Extremely rare first edition of the first German emblem book devoted to the heart, also described as “a Rosicrucian item of great interest” (McLean), with only a handful of institutional copies in Europe and only one incomplete copy in US libraries. Here we see the heart in a multitude of precarious poses, struck by a hammer, using wings to escape a devil, nailed to a cross, adrift in stormy seas, placed in a furnace, to name but a few.
McLean continues “In addition to the heading of the title-page in The True Society of Jesus and the Rosy Cross, there are also a number of internal Rosicrucian references relating the symbols of the rose, the heart, and the cross… it is quite possible that here Cramer was consciously trying to produce a series of spiritual exercises of a Protestant esoteric Christianity… Cramer provided an extended meditative exercise of an esoteric Christianity based on the symbol of the heart”.
Cramer’s emblems were published only a year after fellow theologian Johann Valentin Andreae’s Chymical Wedding, one of the original manifestos of the Rosicrucian Brotherhood but not all are convinced by the early Rosicrucian association. Peter Daly disagrees, stating that the emblems “are neither Jesuit nor Rosicrucian. Cramer was a Protestant, a strictly Lutheran pastor, historian and theologian”, and that the “mention of the true rosy cross may also be taken as a reference to Luther’s arms”.
For this edition the highly inventive emblems are printed on the rectos only with a Latin caption, a Biblical motto in Latin and German and a Latin distich. The audience and purpose of the emblems appears to have widened by the time Jennis published an equally rare second edition of 1622 with a new title Emblemata Sacra, Das ist: Fünfftzig Geistliche in Kupffer gestochene Emblemata, oder Deutungsbilder/ aus der Heiligen Schrifft/ von dem süssen Namen und Creutz Jesu Christi (VD17 23:660245Q; some copies have a Latin title page, see VD1723:295247C). Here the prefatory pages are new, the number of plates expanded to 50, with the addition of polyglot verses on the facing page by the poet Conrad Bachman, this was followed by the more commonly found 1624 Jennis edition (VD17 1:078963A) which provided a second part of a further 50 emblems.
Title leaf strengthened and remargined at upper and fore-edge, some toning and occasional light spotting.
Praz p. 43. Landwehr German 212. VD17 14:008781Q.
An English translation and commentary by Fiona Tait and Adam McLean, The Rosicrucian Emblems of Daniel Cramer was published in the Magnum Opus Hermetic Sourceworks series (Phanes Press, 1991).
Peter M. Daly, The Emblem in Early Modern Europe (2014), pp. 84-5. Sabine Modersheim, ‘Herzemblematik be Daniel Cramer’, in The Emblem in Renaissance and Baroque Europe: Tradition and Variety (Ed. Alison Adams & AJ Harper), 1992, pp. 90-103.
OCLC & USTC: UK: Cambridge & Glasgow. US: NYPL (incomplete - lacks emblems 35 & 36), USTC cites Illinois but this is a microfiche copy only).
