This volume presents in-depth and contextualized analyses of a wealth of visual materials. These documents provide viewers with a mesmerizing and informative glimpse into how the early modern world was interpreted by image-makers and presented to viewers during a period that spans from manuscript culture to the age of caricature. The premise of this collection responds to a fundamental question: how are early modern texts, objects, and systems of knowledge imaged and consumed through bimodal, hybrid, or intermedial products that rely on both words and pictures to convey meaning? The twelve contributors to this collection go beyond traditional lines of inquiry into word-and-image interaction to deconstruct visual dynamics and politics-to show how images were shaped, manipulated, displayed, and distributed to represent the material world, to propagate official and commercial messages, to support religious practice and ideology, or to embody relations of power. These chapters are anchored in various theoretical and disciplinary points of departure, such as the history of collections and collecting, literary theory and criticism, the histories of science, art history and visual culture, word-and-image studies, as well as print culture and book illustration. Authors draw upon a wide range of visual material hitherto insufficiently explored and placed in context, in some cases hidden in museums and archives, or previously assessed only from a disciplinary standpoint that favored either the image or the text but not both in relation to each other. They include manuscript illuminations representing compilers and collections, frontispieces and other accompanying plates published in catalogues and museographies, astronomical diagrams, mixed pictographic-alphabetic accounting documents, Spanish baroque paintings, illustrative frontispieces or series inspired by or designed for single novels or anthologies, anatomical drawings featured in encyclopedic publications, visual patterns of volcanic formations, engravings representing the New World that accompany non-fictional travelogues, commonplace books that interlace text and images, and graphic satire. Geographically, the collection covers imperial centers (Great Britain, France, the Netherlands, and Spain), as well as their colonial periphery (New France; Mexico; Central America; South America, in particular Brazil; parts of Africa; and the island of Ceylon). Emblematic and thought-provoking, these images are only fragments of the multifaceted and comprehensive visual mosaic created during the early modern period, but their consideration has far reaching implications.
Acknowledgments List of Illustrations Introduction Visualizing the Text from Manuscript Culture to the Age of Caricature: A Theoretical, Methodological, and Conceptual Framework Christina Ionescu Part I: Representing Space: Book Culture, Visual Perspectivism, and Intercultural Communication Chapter 1: Compiling Creation: Medieval Codicology and Images of Early Modern Collection by Janine Rogers Chapter 2: Cosmography and Perspectivism: Alonso de Fuentes's Summa de philosophia natural, Its Illustrations, and Cervantes's Don Quixote by Rachel Schmidt Chapter 3: The Development of Mixed Pictographic-Alphabetic Accounting Documents in Colonial Mexico by Cecilia Brain Part II: Annotating the Image: Baroque Painting, News Maps, and Print Captions Chapter 4: Annotation and Books in Early Modern Spanish Painting by Lauren Beck Chapter 5: Visualizing the News: The Amsterdam Spin-Doctor Claes Jansz Visscher and the West India Company by Michiel van Groesen Chapter 6: Text on Image on Text: Picturing "Nature" in Schall's Illustrations for Rousseau's Julie, ou La Nouvelle Heloise by Ann Lewis Part III: Imagining Empirical Knowledge: Illustrated Travelogues, Natural History Treatises, and Geological Texts Chapter 7 : Description and Representation in Oviedo's and Staden's Travel Accounts of the New World by Sandra Saenz-Lopez Perez Chapter 8: Louis-Jean-Marie Daubenton's Anatomic Descriptions Complemented by Jacques de Seve's Drawings: The Hidden Scientific Gem of Buffon's Histoire Naturelle by Swann Paradis Chapter 9: From Analogies to Patterns: Images in French and British Geological Texts (1760-1800) by David McCallam Part IV: Illustrating the Text: Engraved Exotica, Traces of Reading, and Satirical Books Chapter 10: Dialectic of/on Foreignness: Textual and Iconographic Representations of the Faraway in the Histoire Generale des Voyages by Abbe Prevost by Antoine Eche Chapter 11: Illustrating for Posterity: Modes of Readership in the Eighteenth-Century Literary Marketplace by Leigh G. Dillard Chapter 12: "Caricature Untrammelled": Thomas Tegg's Illustrated Satirical Books by Christina Smylitopoulos About the Contributors Index
