Double Meaning of Personification in Early Modern Thesis Prints of the Southern Low Countries: Between Noetic and Encomiastic Representation
(2016) Personification. Embodying Meaning and Emotion — ISBN: [9789004310421], 433-460, published
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- In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the public defense of academic theses entailed the publication of a written presentation of aspirant’s conclusions. They were printed in the form of broadsides or booklets decorated with coats of arms, portraits and other ornaments, and were posted at the entrance of college halls or distributed to the audience. During the seventeenth century, these paratextual devices developed into increasingly complex images filling the entire broadsheet. They were intended to praise the applicants’ protectors, who were generally scholarly, religious or political personalities. This article will examine the iconic systems—the symbolic and the allegorical— brought into play in thesis images that express the overabundance of the signified in relation to a single signifier. From the start, academic broadsides were regularly populated with personifications of Science, the Liberal Arts, Virtues, Wisdom, War and Peace, towns or countries, etc., which served to highlight key individuals, their heraldry devices and the accompanying texts. In thesis prints produced in the Southern Low Countries, these figures simultaneously play a cognitive and a laudatory role.
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de Mûelenaere, G. (2016). Double Meaning of Personification in Early Modern Thesis Prints of the Southern Low Countries: Between Noetic and Encomiastic Representation. In Walter S. Melion and Bart Ramakers (ed.), Personification. Embodying Meaning and Emotion (pp. 433-460). Brill. https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004310438