The appearance in 1531 of Italian jurist Andrea Alciato's collection of illustrated poems, Emblemata, was a cultural watershed: for the next three hundred years, emblems exerted a considerable influence on Continental prose, poetry, theater, art, and material culture. Though no English translation of Alciato appeared until late in the twentieth century, the impact of Alciato's Latin emblems on English culture was similarly marked.
Library collections, school curricula, manuscript compilations, and printed books all bear direct evidence of Alciato, as do early English emblem books such as Geffrey Whitney's Choice of Emblemes (1586) and Thomas Heywood's The Hierarchie of the Blessed Angells (1635). At other times, English 'translations' and borrowings from Alciato remain largely unacknowledged, as in Thomas Palmer's manuscript collection Two hundred poosees (c. 1565). Still others, such as George Wither in A Collection of Emblemes (1635), borrow emblems from emblem writers who themselves had borrowed from Alciato. England's engagement with emblems hardly ended with the printed page, however, as motifs from Alciato's emblems can be found widely in English decorative arts.