Personification: Embodying Meaning and Emotion

Personification, or prosopopeia, the rhetorical figure by which something not human is given a human identity or ’face’, is readily discernible in early modern texts and images, but the figure’s cognitive form and function, its rhetorical and pictorial effects, have rarely elicited sustained scholarly attention. The aim of this volume is to formulate an alternative account of personification, to demonstrate the ingenuity with which this multifaceted device was utilized by late medieval and early modern authors and artists in Italy, France, England, Scotland, and the Low Countries. Personification is susceptible to an approach that balances semiotic analysis, focusing on meaning effects, and phenomenological analysis, focusing on presence effects produced through bodily performance. This dual approach foregrounds the full scope of prosopopoeic discourse--not just the what, but also the how, not only the signified, but also the signifier.

Walter Melion is Asa Griggs Candler Professor of Art History at Emory University in Atlanta. He has published monographs, edited volumes, and articles on Dutch and Flemish art and art theory of the 16th and 17th centuries, on Jesuit image-theory, on the relation between theology and aesthetics in the early modern period, and on the artist Hendrick Goltzius. He was elected Foreign Member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2010.

Bart Ramakers is Professor of Historical Dutch Literature at the University of Groningen. He specialises in medieval and sixteenth-century drama and has a particular interest in the intersections between performative and visual culture. He is an editor of the Netherlands Yearbook for History of Art (NKJ).