Company, the trade guild that governed the production of printed material in England and Wales (Scotland was independent of its jurisdiction: there printing was governed directly by the crown). A Company licence did not indicate ideological approval  – rather it certified that the licensee had proprietary rights in the text, and that the text was free from prior claims. Once again, how this might apply to visual images has yet to be researched. The title and/or a brief description of the text could also be entered in the Stationers' Register (not everything entered received a Company licence). This was not a licence to print: rather, it recorded the ownership of the text by the person who entered the title. As this had to be a member of the Company, it was a printer or bookseller, seldom the author. This owner was then able to prosecute, through the Company courts, anyone who violated his (occasionally her) ownership of copy by printing another edition. The Register also served as a means of transferring ownership of copy. Once again, most publications were not entered in the Register, but the procedure, and the Company itself, did provide a means of ensuring a degree of orderliness within the book trade, which in turn could assist the government should an actual offence be committed.

This was not a coherent system. However, it was flexible, and assured a degree of order and control within the trade; it supplemented ad hoc prosecution for actual offences and, perhaps more importantly, harassment of individuals by government representatives. The putative collapse of censorship in the 1640s both overstates the effectiveness of these mechanisms and understates the continuity with what followed. As analysis of print has centred on (especially literary) books, the relevance of press controls to visual materials has been insufficiently explored. This relevance is at the practical level  – what was the actual procedure for licensing an image?  – as well as the imaginative: how did complex and imperfect mechanisms of control shape visual culture and artists' modes of working?

These volumes dispel any lingering impression that there was not a lively visual aspect to early modern Britain's culture of print, though that may be a stage short of demonstrating that there was a lively visual culture. Questions about the effectiveness and influence of these images remain. A qualification should be added to the important corrective offered in these books; however, one that emerges from their own research findings. Both volumes make apparent how much visual material originated overseas, or was facilitated by transnational travel or communication. Though there may not have been an aversion to the visual, there was a degree of incompetence or unfamiliarity with it.

The influence of continental printed images on Britain is wide-ranging. First, many prints were imported, some published overseas specifically for the London market. Others were commissioned overseas by London publishers. The catalogue of the great printer and printseller Peter Stent included numerous pieces that were European in subject or origin.¹⁰ In London-printed and -published works, imagery often drew heavily upon foreign works, such as anti-popish images from Reformation Germany. Genres, such as caricatures and emblematic title pages, were generally foreign in origin, as were printing techniques, created and learned overseas. Finally, the English tended to import artists and artisans, like the Droeshouts.

A few examples amply demonstrate this. Hollar's prospects of London, as Turner reports, were printed and published in Amsterdam (p. 147). This was presumably not on account of a large Dutch market for them, but either because Hollar did not trust the craftsmanship of London engravers and printers with large formats, or because no London publisher wished to participate in such an unfamiliar venture. There may have been a shortage of rolling presses in London. During the civil wars Hollar departed London for Antwerp, a more professionally congenial environment. The earliest engraved portraits of Buckingham, examined by Bellany, were by the émigré Simon de Passe. They were followed by a 1626 engraving by Willem Delff based on a painting by Michiel van Miereveld. Buckingham had already been painted by Van Dyck, Balthasar Gerbier, and Rubens. Buckingham, as Tom Cogswell has shown, had been the first to use serial newsbooks as part of a sustained popularity campaign.¹¹ Did he use French and Dutch artists because he was a connoisseur, or because they offered a better or more available product?

The wonderful broadsheet A Pass for the Romish Rabble To the Pope of Rome through ye Devils Arse of Peak (c. 1624), in English, and involving a Derbyshire landmark, was produced in Amsterdam by Claes Jansz. Vissher for the English market (Jones in Hunter, p. 202). It contains a defecating demon, which was then imitated in title-page woodcuts for 1641 pamphlets by Henry Walker and John Taylor.¹² First the print was imported, then the imagery was domesticated in a more demotic, less costly medium. The civil war  – whatever the role of censorship  – certainly broadened the modes of visual expression, creating an environment in which caricatura could flourish (Pierce in Hunter, p. 241). Title pages are one of the richest sources of images. The emblem tradition is influential on British title pages, as Champion shows, as well as on domestic interiors (such as on the ceiling of the Long Gallery at Blickling Hall in Norfolk). However, the genre is continental in origin and development: so much so that the printer of George Wither's emblems, the most widely read English example of the genre, messed up the first edition because he did not understand how the genre worked. The mezzotint, which played a prominent role within the printed visual culture of Restoration England, complementing engravings and woodcuts with its moodier tonality and higher price tag, was of course an import from France. It seems to have been through John Evelyn's descriptions that it spread to the Netherlands (Thomas in Hunter, p. 288). The history of English fashion has been written from French fashion engravings. Finally, the English preferred to import their pornography than to make it themselves.

Michael Hunter claims that there is ‘a distinctiveness to the British tradition’ (p. 7), which is doubtless true. Continental engravers tailored their work to the British market; a tailoring within their understanding and competency. The distinctiveness followed from confessional conflict and political outlook as much as generic specificity or narrowness. One element lay in the word-centered nature of British political culture. British engravers may have been good at non-representational images: wall papers, box and drawer-liners, patterns for embroidery which Saunders discusses, and damasking, the history of which Juliet Fleming is recovering. Abstract designs were printed for decoration on already-used paper – from 1566 onwards this was used a punishment for offensive books.¹³ Similarly, on Ferrell's account, Ramist typography was common in British books, because British authors, printers, and readers were able to understand complex matters cast into tabular form. The British were good at reading typography – and typography has words at its centre. This verbal orientation reflects the organisation of the book trade in Britain – small, vernacular, centred in London, governed by a monopolistic trade guild, insufficiently expansive to embrace the degree of specialisation evident in other, greater printing centres.

To some extent this internationalism reflects wider practices. There was, for example, a dynamic Anglo-Dutch trade not only in books – the history of books in Britain cannot be comprehended without this dimension – but also in ideas and commodities. It was normative to import goods and expertise from overseas because of specialised skills and economies of scale in production (most obviously, the cost of a rolling press when used only occasionally). Jones's admission, that one print ‘I am tempted to say, [is] so impressive it could not possibly be English’, concedes the superiority of foreign craftsmanship (p. 137) if not the foreign visual imagination. However, the internationalism also suggests that, despite the quantity of printed images in early modern Britain, though they may not have been iconophobic, the competence of the British in matters of visual culture was limited. These studies of the richness of the printed visual culture of early modern Britain intensify the impression that it is not only distinctive, but also thinner than and guided by – perhaps derivative of – mainland Europe.

Both volumes suggest the dynamism of English print culture. They reveal the profound importance of interconnectness: echoes between images, synergy between genres, exchanges with mainland Europe, word-text interactions. They also raise questions about other relations: the impact of theology on secular practices of representation, the relationship between aesthetics and satirical, polemical and political argument, and the place of printed images in the material and commercial practices of the business of printing and the trade in books.

Notes