Emblematic Tabernacles in John Donne, John Milton, and the Antwerp Polyglot Bible

Abstract

The tabernacle became an early modern European emblem in the works of John Donne, John Milton, and the Antwerp Polyglot Bible (1568–1573). An emblem had long been understood as a mosaic artwork rather than the word-and-image genre it came to be in Renaissance emblem books. The emblematic tabernacles are mosaic: they are inlaid, three-dimensional, objets d’art that express the ongoing Divine Presence in the post-Tridentine world of their makers. The centerpiece of my essay is a substantial analysis of the Antwerp Polyglot Bible’s emblematic tabernacle, which was based in a Christian Hebraist interpretation of the tabernacle in the Book of Exodus and inflected by the emblematic mindsets of its creators. This Bible includes a neo-Latin treatise on the tabernacle and an engraving of it: both are crucial for understanding its tabernacle-as-emblem as well as understanding Donne’s and Milton’s. All their emblematic tabernacles engage the transmission of the Divine Presence from Mount Sinai, through the Word-Made-Flesh in Christ, to the doctrinal controversies in their own post-Tridentine Europe. All figure Scripture or scriptural exegesis. And all resonate with the biblical tabernacle and reverberate with issues of sacred philology important to Christian humanists, both Roman Catholic and Protestant. [T.G.]