I have embarked on this blog in order to advertise the astonishing wealth of imagery painted (for the most part) in the Early Modern alba amicorum or Stammbucher [‘friendship books’] of (mainly) ‘German’ students, compiled between c.1560 and c.1700. This iconographic wealth is all but unknown to British art historians (the keeping of such souvenir albums having never been a British habit, sadly!) but even in the Germanic countries I find the iconographic aspect of the albums has been surprisingly little studied — a recent handsome 2-volume study of early modern albums, for example, whilst fulsome in its treatment of the ‘social networks’ amongst album owners and those who signed their albums, has almost nothing to say about the images selected to decorate the albums. In recent years hundreds of such albums have been made available digitally by holding libraries — and foremost amongst them the Herzogin Anna Amalia Bibliothek in Weimar — the British Library, which has by far the largest holding of such manuscripts outside Germany, has been sadly parsimonious in its offerings to date.

At the risk of sounding overly portentous — but these days it seems one is expected to justify one’s frivolities — I may say that this wealth of underexploited iconography has much to tell us about Early Modern mentalite, and cultural histories that ignore this material are quite simply ignorantly incomplete.

Bibliography: For the iconographic aspect of early modern alba amicorum,

Unsurpassed is Lotte Kurras, Zu gutem Gedenken Kulturhistorische Miniaturen aus Stammbuchen des Germanischen Nationalmuseums 1570-1770 (Munchen, 1987)

Werner Taegert, Edler Schatz holden Erinnerns: Bilder in Stammbuchern der Staatsbibliothek Bamberg aus vier Jahrunderten (Bamberg, 1995) — excellent

The only recent English treatment of alba amicorum as it relates to England is June Schlueter, The Album Amicorum & the London of Shakespeare’s Time (London, 2011)

If I can work out how to use this blog technology ! I am intending to post themed essays exemplifying specific motifs. In the interim, I have posted some 1,500 album images (with minimal commentary — often just provenance details) on two Pinterest sites: https://uk.pinterest.com/malcm2557/album-amicorum-stammbuch-friendship-album/ and https://uk.pinterest.com/malcmjones/album-amicorum-stammbuch-continued/