Part 5

Recent Studies in the English Renaissance
Richard C. McCoy
Renaissance vs. Early Modern
The "Renaissance" remains a viable title not only for this review but also for many of this year's books. Despite being "regarded with suspicion in many quarters," as Alvin Snider noted in last year's exemplary SEL review (p. 171), and despite New Historicism's preference for the less honorific "early modern," the older term persists. I must begin by admitting my own attachment to it. I recently taught a survey course called "Renaissance, Reformation, and Revolution," a title reflecting not only a weakness for alliteration, but also the belief that, whatever we call it, our period of study was a very big deal, making a greater mark on English culture and society than any other era. Mark Kishlansky proudly declares in his recent Penguin history of Stuart Britain that "the seventeenth century was decisive for everything!" (p. xiii), and my only argument with that would be that the sixteenth century easily matches it. Urgent desires for renewal and reform inspired extraordinary accomplishments as well as revolutionary upheavals, including religious struggle, civil war, and regicide. These desires remain heroic even if their consequences were often tragic or simply muddled. Lofty aims and traumatic events are, in my view, best evoked by such traditional categories as "Renaissance" rather than a tepid teleology reducing them to a mere prelude to modernity. At the same time, I realize that postmodern suspicions about the mediation of agency and cause or action and accomplishment cannot be ignored, and this year's most interesting work generally grapples with these issues. [End Page 157]
New Historicism's twenty-year reign is examined and endorsed in two valuable anthologies, though both retain "Renaissance" in their titles. The editors of Discontinuities: New Essays on Renaissance Literature and Criticism, Viviana Comensoli and Paul Stevens, affirm New Historicism's vitality against those who detect "signs of weariness," maintaining that such "pessimism is . . . premature" (p. ix). All their contributors are said to agree on the importance of what Louis Montrose described in his "now famous chiasmus . . . the historicity of texts and the textuality of history" (p. xii), but some essays suggest that such a chiasmus can become a kind of rhetorical sign of the cross, providing ritual reassurance that all bases are covered by incantation. In an impressively trenchant essay, Sylvia Brown reaffirms a suppressed "desire for historical truth" (p. 9), and she rejects deconstruction because its oppressively patriarchal "cultural scripts" always "yield the expected results" (p. 13). In her new edition of a trial transcript from the sixteenth century, Annabel Patterson turns to "a 'found' courtroom drama" to pursue "that elusive entity: historical truth" (p. 25). The Trial of Nicholas Throckmorton also defies conventional expectations by ending with an acquittal from the ordinarily lethal charge of treason as well as by encouraging impartiality in its wealth of verbatim detail. In her essay, Brown seeks to reconnect "mothers' legacies," religious counsel directed by women to their offspring, to authors like "Elizabeth Jocelin, a real historical woman" (p. 22), but a lack of textual detail renders her account somewhat sketchy. In her essay on Anne Clifford, Katherine Osler Acheson intelligently opposes "glib conflations of then and now" (p. 31), but concedes that "statements calling for . . . attention to fundamental difference, although easy to utter, are fraught with difficulties in practice" (p. 30). Linda Woodbridge wants, in turn, to revive a conception of literature as a relatively separate domain following "its own rules" (p. 59), but her embrace of this "enabling fiction" (p. 68) seems more wistful than methodical. Determinism is challenged more vigorously in the section on "Rethinking Subjectivity," most notably in Tracy Sedinger's account of unconscious resistance to interpellation (p. 130), but each of these essays suggests uncertainties about problems of evidence and interpretation.
Renaissance Culture and the Everyday proposes to solve these problems by exploring fresh terrain. In her introduction, Patricia Fumerton (coeditor of the volume along with Simon Hunt) promotes a "New New Historicism" broadening the horizons of the old by moving beyond the court and its hierarchies and focusing on "the low, . . . the ordinary, . . . the familiar, . . . the customary or typical or taken-for-granted" (p. 3), and she adds that "attention to the details of everyday life, in all their plurality, complements a further [End Page 158] interest by second-generation new historicists in materiality" (p. 5). Such a project is complicated, of course, by the fragmentary nature of material remnants of the past--things do not speak for themselves--and several contributors acknowledge that they must deal with traces or representations rather than objects or acts. Lena Orlin's fascinating discussion of women's needlework as a strategic "coverture of vertue" concerns "less historical practice than cultural myth about the role of stitchery in gender construction, patriarchy, and domestic ideology" (p. 199). Frances Dolan astutely challenges the assumption that women were always victims of a Renaissance "culture of violence," but her evidence is drawn from tracts and drama demonstrating "a range of representations of women's violence" (p. 221). Essays by Karen Raber on horsemanship's unanticipated political implications, Judith Brown on the health benefits of convent life, and Ann Jensen Adams on money's civilizing power on prostitutes and mercenaries explore unfamiliar territory. There are also superb essays on familiar literary texts; but, while they may deal with ordinary experience, there are few breakthroughs into "materiality." Two of the most original essays in the collection actually move in opposite directions in their approach to material objects. Debora Shuger shows how mirrors in Renaissance art and literature defy conventional expectations, reflecting likeness rather than identity, but whatever is seen in the mirror has less to do with actual reflections (p. 31) than with intellectual and psychological presuppositions. By contrast, Juliet Fleming's well-illustrated essay on graffiti found in households and churches provides ample evidence of genuinely material texts that also defy expectations; rather than signs of vandalism, this handwriting on the wall records pious and edifying instruction, an excellent collective medium for the aphorism, epigram, and "worthy sentence" (p. 329).
Culture Heroes
A few exceptional figures still loom large in Renaissance studies. Though no longer imbued with the magisterial autonomy of Jacob Burckhardt's "Renaissance Man," these more agonized or ambivalent figures exert extraordinary influence on European culture, for better or for worse. Two of this year's most engrossing books show how Francesco Petrarch and Martin Luther profoundly altered psychological attitudes and religious beliefs. Petrarchan Love and the Continental Renaissance, the first volume of Gordon Braden's projected two-part study of Petrarch's life and works, is a learned and cogent survey of his impact on the Continent and the New World; the next will consider his importance in England. Braden sharply [End Page 159] defines its anomalous character, conceding that, while "Petrarch's influence has long seemed almost indistinguishable from the Renaissance itself," nevertheless, "as founding figures go, he proves a light presence" (p. 61). Braden attributes this partly to the poet's "disengagement from republican politics" as well as "humanism's sense of itself as a progressive enterprise" (p. 62) in which predecessors are inevitably superseded. He also sees Petrarch's chronic ambivalence as a source of his paradoxical authority. Petrarch was a writer so prolific that he wore out his scribe (p. 6), yet, though he pursued and found glory through the profession of letters, he remained uneasy about his renown. Guilt about his emotions and eloquence pervades Petrarch's more personal works, most notably the Secretum and Rime Sparse. Such ambivalence gave rise to a capacious poetic tradition of platonic moralizing, bitter frustration, and "a failure of reciprocity" (p. 161) that still permits an anguished intimacy and even acceptance. Braden's judicious assessment of Petrarch's importance shows how the poet surpassed all his predecessors "in linking love to the power of the poetic imagination" while still recognizing a higher, "objective truth as an urgent and inclusive contradiction of that love" (p. 60). Braden thus succinctly defines the contradiction at the heart of Western romantic literature from Shakespeare to Freud.
According to the late Richard Marius, Martin Luther's efforts to control the reformation he launched are repeatedly thwarted. In Martin Luther: The Christian between God and Death, Luther remains a titanic figure, but his effect on European history represents "a catastrophe in the history of Western civilization" (p. xii). Lutheranism's failure is attributed to its elitist emphasis on preaching over ritual and the sacraments: "the ultimate result of the Lutheran reformation among the common people was to take away from them many of their common practices and to leave them in religious ignorance and indifference" (p. 435). This view is countered by Auke Jelsma, who argues in Frontiers of the Reformation: Dissidence and Orthodoxy in Sixteenth-Century Europe that pervasive anticlericalism "testifies rather to a growing involvement with the church than to indifference or superficiality" (p. 3); the essays edited by Susan Wabuda and Caroline Litzenberger in Belief and Practice in Reformation England: A Tribute to Patrick Collinson from His Students also depict a reformation "from below" (p. 1). Marius is less interested in institutional consequences than the personal origins of Luther's struggle. Prey to radical doubts which he considered tantamount to blasphemy, Luther tried to purge himself and all of Christendom through a ferocious assertion of human inadequacy, redemptive faith, and bilious vitriol. Luther's doubts, Marius says, derived from an acute fear of death, and his desperate reaction created a cure worse than the disease by identifying God with death: "He loves God less than [End Page 160] himself, even hates, him, who hates or does not love death (that is the will of God)" Luther declares (p. 153). Marius's account is nuanced, scrupulous, and solidly informed, but his explanation of the central doctrines, including faith as a lived experience and justification as catharsis, remains rather opaque (pp. 210-2). Marius's acknowledged aversion to his subject's "ferocious vehemence" sometimes prompts him to reduce Luther's religious ardor to an emotional "cry of pain" (p. 307), and Marius imagines various counterfactual scenarios in which Luther and his adversaries sit "down over a good cask of wine to have a long talk about God" (p. 454). However, Marius knows the limits of common-room moderation in understanding religious zeal (pp. 463-4), and his book conveys a powerful sense of its urgency.
W. A. Sessions's splendid new biography, Henry Howard, The Poet Earl of Surrey: A Life, persuasively redefines Surrey's importance for Renaissance literature and politics, dramatically raising the profile of this somewhat neglected figure. Surrey was a dangerously ambitious "heir to the greatest title in early Tudor England outside the royal family" (p. x) and an aspirant to the Protectorate of Edward VI, who loathed the "new erectyed men [who] wowlde by their willes leave no noble men on lyff" (p. 151). He was also an "originating" figure in Renaissance poetry (p. 1) whose elegies, sonnets, and translation of the Aeneid impart a melancholy Virgilian gravity to English verse. Sessions's account of a "poet writing in the midst of violence" (p. ix) is densely detailed and gripping, encompassing the fluctuating fortunes of the entire family. Sessions ascribes immense ambitions to Surrey, claiming that he "revolutionized in his own texts and in his own life concepts of honour and nobility" (p. x). In his verse, the "role of the poet . . . changed forever" (p. 239), and the invention of blank verse was undertaken "with a specific political goal in mind, a renovatio of English blood nobility" (p. 260), providing "a language with which to build a Renaissance in England" (p. 273). Sessions may exaggerate the programmatic aims of Surrey's activities, and his raptures over the poet-earl's attributes and accomplishments are occasionally excessive. His analysis of the final portrait of the earl with its fatal coats of arms implying a royal lineage is fascinating, showing how this "glorious male body" (p. 333) aims to match and surpass the "God-given scrotum power" (p. 163) of Holbein's magnificent portrait of Henry VIII, but I think he overstates the painting's capacity to achieve "nothing less than conversion of the spectator to his cause of greater nobility" (p. 335). Every detail is made to serve this "programme of conversion" (p. 336), including Surrey's wall-eye. Nevertheless, the portrait's motto claiming that enough survives (SAT SVPER EST) is amply vindicated by this biography's rich account of Surrey's influential political ideals and poetic legacy. [End Page 161]
Religion
Revisionist accounts of the Reformation have complicated older views of protestants as triumphant progressives by emphasizing catholic reforms and the enduring appeal of traditional religion throughout the Renaissance. Erasmus exemplifies both tendencies, and the publication of three new volumes of the Collected Works of Erasmus is particularly opportune. One includes controversial writings in which he, somewhat disingenuously, professes himself reluctant to engage in controversy, declaring that "I have always had a deep-seated inner revulsion from conflict" (vol. 76, p.7). Nevertheless, alarmed by Lutheran dissent, he attacked Luther directly, charging that "because of that arrogant, insolent, seditious temperament of yours you throw the whole world into deadly hostile camps" (vol. 76, p. lxxix). The two other recent volumes include spiritual and pastoral treatises and prayers, which John O'Malley describes as the work of an "Erasmus nobody knows" (vol. 69, p. xi). The prayers and meditations include one "for peace in the church" which condemns "the chaos wherein there is no love, no faith, no covenants, no respect for laws and those in authority, no agreement on basic doctrines, but, as in a cacophonous choir, everyone sings his own song" (vol. 69, p. 114). Modus Orandi Deum ("On Praying to God") marks, according to O'Malley, "Erasmus' definitive repudiation of Luther's movement" (vol. 70, p. xvi). Indeed, Erasmus qualifies earlier mockeries in such works as On Religious Pilgrimages by arguing that "such superstition should be tolerated if it does not result in impiety, or should be corrected as far as one can without causing disturbances " (vol. 70, p. 197). The texts collected in these volumes reflect the complex responses of a moderate intellectual to Europe's fiercest religious struggle. This year's publication of the index and final volume of The Folger Library Edition of the Works of Richard Hooker, edited by W. Speed Hill, marks the completion of another valuable scholarly enterprise, and we can be grateful to both Toronto and the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies at Arizona State for sponsoring series of this quality.
In his De Praeparatione Ad Mortem, Erasmus writes that "Plato thought the whole of philosophy was nothing other than the 'meditation upon death,'" concluding that nothing could be "more useful" to Christians (vol. 70, p. 396). Nevertheless, he confidently adds with unwitting irony that "the unceasing consensus in faith of the Catholic church, however, has completely removed all that uncertainty of ours" (vol. 70, pp. 399-400). Richard Marius makes Luther's quarrel with Erasmus the climax of his book and blames Luther for destroying that consensus. For Jonathan Dollimore, [End Page 162] the consensus was already doomed because, as he argues in Death, Desire and Loss in Western Culture, our culture has been desperately morbid from its origins. Dollimore's reach is vast, ranging from Platonism, Epicureans, and the Stoics to Christianity, gnosticism, and even Buddhism treated in breathtakingly brief chapters. He is no less brisk with G. W. F. Hegel, Martin Heidegger, Jean-Paul Sartre, Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, Karl Marx, Ludwig Feuerbach, and Herbert Marcuse. Dollimore's emphasis on death's "irreducibly traumatic" aspect (p. 126) is poignant and compelling, but parts read like lecture notes from a Great Books survey. He acknowledges that his linkage of love and death is a "commonplace" but promises a fresher, more "sexually dissident" perspective (p. xii). Unfortunately, the discussion of Renaissance writers and the futility of desire lapses into vaporous exclamations about "the seductions, the paradoxes and the profundity of death" (p. 90). He is more interesting on modern authors' paeans to "faithless benevolence" (p. 314), praising Constantine Cavafy, W. H. Auden, and Roland Barthes for their "scandalously anti-humanist" desires (p. 322). Dollimore implies that homosexual promiscuity distinctively favors anonymity of type, "the beauty of anomalous charm" (p. 323), and the savor of risk, but this ignores comparable moves by straights, including the appeals to a generic Corrina, "delight in disorder," and praise of "unrestrained appetite" by the Cavalier poets. So, too, does the claim that the gay "promiscuous encounter" allows "a self-realization which is also a defiant refusal of self" and thus a radical blow to essentialism (pp. 325-6). Perhaps, but, again, Bill Clinton's flagrantly heterosexual misadventures and deconstruction of "is" may prove even more subversive--or maybe not.
Gale H. Carrithers Jr. and James D. Hardy Jr. define love in the Renaissance in fundamentally religious terms in Age of Iron: English Renaissance Tropologies of Love and Power. Indeed, religion is the foundation of Renaissance culture, or, as they write more eloquently, "the ocean, so to say, while economics, court politics, law, even literature were the currents, the waves, the whitecaps, even sometimes the foam, always to be known within the underlying religious context" (p. xi). They object to New Historicism's fixation on the "invidious nature of power" and old historicism's fixation on cause and effect, preferring to highlight love and its interrelationships (pp. xii-xiii). Religious belief takes the form of four arbitrary but allegedly "dominant tropes: journey toward ultimate justice and mercy; the differentiating and defining moment; calling, as a Pauline ambassador of the good; and theater" with its attendant illusions (p. xi), but evidence for the tropes' importance is skimpy. The Book of Common Prayer supposedly presents the liturgy "as the only true and lively theater" [End Page 163] (p. 121), but no textual support is offered for the parallel. Moreover, their insistence that "general satisfaction" with the Prayer Book made it "an absolutely fundamental mark of political stability and religious truth" in "Renaissance and Baroque England" (p. 106) ignores sustained puritan objections to this "papist dunghill" culminating in its replacement by the Directory for Public Worship in the Civil War. John Donne's concern with conversion may correspond to "the trope of the salvific moment" (p. 154), but the claim that, for Milton, "the salvific moment was always at hand" (p. 233) shows how a category this elastic can fit all occasions. Moreover, their objections to New Historicism's power trips are oddly inconsistent with their title's characterization of the period. They blame the Stuarts for mistakenly addressing their subjects "in the language of power--the power of divine-right absolutism" since, in their view, the "Christian imagination of the late northern Renaissance did not accord the same odor of grace to power that it did to love . . . Love connected people and the Commonwealth to God, while power separated them . . . For some of the best minds in England, this fact defined an age of iron" (p. 97). This sharp dissociation of love and power indicates, I think, a misunderstanding of a divine-right theology that regarded both the deity and his deputies as awesome and absolute.
Harold Fisch brings immense theological learning and an intimate knowledge of scripture to his analysis of three major poets in The Biblical Presence in Shakespeare, Milton, and Blake: A Comparative Study. His analysis of Shakespeare focuses on the unstable dialectic of pagan and biblical texts. In Julius Caesar, the Stoic heroism of Brutus is undone by a dramatic recognition of loss and pathos, whereas Antony and Cleopatra's apotheosis is deflated by the clown and serpent, reminders of the fall and its consequences which inject a note of "biblical realism" into a realm of "mythic hyperbole" (p. 58). Fisch's discussion of remembrance as a religious duty acquiring the force of a commandment in Hebrew scripture (p. 85) provides an excellent gloss for Hamlet, as does his explication of paternal blessings and curses in King Lear. His reading of Milton as Midrash is persuasive (p. 159), a reading also undertaken by Jeffrey S. Shoulson in the current Milton Studies, and so is the description of Milton's work as "a brave attempt to 'resituate the text within an alien conceptual framework,'" an effort "doomed, if not to failure," then to only "partial success" (p. 178). What is unclear is whether all Midrash is comparably doomed, or whether Shakespeare's "organized incoherence" (p. 132) and William Blake's unresolved contradictions (p. 265) are the result of the "radical freedom" (p. 210) of the poetic imagination. [End Page 164]
The title is unwieldy but the argument compelling in Ian Robinson's The Establishment of Modern English Prose in the Reformation and the Enlightenment. Robinson describes the ways in which good "prose constitutes a public community" (p. 155), and his alternative title, Cranmer's Sentences (p. xiv), suggests the fundamentally religious nature of that community as well as indicating an engagingly inductive methodology which he contrasts with both old and new historicism: "Works of literature are understood, if at all, in the context of their world. The traditional literary fallacy is to try to get at the relevant world first, before slotting the poet in. The more interesting, one might say more wonderful thing, is that in actuality the process works the other way round and we somehow get into a world from what we read, see or hear" (p. 152). This book gives access to the worlds of William Tyndale, Thomas Cranmer, and many others through explications riveting in their acuity and attention to rhetorical detail. It also advances the provocative claim that "the well-formed sentence" was not devised "for the sake of conveying information or describing the external world" and was "not indicative, but imperative"; first appearing in The Book of Common Prayer rather than the transactions of the Royal Society, such a sentence aimed not "to purify the language and make it fit for science, but to approach God" (p. 103).
Robinson begins with a cogent technical account of syntax and prose rhythm and then turns to the relatively shapeless quality of middle and early modern English prose, noting that formal "prose tends to appear rather late in the history of cultures" as a sequel to the verse more "natural" to the artist (p. 155). Tyndale and Cranmer rose to the challenge of creating a vernacular scripture and liturgy with a prose style comprehensible to both "the ploughboy (and the poets . . . )" (p. 75). They were, of course, motivated by aims beyond virtuosity and eloquence, and, while Robinson's acute analysis of technique renders their achievements of language and logic palpable, he also pays judicious homage to their extraordinary moral stature. His brief account of their world brilliantly illuminates its horrors and exhilarations: "I confess I find the age of Henry VIII extremely hard to understand: the intense moral seriousness and gross cynicism, the sycophancy and courage to the death exhibited by the same courtiers . . .The Book of Common Prayer is wonderfully lucid and an embodiment of a particular conception of the kingdom of heaven, being made here in earth, even under King Henry VIII. That conception needed the prose style of Cranmer" (p. 103). Robinson thus acknowledges the barbarity behind these monuments of civilization while still recognizing their genius. [End Page 165]
Gerald Hammond also praises William Tyndale in "The Sore and Strong Prose of the English Bible" as "the most widely read of all English prose writers" and the "originator of English prose" (p. 20). Hammond's is the first essay in an excellent collection edited by Neil Rhodes entitled English Renaissance Prose: History, Language, and Politics, and other contributors also note the integral link between evangelical protestantism and vernacular prose. N. H. Keeble's essay on Hugh Latimer's sermons shows how the "substitution of an homiletic and ministerial ideal for a sacramental and priestly one changed not only relations between priest and people, preacher and congregation, but between author and audience, reader and text" (p. 74). David Loewenstein describes Gerrard Winstanley's ferocious attacks on verbal artifice (p. 239), and Stephen Clucas discusses Francis Bacon's preference for the aphoristic, but, at the same time, Claire Preston explains how Sir Philip Sidney's elaborate Arcadian rhetoric can also serve a didactic protestant agenda (p. 94) in an impressive collection showing the flexible evolution of English prose.
Wider Worlds
Well-known as an age of exploration and discovery, the Renaissance allowed some to broaden their horizons extensively. At the same time, increased mobility within England permitted many members of the middling and lower orders to rethink traditional notions of place and landscape, changes explored in essays included in The Country and the City Revisited: England and the Politics of Culture, 1550-1850 edited by Gerald MacLean, Donna Landry, and Joseph Ward. Jonathan Woolfson's account of upper-class study abroad, Padua and the Tudors: English Students in Italy, 1485-1603, cites Robert Dallington's Method for Travel: "he therefore that intends to travel out of his own country must likewise resolve to travel out of his country fashion, and indeed out of himself" (p. 124). That is always a tall order, especially during the Reformation's "confessional 'cold war'" (p. 127), but intellectual curiosity sometimes permits greater openness. Two valuable and informative books by Nabil Matar record positive encounters with an even more alien religion, giving considerable evidence of greater engagement with Islam than previously recognized. Islam in Britain, 1558-1685 says that, because "trade with Islamic countries was essential" (p. 10) and England was a weaker commercial and military force, the imperial assurance of "Orientalism" was delayed until the eighteenth century (pp. 11, 191). The Turkish empire was regarded by many Renaissance Englishmen as "the greatest and best-compacted (not excepting the [End Page 166] Romane it self in the height thereof) that the sunne ever saw" (p. 14). Matar treats Islam as a "domain of opportunity and desire" (p. 41) in plays like Thomas Kyd's Solyman and Perseda, Thomas Heywood's Fair Maid of the West, Philip Massinger's Renegado, and Robert Daborne's A Christian Turn'd Turke as well as religious tracts. It thus becomes a source of elaborate and contradictory fantasies rather than a site of actual encounters, arousing hopes of wealth and liberty as well as fears of emasculation and heretical perfidy. The fuzziness of these fantasies combined with Matar's somewhat disjointed analysis of their sources sometimes blurs his argument. Turks, Moors, and Englishmen in the Age of Discovery draws a sharper distinction among texts, maintaining that "government documents, prisoners' depositions, and commercial exchanges show little racial, sexual, or moral stereotyping of the Muslims" (p. 13) in contrast to fiction and theology, but he still spends more time on the latter, showing how they reduce Muslims to savages and indulge in dreams of conquest.
Andrew Hadfield's Literature, Travel, and Colonial Writing in the English Renaissance, 1545-1625 effectively challenges the views of "some New Historicists, who write as if power were a monolithic entity" by showing how travel writing could undercut the "'official ideology' of Tudor and Stuart England" (p. 266). Hadfield shows how travel literature can lead to "reflections on one's own identity and culture" and genuinely broaden intellectual horizons (p. 1). He also concludes that even colonists are necessarily forced to adjust to altered circumstances and "to recognize the violence" implicit in colonization (p. 70), while conceding that critical insights were often dimmed by blaming other nations for the worst excesses, as in Richard Hakluyt's tales of Spanish cruelty (pp. 132-3). Hadfield focuses largely on travel literature's implications for English political controversies. He regards Thomas More's Utopia as the fictional paradigm for more factual accounts because it turned to a foreign land to explore "European political problems" (p. 7). Hadfield also considers a number of less familiar treatises and translations that pursue similar strategies, including William Thomas's Historie of Italie, Dallington's View of France, Lewis Lewkenor's translation of Gaspar Contarini's Commonwealth and Gouernment of Venice, and Coryat's Crudities, and he suggests that work of this kind "might often be self-obsessed, insular, and, more often than not, racist, but it contained the potential for vigorous criticism of the status quo" (p. 68). He convincingly traces the reappearance of "humanist literature of counsel" in such unlikely places as William Painter's Palace of Pleasure and John Lyly's Euphues, ordinarily deemed "frivolous romances" (p. 148), and he concludes with a discussion of Christopher Marlowe's Massacre of [End Page 167] Paris, Shakespeare's Othello and The Tempest, and John Fletcher's Island Princess aimed at "indicating the ingenious range of political concerns to be found in English Renaissance drama" (p. 202).
The political implications of utopian thought are addressed in David Harris Sacks's new edition of More's Utopia. Sacks focuses on its immediate afterlife by using its first translation into English by Ralph Robynson in 1551, an edition republished frequently in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (p. ix). The work's reception by earnest and high-minded puritan "commonwealth men" eager to offer Edward VI good counsel, and its reappearance amid the tumults of the Blessed Revolution, the Civil War, and just before the Glorious Revolution provide background for a discussion of popular protest movements. By contrast, Marina Leslie accurately emphasizes that Utopia "was never intended as a text for the masses" (p. 80) in Renaissance Utopias and the Problem of History, noting that More feared its translation. Leslie's book explores tensions within a genre that shifts from "radical social critique to ideologically entrenched exercise" (p. 5) and from escapist ideals to historical circumstance, but, despite professed historicist aims, her account remains nebulous, replete with vague generalizations about "history as the gap between cultures" (p. 31), "Utopia as the failure of history or history as the failure of utopia" (p. 80), and literature and history as "the intersection of representation and experience" (p. 122). Utopias are said to "dramatize historical crisis" (p. 8), but, since she focuses largely on "a heuristic crisis" (p. 80), her account remains hermetically literary. Bacon's New Atlantis promotes an "apocalyptic articulation of knowledge as power" (p. 99) through "a poesis that masters rather than shadows its materials" (p. 105). Moreover, Leslie's praise of The Blazing World confirms charges she seeks to refute: "Far greater than a sublunary discoverer, Margaret Cavendish, out of empty air and pure whimsy, in her ramblings, which never leave the circuit of her thoughts, is a celestial maker of new worlds" (p. 149). Such an approach transforms utopias into escapist fantasies, bereft of political consequence.
Shannon Miller's Invested with Meaning: The Raleigh Circle in the New World challenges what she sees as an inflexibly monolithic and hierarchical conception of both new-world expansion and patron-client relationships fostered by New Historicism. Her resources consist of newer postcolonial theories which break down the "binary rigidity" of "core" and "periphery" (p. 20), a recognition that "notions of deference become supplanted by a discourse of profit and commerce" during this period (p. 14), a commitment to local readings "of a particular community" rather than treatments of society "as a single system" (pp. 15-6), and a "multicentric model of patronage" [End Page 168] allowing for "a more flow-based model of production" (p. 186). Miller's observations on individual texts are often illuminating. Her analysis of Spenser's allusions to Peru, the Amazon, and "fruitfullest Virginia" in The Faerie Queene and of his View of the Present State of Ireland concludes that they reflect fears of idleness pervading new-world propaganda. The report promoting the expedition to Newfoundland allures its readers with the promise of "public and personal gain" (p. 96) as well as a means of proving their virility (p. 111). The gold of Guiana acquires largely metaphoric significance, oscillating between icon and commodity (p. 161), allowing Ralegh to offer his backers "assurance of riches and glory" (p. 156) and the opportunity to acquire a "princely valure" (p. 181) to rival the queen's. At times, though, Miller's somewhat schematic approach proves misleading. The claim that Ralegh's fall from power shows how "the traditionally central figure of patron has been decentered from this circle" of patronage (p. 185) does not recognize that Ralegh's courtly failure actually increased his intellectual influence and authority, a paradox obscured by her "multicentric model of patronage."
In But the Irish Sea betwixt Us: Ireland, Colonialism, and Renaissance Literature, Andrew Murphy criticizes notions of a "fixed and stable colonial binarism" (p. 6) and "a grand unified theory of oppression" (p. 16) by emphasizing the unnervingly "proximate" (p. 30) qualities of the Irish. A letter written during the Great Famine by an Englishman reporting his alarm at these "white chimpanzees" whose "skins, except where tanned by exposure, are as white as ours" (p. 12) provides a particularly vivid example of the problems encountered in colonizing close neighbors. Murphy discusses complicating social factors such as a mid-Tudor "constitutional revolution" (p. 21), European trade (p. 23), and religious affinities (p. 24), but he devotes most attention to literature. He begins with Gerald of Wales, one of the first of the Geraldines to make his fortune in Ireland in the twelfth century, whose account of "miracles and marvels" (p. 41) implies that Christianity barely made a dent on the country's fundamental paganism. For Spenser, Mutability is both Irish and irresistible, thwarting plans for subjugation advanced in the Present View. Similarly, fantasies of assimilation and solidarity tenuously sustained by Agincourt's esprit de corps in Shakespeare's Henry V are dashed by the play's epilogue, and theatrical illusions of commonality in Ben Jonson's Irish Masque prove "entirely bogus" (p. 144), "a vacuous dream of transformation untroubled by the intense anxieties" (p. 149) that more realistically beset Shakespeare and Spenser. Renewed conflict during the Civil War or War of the Three Kingdoms disrupted such wishful thinking, but, once again, when such English writers as Milton [End Page 169] turn their attention to Ireland, they are "less concerned with the native Irish" than with Scots presbyterian settlers in Ulster (p. 161). The effacement of "the native Irish" and their circumstances is perhaps inevitable in a book concentrating largely on English views of Ireland, and Murphy acknowledges the need for "a study of native Irish historiography" (p. 9), but his subtle analysis of English distress at the uncanny proximity of their Irish neighbors helps amplify our understanding of this vexed relationship.
Robin Grey explores a no less complex relationship in The Complicity of Imagination: The American Renaissance, Contests of Authority, and Seventeenth-Century English Culture, probing the thoughtful appropriation of English Renaissance culture by Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Henry David Thoreau, and Herman Melville. American writers were familiar with the work of Jonson, George and Edward Herbert, George Chapman, and Bacon, not to mention Shakespeare, and they searched the texts of Milton, Edward Hyde, earl of Clarendon, James Harrington, and Thomas Hobbes for insights into the political and cultural "predicaments" of antebellum America (p. 12). Grey shows how Milton provides Emerson with a fiercely inspired and potent eloquence that "turns the world upside down" (p. 56) as well as with support for his own turn from an institutional church. Fuller, in turn, defies Emerson's presumption of a "right to lead her" (p. 90) by rejecting his preference for George Herbert and arguing for the superiority of the older brother, Edward, Lord Herbert of Cherbury, as a "spiritual man of the world" (p. 88). For Thoreau, Lycidas and the prose of Izaak Walton and Abraham Cowley provide a combination of pastoral autonomy and political critique pertinent to Walden. Finally, Melville relishes the "gargantuan compendium of exotic natural wonders, extravagant superstitions, and errant iconographic traditions" (p. 155) as well as the effort to combine faith and science in the writings of Sir Thomas Browne. Melville also embraces Milton as a strong kindred spirit who rejected consistent and fixed beliefs, arguing that "He who thinks for himself can never remain of the same mind. I doubt not that darker doubts crossed Milton's soul, than ever disturbed Voltair [sic]. And he was more of what is called an Infidel" (p. 227). Grey shows how Melville's desire to align Milton with the devil's party is rooted in his own distinctive religious restlessness, and this fresh and intelligent book reveals many other powerful affinities between early modern England and classic American culture.
Poetry and Gender
A generation of feminist scholarship and, more recently, queer theory have also complicated older views of Renaissance Man, and careful study [End Page 170] of women authors has dramatically altered the canon. The essays included in Virginia Woolf: Reading the Renaissance, edited by Sally Greene, discuss Woolf's role in stimulating these revisions as well as renewing interest in the Renaissance. Changes in the canon are reflected in Women Poets of the Renaissance, a useful anthology edited by Marion Wynne-Davies. She begins her introduction by citing Isabella Whitney's Manner of Her Will . . . To London, noting that her rueful request--"in oblivion bury me / And never more me name"--was largely fulfilled until just very recently (p. xix). Wynne-Davies also remarks on "the distinct lack of love poetry" (p. xxiv) in her collection, concluding that political and religious issues were more important for women writers (p. xxiv). Elizabeth I's impenetrably opaque valediction to Alençon and her patronizing (matronizing?) mockery of Ralegh's sulks (pp. 12-3) show that the queen could play courtly games in verse, but Anne Dowriche's epic account of the French religious wars, Mary Sidney's psalms, Alice Sutcliffe's Meditations on Man's Mortality, and other selections from Aemilia Lanyer, Diana Primrose, and Anne Bradstreet suggest that women writers were generally drawn to graver matters.
Susanne Woods's biography, Lanyer: A Renaissance Woman Poet, amplifies her excellent edition of Lanyer's verse by "situating the first self-proclaimed public woman poet in English among the equally ambitious men of her time" (p. 41). "Spenser provides a powerful model" for female agency (p. 65), while Shakespeare's Adonis and Lucrece offer intriguing parallels to Lanyer's Christ (p. 83). Influence flows the other way in her "Description of Cookham," which Woods reads as the generic prototype for Jonson's "To Penshurst," and her religious verse "valorizes specifically female piety" (p. 159). Once "largely occluded" (p. 116) by their male contemporaries, Lanyer and others are now better known and even renowned.
In Margaret Cavendish and the Exiles of the Mind, Anna Battigelli considers an author whose aspirations are both exhilarating and problematic. Cavendish boldly declares "I am . . . as Ambitious as ever any of my Sex was, is, or can be; which makes, that though I cannot be Henry the Fifth, or Charles the Second, yet I endeavour to be Margaret the first. And although I have neither power, time nor occasion to conquer the world as Alexander and Caesar did; yet rather than not to be Mistress of one, since Fortune and the Fates would give me none, I have made a World of my own: for which no body, I hope will blame me, since it is in every ones power to do the like" (pp. 104-5). Battigelli keenly appreciates the problems arising from that world of her own, reinforced by adversities suffered in the Civil War. As duchess of Newcastle, Cavendish was married to the losing commander at the battle of Marston Moor, her family estate was ransacked, and many [End Page 171] family members were killed. Although her banishment came to an end with the Restoration, Cavendish, Battigelli suggests, never fully recovered psychologically or politically, remaining an "exile of the mind" (p. 84). Cavendish resorted to somewhat dilettantish philosophic and scientific speculation, prompting skeptical hostility among her contemporaries. Mary Evelyn's reaction is typical: after listening to Cavendish promote her own learning over Aristotle's and "hearing her go on magnifying her own generous actions, stately buildings, noble fortune, her lord's prodigious losses in the war," Evelyn concludes, "Never did I see a woman so full of herself, so amazingly vain and ambitious" (p. 6). Battigelli accentuates the positive by "highlighting the subjective nature of her writing" (p. 9) and claiming that this "marks her as a modern thinker" (p. 114), but this proves a dubious defense. A duchess may be pleased "only to Exercise my Fancy" (p. 80), but solitary confinement to an inner realm is hardly liberating for most women. Battigelli's detailed account of this eccentric and talented woman also encompasses more genuinely radical insights, including a religious skepticism that concluded "it is better, to be an Atheist, than a superstitious man; for in Atheisme there is humanitie, and civility, towards man to man; but superstition regards no humanity , but begets cruelty to all things" (p. 55).
Books dealing with the image and role of women in English poetry include Ilona Bell's Elizabethan Women and the Poetry of Courtship. Bell sees female readers as the "primary" audience (p. 5) for this verse which she reads as a "dialogue with Elizabethan women" (p. 4), an audience erased by T. S. Eliot's belief that we hear only "the voice of the poet speaking to himself or nobody" (p. 17) as well as by the self-referential tendencies of deconstruction (p. 28) and New Historicism's emphasis on homosocial coteries (pp. 31-2). Drawing on Judith Fetterley, Elaine Showalter, and others to show how women readers can resist and redefine a text (p. 11), Bell convincingly argues that women's subordination was "never as monolithic as the stricter prescriptive texts" seem to indicate (p. 33). Patriarchal control was repeatedly challenged by loopholes in canon law, late marriages, high mortality rates, family divisions, and other complications. Mary Chan's Life into Story: The Courtship of Elizabeth Wiseman provides a fascinating glimpse into such struggles, showing how a young widow with the aid of her brothers successfully resisted a repellent suitor. Bell offers comparably absorbing tales of contentious courtship, including Sir Henry Lee's reproaches in a "female persona" (p. 81) to the earl of Oxford for betraying Anne Vavasour. She also effectively shows how Mary Sidney's translation of Petrarch's Triumph of Death permits Laura to give voice to her own desire [End Page 172] (p. 103) while Isabella Whitney's Copy of a Letter to Her Unconstant Lover, with an Admonition to Al Yong Gentilwomen deftly shifts shame and blame to fickle men (pp. 118-9).
Bell finds Spenser more sympathetic to women than most of his contemporaries and calls his poetry a "remarkable exchange of respectful, empathetic love" (p. 181). Dorothy Stephens has a comparably high regard for Spenser in The Limits of Eroticism in Post-Petrarchan Narrative: Conditional Pleasure from Spenser to Marvell. She describes her own approach as "less antipathetic towards male authors" and more open to the ambiguities of what she calls "conditional erotics" than "some recent feminist criticism has been" (p. 2). Flirtation, with all its confusing indeterminacy and risks, is the basis of this more open erotic perspective (p. 15), allowing for a "culturally significant flexibility" in conceptions of gender (p. 48). In this account, Spenser's "Faerie Queene finds its greatest power in the very insecurity of its flirtation with femininity rather than in the poem's carefully built quest structure" (p. 139). Stephens's theory of flirtation provides a wonderful key to this maze-like work. It proves no less illuminating in her analysis of The Concealed Fancies, a play by the stepdaughters of Margaret Cavendish dramatizing a relatively secure "feminine community at the center of men's violence" (p. 145), whose heroines retain their erotic power over suitors named Presumption and Courtley by prolonging their own courtly evasions. In "Upon Appleton House," Andrew Marvell's poetic voice "positively hungers to make itself both vulnerable and ridiculous, to put itself delectably out of control" (p. 203), a plausible point, but her comparison of Marvell's yearnings to the apprehensions expressed in a royalist pamphlet called The Parlament of Women (1640) is less convincing. Both are said to promulgate a "fantasy of the state's making it mandatory to screw around with women who are both lascivious and dangerously aggressive," and Stephens broadly claims that this "fantasy was much wider than Marvell; puritan and royalist men both had it" (p. 209). Scant evidence is given for this allegedly rampant fantasy, but the book's deft and subtle explications show how poets had more fun with the idea of women on top.
The risks and attachments Richard Rambuss describes in Closet Devotions are graver and more forceful. Declaring himself both "a historicist and an unrepentant presentist" (p. 5), Rambuss explores the current implications of the seventeenth-century "prayer closet" as well as the homoerotic undertones of Christ's naked agonized body by juxtaposing metaphysical poetry's lurid images of Christ with gay porn videos and Andre Serrano's notorious Piss Christ, the artwork that brought down congressional wrath on the NEH ten years ago. Rambuss deals with "devotion . . . as form of desire" or, in the words of a tract called The Mystical Marriage, "spirituall [End Page 173] concupiscence" (p. 5), and he treats metaphysical poetry "as a daringly experimental expressive project" (p. 1). Closet Devotions is a brilliant exposition of the carnal subtext of Renaissance spirituality and a major contribution to our understanding of religious verse. Donne urges auditors of Death's Duel "to hang upon him that hangs upon the Crosse, there bath in his teares, there suck at his woundes" (p. 19). Rambuss provides abundant and convincing evidence for the links between sex and religion from Richard Crashaw's fixation on oozing orifices (p. 30), to Catherine of Siena's image of Christ's foreskin as a wedding band (p. 46), to Traherne's desire to become God's Ganymede (p. 54), to Edward Taylor's belief that "The Soul's the Wombe. Christ is the Spermodote / And Saving Grace the seed cast thereinto" (p. 76). Rambuss shrewdly concludes that the prayer closet is not "the place for the comprehension and organization of the self, but instead . . . the scene of its disruption, its disarticulation" (p. 115).
H. L. Meakin's John Donne's Articulations of the Feminine also focuses on gender, and disarticulation still prevails, or rather "Donne's articulation of the female body is one which breaks that body into pieces" (pp. 20, 238). When directed against women rather than the self, the process may be less attractive, but Meakin finds "nothing particularly interesting in pointing out exclusionary and misogynystic language" in Donne's verse or sermons (p. 140). Nevertheless, her book still has a strong moral, even eschatological, agenda inspired in part by Luce Irigaray's proposal of "sexual difference . . . [as] one of the major philosophical issues, if not the issue, of our age . . . which could be our 'salvation' if we thought it through" (p. 2) while permitting "the possibility of creative, ethical relationship" (p. 15). Irigaray turns out to be an excellent gloss for Donne, for his insistence that "Love must not be, but take a body too" matches her aspirations to a "sensible transcendental" (p. 17). Meakin's use of Irigaray is subtle, astute, and original even when a bit tendentious. While allowing that the lesbian ventriloquism of Donne's "Sapho to Philaenis" may seem "to pass the 'test' Irigaray imposes" by permitting "the desire for the proximate rather than for (the ) proper(ty)" (p. 133), she still concludes that "Donne is unable, finally, to step across the threshold of the thinkable" (p. 136). Meakin gives the poet high marks here and elsewhere for satisfactory progress toward "an ethics of sexual difference, regardless of actual practices," but finds him "frustrated rather than invigorated" by its kinks and quirks (p. 137). Since I find Donne's confrontations with sexual difference more invigorating than Irigaray's, I am dubious about the results of this grading system. In Meakin's view, Donne may glimpse the promised land "of a 'world' so inconceivable, so other" more fully envisioned by Irigaray, but he can never enter it, "shackled [End Page 174] as he was to a phallocentric tradition" (p. 237). Nevertheless, Meakin is aware that "the problem lies not in Donne's work but in our own expectations of what it might be asking of us" (p. 239), and Irigaray also allows her to move beyond Donne's "failures" to a recognition of his challenges. Meakin concludes with Samuel Taylor Coleridge's injunction, "If you would teach a scholar in the highest form how to read, take Donne" (p. 239), and she rises brilliantly to that challenge in this smart and bracing book.
David Bergeron invokes Donne as a guide to the epistemology of private correspondence in King James and Letters of Homoerotic Desire: "No other kind of conveyance is better for knowledge, or love" (p. 15). Bergeron's book includes the letters of James and George Villiers, duke of Buckingham, previously published but now presented, he says, "for the first time in the context of their shared love" (p. 147), as well as James's allegorical poem on the death of Esmé Stuart and a lengthy introductory essay on the king's male favorites and the links between "the practice of letter-writing and its profound connection to desire" (p. 5). Bergeron explains that "love letters can be dangerous" (p. 7), especially those revealing a monarch's passions and thus exposing secrets of state. Robert Carr's attempts to blackmail the king by implicating him in the Overbury murder (p. 79) confirm the risks of such correspondence, but James's combination of "rhetorical control" (p. 85) and assured position here and elsewhere blunt such threats. Certainly, he made no secret of his love for Buckingham, declaring to his Privy Council that "Christ had his John and I have my George"; "whatever we may think of James's disingenuous theology here," Bergeron insists, "he forthrightly proclaims his love for Buckingham" (p. 104). Bergeron's distinction between "disingenuous theology" and emotional candor reveals the main problem with his book. In reading these documents, he persistently assumes their unmediated transparency: "I suggest that King James's letters indeed unbolt his interior space; they open closets" (p. 8); "We read a narrative of love; we find James's character" (p. 31); "the private thoughts of Buckingham's heart and desire gain inscription; the pen writes of desire" (p. 134). Moreover, his portentous tone sometimes reduces these complex relationships to banal melodrama: "Voiceless letters can sustain love only so long: expectation and desire crash on the shoals of unrequited love" (p. 14).
Jeffrey Powers-Beck undertakes a detailed exploration of a literary and aristocratic family romance in his evocatively titled Writing the Flesh: The Herbert Family Dialogue. He begins with Magdalen Herbert, mother of ten, of whom Donne writes "so much good there is / Delivered of her, that some Fathers be / Loth to believe one woman could do this" (p. 33). The [End Page 175] bias Donne describes is reflected in an invidious comparison of George Herbert's "Obsequious Parentalia . . . made and printed in her memory . . . In those he writ Flesh and Blood: A fraile earthly Woman, though a Mother" with the poems of The Temple composed in honor of a "Heavenly Father" (p. 1). Powers-Beck adapts the phrase for his title with the aim of correcting its patriarchal bias by grounding the writings of George and his large family in their domestic, material, and social context (p. 5). He attributes George's praise of "The British Church" as a "deare Mother" to admiration for his actual mother's religious moderation (p. 55), and he compares "The Church Porch" with the courtly counsel offered by his brothers, including the immensely successful Henry, finding that all share a "worldly asceticism" more reflective of the puritan work ethic than Machiavellian calculation (p. 67). Chauncey Wood's new edition of Henry Herbert's Golden Harpe or His Heavenly Hymne could provide further evidence for comparison, except that Powers-Beck thinks it was probably written by another, unrelated Henry Herbert (p. 228). The intellectual sibling rivalry between George and his oldest brother, Edward, Lord Herbert of Cherbury, is particularly interesting, since the elder evidently rejects his little brother's Calvinism in his arguments for free will and conscience (p. 130), suspects that a sacrificial conception of the Eucharist makes it "no better than a butchery" (p. 136), and prefers "the philosopher before the priest" (p. 138). This informative account provides a more complex and detailed context for understanding seventeenth-century religious beliefs.
Poetry, Politics, and Ideas
Renewed interest in religious belief is matched by a vigorous analysis of political ideas and convictions, particularly in recent studies of the seventeenth century. The year's best contribution to this analysis is David Norbrook's Writing the English Republic: Poetry, Rhetoric, and Politics, 1627-1660, a richly learned and absorbing recuperation of a largely forgotten literary tradition. Norbrook deals with figures as familiar as Milton and Marvell, but he links them astutely to lesser known works of Tom May, George Wither, Cowley, and Henry Marten. He also clearly demonstrates the importance of Lucan's Pharsalia and its translation by Tom May, showing fascinating parallels between Caesar and Satan (pp. 442-3). In their scorn for Whig history, revisionists have subordinated principles to interests as root causes of the Civil War and treated it as a power struggle comparable to the Wars of the Roses. In response, Norbrook gives a cogent account of republican values and demonstrates their ideological importance [End Page 176] for the combatants. As one parliamentary exponent declared, "The Action of these times transcends the Barons Warres, and those tedious discords betweene the houses of Yorke and Lancaster, in as much as it is undertaken upon higher Principles, and carried on to a nobler end, and effects more universall" (p. 88). Discord was prized as a source of "healthfull commotions" (p. 134) in literature and politics in verse which celebrated "Vnion, without uniformitie" (p. 144). Norbrook acknowledges that republican principles were often belligerently elitist and illiberal, concerned "with civic virtue and responsibility more than individual rights" (p. 19). Such beliefs led, most notably in Milton, to a radical pessimism verging on despair (p. 189), but Norbrook persuasively argues that the tragic vision of Paradise Lost encourages renewed resolve rather than resignation (pp. 440, 467).
Peter Davidson's Poetry and Revolution: An Anthology of British and Irish Verse, 1625-1660 is an apt companion to Norbrook's study. Including a large number of previously unpublished or obscure poems, it focuses on poetic "attempts to write about hitherto-unimaginable events" confronted in the Civil War (p. xxxiii). Davidson argues for the importance of "non-élite" and therefore "more representative" poetry while dismissing concerns about "literary quality" (p. lxiii), but this diminishes verse that is often strikingly fresh and original. Inclusiveness reaps rewards beyond mere representation in a widow's tribute to her dead husband (p. 1), or a vibrant working class aubade (pp. 104-5), or the plaintive hope that "Musicks Art" may "repair a State" damaged by civil war (p. 121). The riches offered by some poems are primarily historical, permitting insight into the raptures of Ranters (p. 161) and Fifth Monarchists (pp. 182-3) or providing a detailed topical record of the controversies of 1659 in a "Letany for the New-year" (p. 303). At the same time, this approach permits new perspectives on literary history, expanding, for example, the range of the Cavalier repertory by juxtaposing the manipulative blandishments of Edmund Waller's "Song" (p. 31) with the more belligerent machismo of the marquis of Montrose (pp. 44-5, 357-8). Davidson's anthology should prove an invaluable scholarly and teaching resource.
The essays included in The English Civil Wars in the Literary Imagination, edited by Claude J. Summers and Ted-Larry Pebworth, probe the largely traumatic impact of that conflict on both royalists and parliamentarians. In his excellent essay on Robert Overton, the presumed author of the scurrilous "Character of a Protector" (p. 162), Andrew Shifflett sees "a sad quality of pointlessness to Overton's humane literacy in the 1650s" (p. 167), and he cites Cowley's rueful admonition that "a warlike, various, and a tragical age is best to write of, but worst to write in" (p. 172). The experiences of Robert [End Page 177] Herrick and John Denham, as described in essays by M. Thomas Hester and Jay Russell Curlin, confirm this sad truism. Alternatively, the war provides women authors with new opportunities to address their rulers, as Elizabeth Clarke points out in her essay on "Women's Use of the Religious Lyric," but the actual experience of war appalls even the victors, as M. L. Donnelly shows in "Milton's Revaluation of Military Virtue."
The trial and execution of the king was supposed to be the climactic victory of the Civil War, but regicide only reinforced popular sympathy for Charles and the monarchy. These unintended consequences are explored in The Royal Image: Representations of Charles I, edited by Thomas N. Corns. Essays by Anne Baynes Coiro, Joad Raymond, Martin Dzelzainis, Loewenstein, and John Peacock treat portraits and masques, pamphlets and broadsides, tracts and sermons, and coins, prints, and paintings. Elizabeth Skerpan Wheeler suggests that the Eikon Basilike presents a more "democratized image of the king" (p. 136), while Sharon Achinstein shows how Milton's Eikonoklastes exploits popular anti-papist fears. All of these essays suggest the increasing political importance of public relations. The last two by Lois Potter and Laura Knoppers indicate the ambiguities of popular sentiment by showing its susceptibility to shifting fashions. Potter cites John Dryden's shrewd observation that "Pity only on fresh Objects stayes: / But with the tedious sight of Woes decays" (p. 250), and Knoppers convincingly charts the reduction of "Charles I as Jacobite Icon" from "an image of the divine" to a "sentimental" figure (p. 283).
Two books deal with the importance of classical philosophy in the seventeenth century. Shifflett's Stoicism, Politics, and Literature in the Age of Milton: War and Peace Reconciled persuasively rejects conventional notions of stoicism as a form of nonresistance and withdrawal. Milton's "paradise within," Marvell's gardens, and Katherine Philips's "rude and dark . . . Retreat" (p. 101) all represent strategic sanctuaries rather than private places of ease, and sites of laborious preparation and rigorous trial, like the desert where the Son triumphs in Paradise Regained (pp. 130-1). Prudence is the supreme political virtue, pursuing "a middle path between an obstinate austeritie, and a shameful servitude" in the words of a contemporary tract (p. 2). Shifflett astutely shows how stoicism's fixation on honor and control, along with its exhibitionism, promote dangerously domineering ambitions. In the words of Seneca's De Tranquillitate Animi, we stoics "have thrust ourselves into the conversation of the whole world and have professed that the world is our Countrey, that wee might give vertue a more spacious field to shew her self in" (p. 5). Lipsius claims a comparably vast terrain in De Constantia: "A Great and large Mind does not withdraw, and retire [End Page 178] itself within those narrow Bounds, which Opinion sets him; but his Thoughts spread, and advance beyond them, as looks upon the whole Universe, as his Own" (p. 154). If Milton's heroes seek a "paradise within," as Shifflett persuasively argues, they attain "a politically powerful inwardness, 'Spreading and overshadowing all the Earth'" (p. 148).
Reid Barbour's English Epicures and Stoics: Ancient Legacies in Early Stuart Culture is an immensely learned and wide-ranging study of the influence of these two ancient, presumably opposing schools of thought on a variety of writers. Unfortunately, he refrains from defining his concepts and key terms, and his determination not to oversimplify makes his account hard to follow. Barbour insists "that the transmissions of Stoicism and Epicureanism are messy in construction and malleable in strategy" (p. 11), but this premise generates formulations no less schematic and opaque: Stoicism is "at once at peace and in conflict with itself" (p. 144); "the movement from antimasque to masque is at once Stoic and anti-Stoic" (p. 180); Stoicism "was used in the interest of both the established and the dissatisfied; it mediated between extremes but also proved slippery beyond the control of those who would mediate" (p. 192). In his conclusion, Barbour finds himself "compelled to mediate between a culture that thrives on principled division and a culture animated by the babble of hybrid discourses and crossbred legacies" (p. 268). This suggests that his topic may also prove "beyond the control of those who would mediate."
L. E. Semler's study of The English Mannerist Poets and the Visual Arts revives an aesthetic category with a "venerable history" (p. 13) in order to pay closer attention to style and form than New Historicism permits (p. 17). It also shrewdly suggests that the tensions presumed to arise from a "site of contest" or profound anxiety are often the deliberately cultivated effects of "poetic virtuosity" (p. 77), an insight which could allow more precise analysis of this poetry's extraordinary technical accomplishment. Unfortunately, Semler's approach, though informed and wide ranging, is also scattered and vague. Anxious to avoid "the infamous problem of periodization" (p. 16), Semler almost parodies it with his sketchy and abrupt shifts from the "serene and wholly unforced balance" of the "high Renaissance" (p. 18) to "anti-classical" early mannerism (p. 19) to early (p. 21) to high Maniera (p. 23). These blank labels are filled in with broad psychological claims, charting shifts from serenity to emotional distress to greater detachment, ingenuity, and artifice, but the implied chronology is confounded by interpretations stressing Donne's oscillation from "the ornamental intellectualism of (particularly continental) high Maniera to the disturbed ruptures of early Mannerism" (p. 134), Herrick's "emotional warmth in the [End Page 179] English Maniera" (p. 134), and the "post-classic (at times anti-classic)" thrust of Thomas Carew (p. 136). Critical terms such as precision, elegance, design, and grazia are not much help. Nevertheless, despite the limitations of his criteria, Semler is often an astute and sympathetic reader; his discussion of Richard Lovelace's thwarted desire for a "confederacy of aesthetes" (p. 170) and collapse into the "ingenious Rage" (p. 199) is probing and intelligent.
The title of Marshall Grossman's The Story of All Things: Writing the Self in English Renaissance Narrative Poetry comes from a commendatory poem to Paradise Lost, and Grossman's work aspires to a comparable grandeur, covering Western narratives of the self from Augustine to Spenser and Milton while calling for a new vision of literary history (pp. xx-xxi). It is a generous as well as ambitious book, dedicated to the memory of Joel Fineman in gratitude for his seminal work on the deconstruction of the self and the generation of the "subjectivity effect" in Shakespeare's sonnets. Grossman aims to apply Fineman's linkage of psychoanalysis and Renaissance culture to a wider variety of texts, and he argues that "ideological tensions arising from the reorganization and modernization of social life in seventeenth-century England were experienced as an inward division of the self" (p. 218). One problem with his analysis of "the interaction of historical change and literary form" (p. xi) is its scheme of vast but predictable historical determinants: e.g., "changes in the organization of agriculture and the development of a world market economy, the shift away from the land as the dominant medium of wealth, the opening of a 'new' world" (p. 23), and "the New Science, the new technology, the market economy, the immense, largely unnameable, and not at all unified or homogenous forces of material culture" (p. 103). Generalizations of this magnitude arise from Grossman's desire for comprehensive revision, but a determination to tell the story of all things can prove self-defeating. "For an individual, the one serious answer to the question 'Who are you' is the story of his or her life" (p. 40), and Grossman believes that such stories are now somehow best encapsulated in the psychoanalytic case history (p. 115). In our acquaintance with individuals living and dead, most of us necessarily and happily make do with much less. A comparable absolutism governs his assumption that experience remains "a disarticulate set of contingent events" until defined by the "irreversible conclusion" of death (p. 40); again, the ends and aims most of us pursue in the interim give our lives a coherence which this overlooks. Grossman cites Jonathan Culler in describing two types of narrative structure in which "one logic assumes the primacy of events; the other treats the events as the products of meanings" (p. 43). Very few contingent events make it into The Story of All Things, but the larger patterns Grossman discerns are [End Page 180] often illuminating and ingenious. He explores surprising affinities between Milton and James Joyce by showing how the Son of Paradise Regained anticipates the intensely private heroism and epiphanies of high modernism (p. 263) while discerning a postmodern void in the failed memorials of Donne's Anniversaries and Milton's Samson Agonistes (p. 266).
Catherine Gimelli Martin's The Ruins of Allegory: "Paradise Lost" and the Metamorphosis of Epic Convention also places Paradise Lost at a historical crossroads in European culture, treating the work as a prophetic account of the end of allegory and the breakup of Christianity's "old sacral worldview" (p. 28) in the face of "secular indeterminacy" (p. 8). From this broad overview Paradise Lost "implicitly records its own epic 'fall' from the Christian height of eternal correspondences--and thus from a static 'artifice of eternity' into a Benjaminian 'ruin in the realm of thought.' For representing a forever-absent structure, the ongoing present tense of Paradise Lost thus not only prophetically cancels the eternal moment of Augustine, Dante, and Spenser but also proleptically undermines the belated mysticism of Yeats" (p. 161). Gimelli Martin concludes that Milton's poem can be "contextualized, not only within the modernity that came into being during the seventeenth century, but also with a postmodern frame of reference defined by the 'uncertainties' that we now must find endemic in all correlations of words, things, and thought" (p. 323); indeed, the poem becomes an "elegiac valediction to certainty itself" (p. 341). Despite her postmodern perspective, Gimelli Martin's notion of the Reformation's progress toward secularism and incipient modernity is fairly traditional and even Whiggish. So is her conception of both Christianity and allegory as stable, monolithic systems. She cites Angus Fletcher among many others on allegories, but she does not seem to have absorbed his point about allegories being "symbolic power struggles" rather than "the dull systems they are reputed to be" (Allegory, p. 23). Nevertheless, the book makes many shrewd and illuminating points about Milton's distinctive uses of allegory, showing how Satan and his cohort are "allegorized to death" (p. 191) and how the battle in heaven results in a weird meta-allegory whose signs and wonders are lost on Satan (p. 221). From this vantage point, the recovery of Paradise must remain "like eternity itself, an 'end no eye can reach' (PL, 12:556), a vanishing point 'visible' only to the inner eye and ear" (p. 320).
Stanley Fish rejects the slide into postmodern uncertainties in his new preface to Surprised by Sin: The Reader in "Paradise Lost," his ground-breaking book first published thirty years ago. In an updated survey of Milton studies, he insists on the poet's firm commitment to two powerful doctrines in Paradise Lost. The first is monism, a belief which "gives value [End Page 181] to everything, [but] . . . doesn't let anything have its own value" (p. xxii). The second is a belief in the absolute autonomy and potential perversity of free will. Fish's clarity and rigor derive from his grasp of the poem's categorical imperatives. "Provisionality . . . marks experience (but not the structure of the universe)" because Milton combines the "ontology of monism--there is only one thing real--with the epistemology of antinomianism--the real is only known perspectivally" (p. xliv). Fish is no less harsh on New Historicism in its fixation on mere circumstance which, in his view, "gets the relationship between particulars and generals backwards" (p. lxii). Milton's politics are governed instead by a faith in which "the meaning of things and events is foreknown (meanings are never new); what is not known is the specific and often surprising form this unvarying meaning will take" (p. liii). This is, of course, a major loophole, causing more conflict and confusion in Milton's thinking than Fish allows, though he hints at its implications by defining belief as "an exercise of the will" and truth as "a product of thought" (p. xxxvii).
Milton's political uncertainties are the subject of a fine collection entitled Milton and the Imperial Vision. In their introduction, Balachandra Rajan and Elizabeth Sauer note that some see Milton's response to England's incipient imperial enterprise "as thoughtful and troubled . . .Yet it can still be argued that Milton's thought even in its self-vexations, circulates around structures of order that lend themselves too easily to imperial takeovers" (p. 18). Some essays take the latter line, but many argue for persistent ambivalence. Bruce McLeod sees Milton as a passionate prophet "for a Protestant English empire" (p. 66), whereas Janel Mueller reads Paradise Regained as a rejection of "the domination of the female by the male within the domestic sphere" (p. 42), and Diane McColley defends him as "an ecological poet" (p. 113) opposed to "the empire of man over things" (p. 118). Achinstein notes Milton's identification with subjugated Britons but concedes that he subscribes to Roman notions of barbarity and civility (p. 80), a point reinforced by Linda Gregerson's astute comparison of Spenser and Milton (p. 179). Paul Stevens and Sauer each probe the limits of Milton's religious and racial tolerance evident in Samson Agonistes. Nicholas von Maltzahn discusses eighteenth-century appropriations of Milton justifying imperialism under the aegis of republican virtue and universal ideals, and Julia Wright considers Blake's opposition to the image of Milton as neoclassical patriot. Rajan links the repudiation of "the imperial temptation" in Paradise Regained to protestant nonconformity while allowing that Milton's nostalgia for epic and empire persists. Noting that this vexatious "combination is fluid enough to befuddle [End Page 182] any thinker" (p. 311), Rajan explains the resulting contradictions by returning to "the split between imagination and doctrine . . . the oldest issue in Milton criticism" (p. 312).
Milton and Heresy, an excellent collection edited by Stephen B. Dobranski and John P. Rumrich, focuses on Milton's religious unorthodoxy. The root meaning of heresy means choice, and the editors maintain that Milton makes such heretical choices in De Doctrina Christiana, where he "rejects the Trinity, denies creation ex nihilo, and insists on the common materiality and mortality of the soul" (p. 1), and thus aligns himself with Arianism, often described as "the 'archetypal heresy'" (p. 5). Doubts about Milton's authorship of De Doctrina Christiana raised recently by William Hunter are briefly considered and dismissed; Barbara Lewalski addresses these concerns more fully in the current Milton Studies, noting "how closely, in ideas, language, and characteristic attitudes, De Doctrina Christiana conforms to Milton's other writing" (p. 203). The editors of Milton and Heresy claim that their contributors share the belief "that Milton as poet, thinker, and public servant shunned reliance on set beliefs and regarded indeterminacy and uncertainty as fundamental to human existence" (p. 12), but their own contributions highlight the difficulties encountered in ascribing consistent attitudes, orthodox or heretical, to a man whose intellectual career was so turbulent, dynamic, and long. Rumrich gives a lucid exposition of what Arianism means and "why it matters," while showing how it is rooted in Milton's monist materialism (p. 83) and skepticism toward all lesser authorities, including the Son of God. Dobranski, in turn, raises doubts about the timing of Milton's acceptance of such doctrines, noting his earlier condemnation of the "infections of Arian and Pelagian Heresies" (p. 154); moreover, his emphasis on the "collaborative practice of textual production" (p. 140) lends some support to the "disintegrationist" reading of De Doctrina Christiana recently promulgated by a group of British scholars. Corns concludes that Milton finds heresy as protean and elusive as truth, and, true or false, belief "is to be left substantially free and beyond prescription" (pp. 47-8), while Barbara Lewalski seeks to revise recent revisionism (p. 49) by describing a consistently radical and prophetic young author who makes a strong case for his own autonomous authority. Loewenstein ascribes to Milton an aloof detachment from the excesses of "contemporary antinomians and sectarians" while making a convincing case for the individual dissenter as the true Miltonic hero, but his citation of Milton's "licensing the infamous Racovian Catechism" (p. 180) as evidence of his heterodoxy is complicated by Dobranski's doubts about Milton's actions and intentions as the censor nominally responsible for [End Page 183] clearing that book (pp. 142-4). The editors want to have it both ways, contending that "regardless of the reliability of the story as it appears in the anecdotal record, it is for our purposes truly illustrative" (p. 5), but such expedients mainly illustrate the problem of relying on anecdotes for evidence as well as a tendency to talk past one another even when appearing in the same volume. Joan Bennett traces links between Milton's radical Christianity and contemporary liberation theology, and the banality of her selections from the latter (e.g., "we cannot say that it comes down to 'doing good and avoiding evil.' Rather it comes down to 'doing good and fighting evil to wipe it out'" [p. 235]) certainly displays the rigorous intelligence of earlier religious thought to greater advantage. Joseph Wittreich's final essay provides disputes over Milton's orthodoxy with a fresher context by placing them amid the culture wars and curricular disputes of the last decade, showing how conservative readers from Dryden onward have consistently sought "to cancel Miltonic ambiguity" (p. 249); Wittreich astutely notes "that religious poems are not necessarily possessed of coherent creeds" (p. 259) and encourages readers "to reclaim Paradise Lost as a poem of proliferating contradictions" (p. 261).
In The Alternative Trinity: Gnostic Heresy in Marlowe, Milton, and Blake, A. D. Nuttall challenges the traditional conception of Renaissance culture as "a virtually unbroken sequence of religious orthodoxy" (p. 2) by emphasizing the pervasive influence of gnosticism. Nuttall shows how a pessimistic creed which divides creation between a malign paternal despot and a filial promethean emancipator can be paradoxically liberating. Glancing back from Blake's and Percy Shelley's explicit formulation of this scheme, Nuttall shows how Marlowe's Dr. Faustus dramatizes the despair that Luther places "at the very centre of Christian experience" (p. 39) by simultaneously celebrating and defeating human aspirations to knowledge. Milton's Arminianism initially permits Milton to fight "his way clear from predestinarian theology" (p. 93), but the poet still stacks the deck against Adam and Eve and thus all humanity by allowing Satan to corrupt "her unconscious mind" (p. 107). Nuttall sees Eve as a gnostic heroine who simply "wanted to know" (p. 130), but he argues that Milton ultimately "flinches from this thought," refusing "to allow that eating the fruit cleared their vision" (p. 135). Milton's Arianism permits a detachment of the Father from the Son, but the poet backs the wrong deity, promoting "the exact opposite of that elevation of the Son above the Father-Creator which I have been pressing" (p. 161). Nuttall concedes that "the scheme I have described will certainly appear 'cranky' to many" (p. 143), and he also acknowledges the limitations of Blake's more "radical" gnosticism (p. 224). His book is cranky in places [End Page 184] as well as oddly familiar in its recapitulation of arguments for the devil's party, but, at the same time, it is learned and often illuminating in its insistence that such a "palpably adversarial" anti-trinity as Satan, Sin, and Death is "the running antithesis, not the primary thesis, of our culture" (p. 272). In Alchemy of the Word: Cabala of the Renaissance, Philip Beitchman traces the influence of comparably unorthodox ideas on Shakespeare, Milton, Browne, and others.
Michael Lieb investigates Milton's affinities with still more unorthodox and arguably unholier religious beliefs in Children of Ezekiel: Aliens, UFOs, the Crisis of Race, and the Advent of End Time. Taking the Book of Ezekiel as his point of departure, Lieb sees Milton's use of the prophet's "Chariot of Paternal Deitie" as part of an ongoing effort "to technologize the ineffable" which led in our own time to President Reagan's millennial enthusiasm for the Star Wars initiative against an "evil empire" (p. 3). Lieb discusses modern appropriations of both this image and Milton, ranging from a nineteenth-century promotional tract for the Liverpool and Manchester railway (pp. 36-7), through G. Wilson Knight's Message of John Milton to Democracy at War in 1942 (p. 38), to Malcolm X who concluded that "Milton and Elijah Muhammad were actually saying the same thing" (p. 155), but, while the continuities are often compelling, the contrasts between Milton's less apocalyptic poem and more fundamentalist fantasies of power and Armageddon are not adequately explored.
History of the Book
Of all the radical changes occurring during the Renaissance, the most important one for literature was probably the invention of the printing press, and Adrian Johns has written a massive revisionist history of its impact entitled The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making. Describing his book as the "first real attempt to portray print culture in the making" (p. 3), Johns challenges both the traditional myths of origins enshrining Johann Gutenberg as the inventor of movable type and current assumptions of print's standardization and fixity. He notes the providential overviews of the early legends (p. 370) and darkens them by considering claims of shadier rivals such as the magus Faust (p. 335). He also challenges Elizabeth Eisenstein and other established authorities on print culture by contending that increased publication undermined standards: "truths became falsehoods with dazzling rapidity" (p. 171), and "far from fixing certainty and truth, print dissolved them" (p. 172). Competition among authors and publishers led to "an explosion of discredit" (p. 231) as [End Page 185] well as a corrosive combination of piracy, plagiarism, and misprints (pp. 31-3). Johns is informative on the political and commercial predicaments of printers and booksellers and the skills required for regulating production and managing disputes. His chapter on John Streater, a republican printer opposed to Oliver Cromwell and the Restoration who still promoted royal control, illuminates the contradictions generated by these pressures. He argues that authorship is "a matter of attribution by others, not of self-election" (p. xxi), tipping the balance of power from production to reception, and he maintains that the "insuperable independence" of readers (p. 379) renders the dynamics of dissemination even more eccentric. Even questions of scientific accuracy are rendered almost negligible by the brutal publish-or-perish campaign waged by Isaac Newton and Edmond Halley against the hapless astronomer John Flamsteed. Johns concludes by describing reading as "a complex skill with a complex history . . . not easily disciplined by texts" (p. 632) and maintains that "communications technologies" are not "intrinsically authenticating" (p. 638). Johns's erudition is formidable and so is his confidence in his own powerful argument, but he tends to exaggerate the discoveries of the sociology of knowledge. He notes that "experimental natural philosophy relied on the successful maintenance of credit through processes of correspondence and publication" (p. 541), and he maintains that "Boyle, Newton, and their counterparts arguably spent as much time negotiating these processes as they did experimenting" (p. 542). Arguably they also spent as much time sleeping, but the connections among all these activities are not necessarily as definitive as Johns assumes. Nevertheless, his informed account of the chaotic standards of an emergent "domain of print" (p. 59) is vivid and compelling. The Nature of the Book should also help illuminate some of the systemic editorial problems discussed in New Ways of Looking at Old Texts, 2: Papers of the Renaissance English Text Society, 1992-1996, where "books" are often, in W. Speed Hill's eloquent prefatory phrase, "less codex than archive" (p. xiv).
Renaissance books were "hybrids," as Johns notes, combining qualities of a gift to a special recipient and of a commodity intended for a general public (pp. 14-5). These same contradictory qualities are even more pronounced in the manuscripts studied in Peter Beal's In Praise of Scribes: Manuscripts and Their Makers in Seventeenth-Century England. Beal and others have convincingly shown how manuscript publication remained a flourishing practice in seventeenth-century England. The exquisite quality of this craft is evident in the abundant illustrations of both In Praise of Scribes and Stan Knight's Historical Scripts: From Classical Times to the Renaissance; but, as Beal points out, scribes remained largely anonymous [End Page 186] in contrast to printers who advertised their trade on their products (p. 15). This anomaly derived from a desire to retain a sense of a "commissioned product" (p. 24) for an elite coterie, but that illusion was compromised by increasing commercialization and democratization (p. 28). The prolific scrivener whom Beal dubs "the Feathery Scribe" flourished throughout Charles I's Personal Rule by transcribing political documents such as Sir Philip Sidney's letter to Elizabeth opposing a French match. Scribal circulation proved an ideal medium during this time for sustaining a "ubiquitous spirit of inquiry--of considering, defining, questioning, and testing basic tenets of the established structures of authority in society, and their underlying principles" (p. 104). Beal also shows how Philips used manuscript circulation for its "protective advantages" as "a sanctioned sphere of operations for a woman of her class" (p. 149), and he contrasts her behavior with Margaret Cavendish's ambition for fame and "bold, open, almost brazenly self-promoting" desire for print publication (p. 154). Philips's discretion did not prevent her "high art" from being posthumously "vulgarized--even prostituted, perhaps" (p. 191) by royal mistresses starring in one of her plays, but Beal's illuminating study shows how publication in manuscript or print always courts such ambiguous responses.
In Privacy and Print: Reading and Writing in Seventeenth-Century England, Cecile M. Jagodzinski discerns ambivalence in Cavendish's ardor for publication: "By publishing her plays, Cavendish strikes a middle ground between public and private: she abjures the secrecy of the modest closet dramatist yet uses her plays to assert her social role as dutiful wife" by refraining from stage production (p. 101). Focusing primarily on reception, Jagodzinski argues that print culture fosters a greater assurance of privacy and autonomy because increased literacy "freed one from the community, from established authority--perhaps even from all authority" (p. 20). Devotional works, conversion narratives, and personal letters provide evidence for this somewhat familiar argument, and more detailed attention is given to the works of Cavendish and Aphra Behn to show how privacy can be rendered female by its violation (pp. 82, 136-7). The links between privacy and confinement, isolation, interiority, individualism, secrecy, and secularity (pp. 164-5) are suggestively intimated but not fully developed.
I will close by hailing the contributions of Ruth Samson Luborsky and Elizabeth Morley Ingram's two-volume A Guide to English Illustrated Books, 1536-1603 and volumes 4 and 5 of The English Emblem Tradition to our understanding of the history of the book. Both types represent, in the words of the introduction to volume 4, another distinctive Renaissance "hybrid," one "combining graphics and texts" (vol. 4, p. xii). Peter M. Daly, [End Page 187] editor along with Leslie T. Duer and Mary V. Silcox of volume 4, has also published a second edition of his scrupulous survey, Literature in the Light of the Emblem, and Deviceful Settings: The English Renaissance Emblem and Its Contexts, edited by Michael Bath and Daniel Russell, includes several fascinating papers on the emblem's literary and epistemological significance. Alan Young, the editor of volume 5 of The English Emblem Tradition, contributes an essay to Deviceful Settings on Henry Peachman's illustrated versions of King James's Basilikon Doron, showing how the emblem's occult, mystical aura could enhance Stuart notions of divine right. On the other hand, the last essay by Peggy Simonds subtly analyzes Edward Collier's still-life picture of George Wither's emblem book, showing how Collier's painting hints at the vanity of all such images, including the artwork depicting it. Productions such as the illustrated Basilikon Doron and the far more powerful Eikon Basilike aspire to the status of sacred texts, but Milton's denunciation of "quaint Emblems and devices" in Eikonoklastes is no less ardent in its vigorous assault on such pretensions. Struggles of this intensity over the meaning and scope of literature are part of what makes the English Renaissance such a compelling field of study.
Richard C. McCoy teaches at Queens College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York, and is the author of Sir Philip Sidney: Rebellion in Arcadia (1979) and The Rites of Knighthood: The Literature and Politics of Elizabethan Chivalry (1989). He is currently working on a book entitled Alterations of State: Sacred Kingship in the English Reformation.