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Communication Dans Un Congrès Année : 2021

Voicing Political and Sexual Suspicion in Henry Peacham’s Emblem Book Minerva Britanna (1612)

Résumé

In March 1603, during King James’s stay at Hinchingbrook Priory, Henry Peacham, then a schoolmaster at Kimbolton, presented the new monarch with one or two emblems of his own invention, an initiative that ended up in three manuscripts and one published work, Minerva Britanna (1612). Peacham’s ambition consisted in giving an emblematic version of the King’s advice book for his son, Basilikon Doron (1599) and thus participating in the iconography of the Jacobean reign, by giving a visual legitimacy to a king often regarded with diffidence. The aura of his main source as well as the dedicatee, prince Henry, put the emblematist in a particularly conspicuous position. Nevertheless, we argue that Peacham uses the emblematic genre in order to voice his suspicion of King James’s reign. Following Michel Foucault’s theory of panopticism in Punishment and discipline (1975), we intend to analyse how the reason of state policy based on constant scrutiny and surveillance is manipulated by the emblematist so as to direct the reader’s gaze back to the King and consider his reign with some critical distance. But voicing suspicion, be it political or sexual, can only be achieved in an oblique way. We intend to analyse therefore the collaboration of visual and verbal strategies used by the emblematist in order to present an uncanonical vision of power.

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Dates et versions

hal-03714811 , version 1 (05-07-2022)

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  • HAL Id : hal-03714811 , version 1

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Cezara Bobeica. Voicing Political and Sexual Suspicion in Henry Peacham’s Emblem Book Minerva Britanna (1612). Conférence internationale, Université de Vérone, Italie, Oct 2021, Vérone, Italy. ⟨hal-03714811⟩

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