Moral Analogies in Print: Emblematic Thinking in the Making of Early Modern Books.

Abstract

It is a commonplace in the history of the scientific revolution that ancient and medieval notions of reasoning by analogy, which united all of creation in layered realities observable in the puzzle of the world, were swept away by the triumph first of empiricism and skepticism and then of the romantic insistence on the uniqueness of the individual. Recent work shows conclusively that this development was not linear, and that the culture of print so important in the diffusion of early modern science depended on the persistence of moralizing analogy in academies and classrooms and in printing houses and bookshops. This paper offers a look at the persistence of moral, emblematic thought" in the publishing industry of early "modern Europe. I contend that book workers -from authors and editors to typesetters and printers -embraced emblematic thinking as a way of bridging the ethical distance between commerce and science. Their habits of translating moral analogy into print can be seen most" clearly and unambiguously in the ways book folk devised emblematic printer's marks and shop signs to label and advertise their work on the book market. An historical case study, this paper describes practices that bear directly on our present debates over the mechanics and ethics of technological innovation and the challenge technology poses to intellectual freedom, enterprise, and the exchange of information. The paper concludes with a reflection on the ways in which contemporary design reasoning is analogous to traditional emblematic thought. Ancient and medieval notions of reasoning by analogy united all of creation in layered realities observable in the puzzle of the world and described in ebullient, cascading metaphors (Rhodes 2000; Stafford 1999; Gentner and Jeziorski 1994) . A typical medieval treatise on natural history, science, or morals was called a Speculum or mirror, and presupposed that the author and reader would find themselves fully