Full Description
Personification, or prosopopeia, the rhetorical figure by which something not human is given a human identity or 'face', is readily discernible in early modern texts and images, but the figure's cognitive form and function, its rhetorical and pictorial effects, have rarely elicited sustained scholarly attention. The aim of this volume is to formulate an alternative account of personification, to demonstrate the ingenuity with which this multifaceted device was utilized by late medieval and early modern authors and artists in Italy, France, England, Scotland, and the Low Countries. Personification is susceptible to an approach that balances semiotic analysis, focusing on meaning effects, and phenomenological analysis, focusing on presence effects produced through bodily performance. This dual approach foregrounds the full scope of prosopopoeic discourse—not just the what, but also the how, not only the signified, but also the signifier.
Contents
Notes on the Editors
Notes on the Contributors
List of Illustrations
Personification: An Introduction
Walter S. Melion and Bart Ramakers
PART 1 - Cognitive Perspectives on Personification
1. Allegorical Personification and Embodied Cognition
Jean Bocharova
PART 2 - Personification and the Critical Tradition
2. Dante and St. Francis: Shaping Lives, Reshaping Allegory
Jeremy Tambling
3. Personification, Power, and the Body in Late Medieval and Early Modern English Poetry
William Rhodes
4. The Personification of the Human Subject in Spenser's The Faerie Queene
Brenda Machosky
PART 3 - Personification and the Modalities of Figuration
5. Framework, Personification, and Pisanello's Poetics
C. Jean Campbell
6. The Triumph of Truth in an Age of Confessional Conflict
James Clifton
7. The Mystical Experience—Between Personification and Incarnation: The Idea Vitae Teresianae Iconibus Symbolicis Expressa (Antwerp, Jacob Mesens: 1680s)
Ralph Dekoninck
PART 4 - Personification on Stage: Forces of Living Presence
8. From the Parade to the Stage: Evolution and Significance of Personifications in Lyon's Sotties (1566-1610)
Katell Lavéant
9. Personification in Sir David Lyndsay's A Satire of the Three Estates
Greg Walker
10. Both One and the Other: The Educational Value of Personification in the Female Humanist Theatre of Peeter Heyns (1537-1598)
Alisa van de Haar
11. Dirty from Behind, Pearly in Front: Lady World in Rhetoricians' Drama
Bart Ramakers
12. Mute Poem, Speaking Picture: The Personification of the Paragone in Shakespeare's Timon of Athens
Jennifer A. Royston
13. The Politics of Personification in the Jacobean Lord Mayors' Shows
Susan L. Anderson
PART 5 - Jesuit Approaches to Personification
14. Figured Personification and Parabolic Embodiment in Jan David's Occasio Arrepta, Neglecta
Walter S. Melion
15. Double Meaning of Personification in Early Modern Thesis Prints of the Southern Low Countries: Between Noetic and Encomiastic Representation
Gwendoline De Mûelenaere
16. Vermeer, the Art of Meditation, and the Allegory of Faith
Aneta Georgievska-Shine
PART 6 - Personifying Charity
17. Personifications of Caritas as Reflexive Figures
Caecilie Weissert
18. Maarten van Heemskerck's Caritas: Personifiying Virtue, Animating Stone With Paint,
Imaging the Image Debate
Arthur J. Difuria
19. Abraham Bloemaert and Caritas: A Lesson in Perception
Caroline O. Fowler
PART 7 - Personifying Life and Afterlife, Trial and Retribution
20. The Duchess and the Cadaver: Doubling and Microarchitecture in Late Medieval Art (with Alice Chaucer and John Lydgate)
Elizabeth Fowler
21. 'But You Are Blind, and Know Not What Is in You': 'A.L', the Fraudulent Judge, and the Coerced Conscience
June Waudby
PART 8 - Personification and the Assertion of Allegorical Order
22. Precarious Personification: Fortuna in the Artist's Cabinet
Lisa Rosenthal
23. Producing the Legible Body: Personification, the Beholder, and Tiepolo's Würzburg Frescos
Max Weintraub
PART 9 - The Four Continents: Sources and Sentiments
24. The Personification of Africa with an Elephant-Head Crest in Cesare Ripa's Iconologia (1603)
Joaneath Spicer
25. The Four Continents in Seventeenth-Century Embroidery and the Making of English Femininity
Heather A. Hughes
Index Nominum
