Personification: Embodying Meaning and Emotion(41 Intersections)

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.

Table of 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

About the Author :
Walter Melion is Asa Griggs Candler Professor of Art History at Emory University in Atlanta. He has published monographs, edited volumes, and articles on Dutch and Flemish art and art theory of the 16th and 17th centuries, on Jesuit image-theory, on the relation between theology and aesthetics in the early modern period, and on the artist Hendrick Goltzius. He was elected Foreign Member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2010. Bart Ramakers is Professor of Historical Dutch Literature at the University of Groningen. He specialises in medieval and sixteenth-century drama and has a particular interest in the intersections between performative and visual culture. He is an editor of the Netherlands Yearbook for History of Art (NKJ).