The Penn State University Libraries have placed online nine emblem books printed in Early Modern England. These scanned versions of the complete texts provide scholars with "an unparalleled source not only for the study of daily life of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries but also for extraordinary insights into what the intellectuals of the times viewed as a necessary adjunct to heraldry, social life, politics, philosophy, and moral behavior." Each of the texts is accompanied by complete bibliographical information, and the works are searchable (though the Java application used for the search engine may give some browsers difficulties). The materials are certainly a find for scholars interested in "the analysis of reading practices, printing history, Elizabethan popular culture, the use of allegory, and the relationship of word to image."
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