Emblem Project Utrecht

Description:

The site is the result of a pilot project, which was designed to establish the feasibility of digitizing a collection of Dutch 17th-century emblem books. Three books are available as prototypes. They have been encoded using TEI/XML; HTML pages have been generated using XSLT (with some Saxon extensions).

The emblem is an art form which was hugely popular in the 16th and 17th centuries. An emblem typically consists of a picture, a brief and often mystifying motto or lemma, and an epigram which links lemma and picture. Dutch emblem writers of the period focused their attention on the subject of love (both secular and religious). Their books were very much addressed to an international audience, often containing texts in several languages (Latin, French, English, Dutch, Spanish, Italian).

We have transcribed the books, and provided them with several indexes. The editions are far from finished, but we're working on adding translations, pointers to relevant secondary literature, annotation, references to parallel emblems, sources for quotations, etc. Most of the site's content is in English.

– Peter Boot

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