XVII-XVIII (Dec 2023)
‘Walke on in Hope’: George Wither’s A Collection of Emblemes (1635) and the book as an intellectual and spiritual pilgrimage
Abstract
Thirty-three years before Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, George Wither had the famous engraver William Marshall produce an intricate “Frontispiece” for his Collection of Emblemes, Ancient and Moderne (1635). The engraving teems with figures either emerging from a dark cave at the bottom, or at some stage of a journey towards twin mountains at the top, one representing salvation and the other damnation. Marshall has his pilgrims meet personified Virtues and Vices, drawing their lot from an ewer in the middle under the auspices of Fortuna, and then choose between the initially arduous path leading to the first peak, or the inviting, but gradually deteriorating path leading to the other. In this article, the picture is considered as a mise-en-abyme of the work as a whole, proposing to guide the willing reader towards moral and intellectual improvement while exemplifying − rather than merely expounding − a decidedly humanistic take on the notion of one’s path in life.
