Research output: Contribution to Journal/Magazine › Journal article › peer-review
Research output: Contribution to Journal/Magazine › Journal article › peer-review
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TY - JOUR
T1 - Curiosity and reality: the context and interpretation of a seventeenth-century image
AU - Barber, Sarah
PY - 2010
Y1 - 2010
N2 - This article traces the varied uses made of a single woodcut image over the course of 350 years. Its repeated issue, first in interregnum tracts – ostensibly newsbooks – in 1644, 1648 and 1651, from which it was archived by picture libraries in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, led to its publication in schools‘ textbooks in the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries and to widespread use by teachers throughout Britain.In the course of its diverse deployment, interpretations of what it depicts have ranged widely. In the earliest depiction which the author has managed to trace, it illustrated a story of post-partum rape by detachments of French soldiers under Prince Rupert's command; subsequently, the image was slightly doctored, tailoring it to illustrate tales of Henry Marten's ‘Leveller’ troops; and finally in the Commonwealth period, it formed part of the ‘anti-Ranter literature published following the Blasphemy Act. The events depicted were reputed to have taken place in Dorset, Leicestershire and York respectively.The disparate employment of the image in the seventeenth century points to the interpretative interdependence of image and text, and makes possible a discussion of the nature of news – propaganda or reportage; ‘curiosity and reality’ as a contemporary journalist had it – in the depiction of truth and fiction when recounting violence and criminality.
AB - This article traces the varied uses made of a single woodcut image over the course of 350 years. Its repeated issue, first in interregnum tracts – ostensibly newsbooks – in 1644, 1648 and 1651, from which it was archived by picture libraries in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, led to its publication in schools‘ textbooks in the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries and to widespread use by teachers throughout Britain.In the course of its diverse deployment, interpretations of what it depicts have ranged widely. In the earliest depiction which the author has managed to trace, it illustrated a story of post-partum rape by detachments of French soldiers under Prince Rupert's command; subsequently, the image was slightly doctored, tailoring it to illustrate tales of Henry Marten's ‘Leveller’ troops; and finally in the Commonwealth period, it formed part of the ‘anti-Ranter literature published following the Blasphemy Act. The events depicted were reputed to have taken place in Dorset, Leicestershire and York respectively.The disparate employment of the image in the seventeenth century points to the interpretative interdependence of image and text, and makes possible a discussion of the nature of news – propaganda or reportage; ‘curiosity and reality’ as a contemporary journalist had it – in the depiction of truth and fiction when recounting violence and criminality.
KW - English Civil War
KW - woodcut
KW - image
KW - propaganda
KW - text
KW - context
KW - National Curriculum
KW - education
KW - schools
KW - history
U2 - 10.1093/hwj/dbq021
DO - 10.1093/hwj/dbq021
M3 - Journal article
VL - 70
SP - 21
EP - 46
JO - History Workshop Journal
JF - History Workshop Journal
SN - 1477-4569
IS - 1
ER -