BOOK BURNING!
Challenge: you will NEVER guess what book this woodcut illustration of a book burning is from, *or* why it's there! 1/?
(A little thread for the countdown to the release of Inventing the Renaissance)
It’s from this edition of ZWAAN, a piece of what’s basically sixteenth-century borderline-pornographic fanfic featuring Sir Lancelot having sex with a swan, a much-reprinted pamphlet, transformed every time with infinite additions & fake authors. 2/?
Something so trashy was printed absolutely as cheaply as possible, and one big way to cut costs was to reuse woodblocks, since a block carved for one text would be set aside, and printers would grab them to reuse later when they were, eh, close enough. 3/?
There are great examples of this in the Pepys collection of broadsides, where they’ll take the same woodblock of a lady and put her next to an infinite range of things, to illustrate a tale about a woman and her lover, a woman and the devil, a woman and a burning house etc. 4/?
Here’s one where clearly the printer said, “It's a sad wife who fears her sailor husband cheats on her while away!” so the illustrator went to the wood block rack and said, “One sad lady, one pretty lady, and one, um... faraway location, coming right up boss!” 5/?
So in ZWAAN sometimes one wants a picture, but one wouldn’t bother to carve a *new* picture, so they reused them. Here accompanying a discussion of the execution of a queen (*one* queen) is a reused scene that’s clearly from some unrelated classical or even biblical double execution scene. 6/?
Later on there’s a scene in which one prince’s evil mother turns out to be a witch, and is burned at the stake. And instead of bothering to hunt down a woodblock of a witch burning, someone in the office decided... 7/?
"A book burning is like a witch burning, right, boss? Close enough?”
Clearly boss said yes.
I haven’t managed to find what the block was carved for originally, likely a Reformationy religious pamphlet of one kind or another. But moments like this make the trashiest, lowest productions from a culture offer great windows of people under pressure, cutting corners, being so themselves. 8/?
It's what make book history, and pop culture history, such a great overlapping world!
I'll post more such fun tales of Renaissance ridiculousness in the coming days, and Inventing the Renaissance is out in the UK now, and in the USA at the end of March! 9/9
https://www.adapalmer.com/publication/inventing-the-renaissance/
In Inventing the Renaissance, acclaimed historian Ada Palmer provides a fresh perspective on what makes this epoch so captivating.