Literary and Linguistic Computing Advance Access published July 17 , 2008

This volume contains 16 papers originally presented at the Learned Love conference held in Utrecht on November 6 and 7, 2006, a conference which was organized to celebrate the Emblem Project Utrecht (EPU) and to discuss its outcomes. This project began in 2002 with the purpose of publishing an Internet site with scholarly and searchable editions of Dutch emblem books. It ended in November 2006 with the website containing 26 texts (http://emblems.let.uu.nl/). The book is structured in two main sections that reflect the organization of the conference itself. The first section is devoted to the study of Dutch love emblems, while the second section analyzes the project’s outcomes, its future, and the digitization process. The thorough introduction, written by the two editors (Els Stronks and Peter Boot), reports the background of both the conference and the project, and outlines the content of the book. In the first essay, Alison Saunders addresses the origins of the Dutch love emblem by reporting the recent discovery of a French emblem book by Guillame La Perrière which dates from 1548. This is a second edition of the lost first edition of 1543, which may have influenced the subsequent Dutch production of love emblem books of the seventeenth century. Both of these books are significantly earlier than the first book included in the EPU which was published in around 1601 by Daniel Heinsius. The following three papers (by Arnoud Visser, Mark van Vaeck, and Els Stronks) investigate the corpus of emblems from a religious point of view. Some of the books that compose the corpus are devoted to divine love and deal with religious matters. In the period covered by the publication of the Dutch love emblems dramatic religious changes (and wars) were taking place in the Netherlands, with Catholics and Protestants each seeing success and failure in alternation. Such an alternation is evident also from the (divine) love emblems books. In his essay, Arnoud Visser compares Otto Vaenius’s Amoris divini emblemata (1615) with Michael Hoyer’s Flammulae amoris (1629). Both books are products of a catholic environment and strongly relate to Augustine’s doctrine, but while the first book finds its place within an highly educated catholic aristocracy, the second conveys a strong pedagogical content in the attempt to improve perceptions of the Augustinian order, perceptions which were seen to have been wounded by the deceit of Luther. Mark van Vaeck discusses how Jesuits used the genre of love emblems through the publication of two volumes of emblems in 1640, one in Latin and the other in Dutch. Such books simultaneously reveal both celebrative and pedagogical intents, the former being more evident in the Latin publication which was designed for an educated and aristocratic public, while the latter transpires more clearly from the vernacular publication which was targeted to a more variegated middle and mercantile class. The last of the ‘religious’ papers is by Els Stronks who used the search tools offered by the EPU website to show that religious influence on the secular love emblems arose during the seventeenth century and assumed different shades (catholic and protestant, both with varying degrees of mysticism) according to the different political and historical conditions which were present at the moment of