Editing Emblem book (section)

== Miscellany == <!-- I'm not happy about the name of this headline, but I couldn't find a better name, and we need one to mark the end of the "Definition" section. -->
Emblem books, both [[secular]] and [[religious]], attained enormous popularity throughout continental Europe, though in Britain they did not capture the imagination of readers to quite the same extent. The books were especially numerous in the Netherlands, Belgium, Germany, and France. Emblem books first became popular in the sixteenth century with Andrea Alciato's ''Emblemata'' and remained popular until the eighteenth century.<ref name="Books: A Living History" />

Many emblematic works borrowed plates or texts (or both) from earlier exemplars, as was the case with [[Geoffrey Whitney]]'s ''Choice of Emblemes'', a compilation which chiefly used the resources of the [[Plantin Press]] in Leyden.

Early European studies of [[Egyptian hieroglyphs]], like that of [[Athanasius Kircher]], assumed that the hieroglyphs were emblems, and imaginatively interpreted them accordingly.

A similar collection of emblems, but not in book form, is [[Lady Drury's Closet]].