The Comely Frontispiece

The Emblematic Title-Page in England 1550–1660

Margery Corbett, R.W. Lightbown

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2025
• eBook ISBN:
  9781040337608
• Topic: Literature
• Index: Literature

Many of the major books published in the years between 1550 and 1660 – one of the richest periods in English culture – were embellished with an elaborate engraved title-page. The Comely Frontispiece (1979) selects twenty such title-pages which represent the different branches of learning – theology, philosophy, history, poetry, medicine – and explains that these pages were not mere ornaments but visual epitomes in the emblematic mode of significant aspects of the book. They were designed by the author and explore the whole world of Renaissance emblematic imagery on which they drew. We see how famous figures used the engraved title-page to express the ideas they had in mind when their books were conceived and written – ideas about the Church and society, philosophy and manners, poetry and drama, science and medicine – so that it affords us an exceptional insight into what they themselves considered was important or attractive in their own creations.

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 General and Rare Memorialspertayning to the Perfect Arte of Navigation...
• 2 The Covntesse of Pembrokes Arcadia
• 3 A tracte containing the Artes of curious Paintinge Caruinge & Buildinge
• 4 His Discours of Voyages into ye Baste and West Indies
• 5 The Holy Bible...: The Bishops' Bible
• 6 His Deuine Weekes & Workes
• 7 The Authorised Version
• 8 The whole works of Homer; prince of poetts. In his Iliads, and Odysses: Translated according to the Greeke, By Geo: Chapman (1616)
• 9 Opera Graecé
• 10 The History of the World
• 11 Workes
• 12 The Workes of Beniamin Jonson
• 13 Poly-olbion, or a chorographical Description of Great Britain
• 14 The Compleat Gentleman
• 15 The Generali Historie of Virginia, New-England, and the Summer Isles...
• 16 Sylva Sylvarum
• 17 The Anatomy of Melancholy
• 18 Chirologia
• 19 Philocophvs: or, the Deafe and dumbe mans friend
• 20 Leviathan
• Index