"A new and stranger sight": allegory, emblems, and interactive images in a seventeenth-century Puritan toy book
Date
2015
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Publisher
University of Delaware
Abstract
Obscured by myth and misunderstanding, Puritan visual culture has often been overlooked or considered undeveloped. An interactive English toy book, The Beginning, Progress and End of Man, reveals that Puritans used images in inventive ways, and relied on them both for the purposes of entertainment and education. When placed in conversation with other examples of Puritan art from seventeenth-century Europe and North America, The Beginning, Progress and End of Man provides insight into an artistic tradition that, despite being shaped by iconoclastic values, was far more lively and complex than previously imagined.