PUB - Publikationen an der Universität Bielefeld

This investigation of Johann Fischart’s employment of emblematic motifs sheds new light on the woodcut tide page of his Geschichtklitterung, his translation of François Rabelais’s Gargantua. Fischart’s oeuvre was inspired by visual artists, especially by the woodcuts designed by Tobias Stimmer, later used in various emblem books from Bernard Jobin’s Strasbourg publishing house. He understood emblems, imprese, and printer’s signets as inspirations for his word art, and they provided him with further impetus to embellish his texts. Stimmer and Fischart were inspired also by the signet of the printer Servatius Sassenus in Leuven to create a puzzling design for the tide page of the Geschichtklitterung: Stimmer’s woodcut and Fischart’s motto can be interpreted as a fictitious printer’s signet that was used only a single time.