Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Date of Degree

2-2024

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

M.A.

Program

Liberal Studies

Advisor

Elizabeth Macaulay

Subject Categories

Ancient, Medieval, Renaissance and Baroque Art and Architecture | Arts and Humanities | Christianity | Classical Archaeology and Art History | European History | History of Art, Architecture, and Archaeology | History of Religion | Medieval Studies | Renaissance Studies

Keywords

classical reception, early modern england, protestant reformation, print culture, print studies, iconography

Abstract

This thesis analyzes the iconography and visual sources of the title page to the first volume of A chronicle at large and meere history of the affayres of Englande (1569) by the Tudor author Richard Grafton. Representing the visual synthesis of several distinct but interrelated currents that developed in the preceding century, the title page to the Large Chronicle offers a rare glimpse into a transitional moment in the middle Tudor perception and visual representation of the British past. These currents include imperializing royal iconography, with origins in antecedent representations in the late fifteenth century; the entry of the ‘classicizing’ or ‘antique’ designs of continental prints into local English production; emergent Protestant symbolism; and the typological reading of British history. Essential to the title page’s visual rhetoric is the employment of the Renaissance stock image of the Roman soldier—in this study referred to as the “antique soldier”—to depict Brutus of Troy and his three sons, the primordial kings of Britain described in the Historia Regum Britanniae of Geoffrey of Monmouth. This thesis argues that the Large Chronicle evinces a conscious “connecting of the dots” in the Tudor mind between defense of the traditional historical record, received from the late Middle Ages, and an emergent consciousness of style informed by the ‘antique’ figuration of continental prints. Although not accurate according to idealized Italianate classicism, the use of a ‘classicizing’ mode to outfit these ancient kings was not an arbitrary choice. Rather, this thesis argues that the title page’s designer made a deliberate, strategic decision to temporally distinguish those kings and link them to concepts of antiquity and authority by virtue of that stylistic differentiation. Taken as an authoritative index of the material ‘look’ of ancient warfare, the Renaissance template of the antique soldier—also associated with the Bible—is combined with royal iconography to rhetorically vindicate the authenticity of the received textual record undergirding the Tudor dynasty’s claims to ancient empire and Godly rule.

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