Print in Early Modern England

The print repertoire of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in England has been neglected historically, and this remarkable book rectifies a major oversight in the history of English visual art. The book provides an iconographic survey of the single-sheet prints produced in Britain during the early modern era and brings to light significant recent discoveries from this visual storehouse, many of them noticed only within the last decade. It publishes many works for the first time, as well as placing them and those relatively few others known to specialists in their cultural context. This large body of material is treated broadly thematically, and within each theme, chronologically. Chapters are devoted to portents and prodigies, the formal moralities and doctrines of Christianity, the sects of Christianity – and the often vicious satire of the Catholic confession (but also of Protestant non-conformists) – visual satire of foreigners and "others", domestic political issues – principally, the English Civil War – social criticism and gender roles, marriage and sex, as well as numerical series and miscellaneous visual tricks, puzzles and jokes. The concluding chapter considers the significance of this wealth of visual material – much of it never reproduced before – for the cultural history of England in the early modern era. This pioneering, important book enlarges the iconographic repertoire of the period, leading to the conclusion that England was not as insular artistically as is often thought, and that the English had access to an astonishingly wide range of iconography. Tracing the European sources of many of these prints leads to the surprising recognition of the influence of the German print repertoire, to an extent that demands a re-appraisal of cultural relations between England and Germany during the early modern era.