A wide variety of evidence apart from the written word can extend and enrich our knowledge of the past. Pictures, tapestries, buildings, sculpture, music, coins, tools and clothing are among the forms of evidence that historians have exploited with increasing frequency in recent decades. The fields of numismatics, musicology, art history, emblematics and other disciplines are contributing more broadly to the study of history than ever before. As this essay will show, emblematics has a particular relevance to the English Revolution.

Emblems and impresas were among the most distinctive of Renaissance art forms. Typically, the emblem consisted of a combination of motto, picture and short poem. The motto was usually a proverb or some wellknown heraldic phrase or literary quotation. Its function was didactic: the conveying of some general truth. The impresa was an emblematic device that expressed the intention or convictions of a particular individual in a personal, sometimes enigmatic fashion. In sixteenth – and early seventeenthcentury England impresas were to be found everywhere — in tapestries, jewellery, medals, coins, household decorations, masques, pageants, monumental sculpture, costumes and portraits. Several English emblem books were published during the half-century or so before the Civil War: Jan Van der Noot, A Theatre for Worldlings (1569), Paolo Giovio's The Worthy Tract of Paulus Jovius (translated by Samuel Daniel, 1585), Geffrey Whitney's A Choice of Emblemes and other Devises (1586), the anonymous P.S.'s The Heroicall Devises of M. Claudius Paradin [and] the Purtratures or Emblemes of Gabriel Simeon, a Florentine (1591), Andrew Willett, Sacrorum Emblematum Centuria Una (1591–92), and Thomas Combe, The Theatre of Fine Devices (c. 1593).