< Back

Quarles, Fra.[ncis] (1592-1644).
Emblems,...
Publisher: Printed for M. G. and W. F. and to be sold by Roger Clavel at the Peacock in Fleetstreet, and Andrew Bell at the Cross-Keys in the Poultrey, London;
Date of Publication: 1696
Stock Code: 14236
Duodecimo in half-sheets, pp., [6], 380, including 56 engraved emblems with English captions and 15 ‘hieroglyphicks’. Bound with Hieroglyphikes of the life of Man. Contemporary brown sheep, blind fillets to boards. Upper board detached, and held in place with tape. Corners well worn. Defective, with the letterpress title but lacking the engraved title-page, final leaf and blanks. With some soling and minor browning, nicks and closed tears to text-block but a reasonably clean copy internally. A fair copy. A wonderfully illustrated edition of one of Quarles highly popular and influential poetic pocket emblem and symbol books. Quarles’ Emblems popularised Catholic baroque emblems among moderate Protestants in England, and was his most significant work. As a biographer wrote in an appraisal of the work ‘ His poems are largely independent and new. They exploit the mimetic quality of the pictures and transform them into allegories of spiritual truth. They speak in the different voices of dramatic dialogue, meditative soliloquy, spiritual love song, irony, or flippancy. Conceits, sometimes derived from patristic texts, are often elaborated with semantic precision and dense intertextuality and repay close study. The overall structure of the work preserves patterns of the spiritual pilgrimage and the Ignatian meditation.’ Despite Quarles’ fame declining in the eighteenth century, the Emblems endured, and played an important role in the Victorian emblematic revival. £450.00