Image, Word, and Catholicism in Ben Jonson’s Works

The first monograph to address Ben Jonson’s thought on the visual arts, Image, Word, and Catholicism in Ben Jonson’s Works: Curating Pictures, shows how Jonson placed a high value on the visual arts and the extent to which he designed his poetics around visual frames. Until this point, scholarship has been oddly divided on these points. Addressing a wider range of evidence than previous studies, Image, Word, and Catholicism in Ben Jonson’s Works both resolves this division and explains it by surveying the influence of Catholic ideas Jonson encountered during the early part of his literary career (1598–1610), while he was a formal member of the Roman Church. Examining Jonson’s works alongside the writings of Catholic writers such as Thomas Palmer, Thomas Wright, Robert Southwell, and Ignatius of Loyola, this work proposes a fresh sketch of Jonson’s nuanced visual imagination and suggests ways to situate his poetry within this important context.