Speaking of Chiasmus and The Ordering of Literature 23264115 PDF

RECENT PUBLICATIONS ON ELIZABETHAN ENGLAND AND RELATED FIELDS
Author(s): Leonard R. N. Ashley

Source: Bibliothèque d'Humanisme et Renaissance , 2012, T. 74, No. 1 (2012), pp. 145-186
Published by: Librairie Droz
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Bibliotheque d'Humanisme et Renaissance - Tome LXXIV - 2012 - n° 1, pp. 145-186
CHRONIQUE
RECENT PUBLICATIONS
ON ELIZABETHAN ENGLAND AND RELATED FIELDS
As 2011, the quartercentenary of the publication of the King James

ends, someone should sum up and evaluate the many celebratory publica
We cannot afford space for that here, but it is worth mentioning that
Renaissance book has been a bestseller for centuries and has greatly influ
life and literature. It also needs to be noted that the scholars who claimed to be
working from Hebrew and Greek texts actually were commissioned simply to
update sixteenth-century English translations. That is what they did, chiefly,
and in deliberately rather antique English. They were, really, more editors than
translators. So was Francis Parris (1743) and his editor Benjamin Blayney
(1769), who gave us what we now usually consider to be the King James Bible
whose old-fashioned English has had to be revised ever since both for accuracy
and modern understanding. We should also think of those editors of The Word
who selected five books which were foolishly or dishonestly attributed to
Moses and who decided which prophets to include in the Old Testament. Talk
about prophets without honor! Surely it is worse to be prophets without notice
at all! As for the New Testament, it was severely edited for Constantine's
political purposes in the fourth century and as time goes on we have discovered
that perhaps as many as 50 others could be added to the four gospels that were
chosen. Further finds of rejected gospels may perhaps be made. Meanwhile
you can read the King James Version but I dare to suggest that you might also
learn from the allegedly heretical gospels attributed to Peter, Mary Magdalene,
Thomas, and even Judas, among others available now. The King James version
is little used in the church of England today.
More about on handing the word down from on high. The British
government has announced that universities ought to specialize in training
that prepares people to make good salaries (and pay significant taxes) and

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146 CHRONIQUE
stop fooling around with the humanities, mere frills. The drive for useful
knowledge goes way back. An example is Sir Hugh Plat (1552-1611 ?), the son
of a London brewer, who was industrious and often ingenious. He published
on innovations in agriculture and gardening and was the author of The Jewel
House of Art and Nature (1584). He dabbled in many areas, including real
science such as medicine and pseudoscience such as alchemy, He touted
macaroni for naval stores. He was truly what we call a Renaissance man. He
was Elizabethan in his interest in novelties and profits to be obtained thereby.
The whole man emerges from Malcolm Thick's study of this individual in
connection with « the search for useful knowledge in Early Modem London »,
Sir Hugh Plat (Prospect Books, distributed by David Brown, PO 511, 28 Main
Street, Oakville CT 06779, 2010, US $ 60.00). Sir Hugh could tell you how to
teach children the alphabet with dice or how to cheat at cards with a tiny mirror
in a ring or how to desalinate sea water or preserve fruit. We need more good
books on scientific experimenters and clever entrepreneurs engaged in creative
money making in the reign of Elizabeth. This is a promising start. The Royal
Society was eventually to spring from those who looked closely at nature and
tried to make use of secrets discovered. If their motivations were sometimes
a bit piratical, that was typically Elizabethan. We also need republication of
Elizabethan works on navigation (Sir Anthony Ashley, Thomas Cavendish,
John Davies, and others) and a survey of that science and cartography, etc., in
the âge of expansion. Plat invented a wagon that could easily be taken apart
and put together, one of many Elizabethan innovations closely connected with
military affairs. Davis' and others were important in such matters and in his The
World's Hydrographical Description America is an island but the Elizabethans
were more advanced that most people know. Their science assisted empire.
Looking for a Renaissance work to which to give renewed life ? How about
Henri Estienne's Theasaus Grœca linguœ (1572). It goes unnoticed in the new
book (Christopher Stray, ed.) on Classical Dictionaries : Past, Present and
Future (Duckworth, 2011, £ 50.00). It was revised by the Victorians but could
be revised today, preferably with information about how it was first used and
has been used since.
*
Sir Sidney Lee (1859-1926) was notable biographer of Shakespeare (after

«studying Elizabethan literature... for eighteen years») and gets his due in
Sidney Lee (Georg Olms, Hagentorwall 7, 31134 Hildesheim, Germany, 2009,
€ 39.80). The book is by a noted German Shakespearian, Marvin Spewack. We
just came across it, years late. Better late than never. Sir Sidney was a major
Shakespeare critic in his time (he needs to be more carefully compared with
James Orchard Halliwell-Phillipps) and he liked «hard, unromantic» figures
and dates but did analyze texts from his Victorian perspective. He was old

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CHRONIQUE 147
fashioned enough to be involved in bibliography, too, and had disagreements

with A. W. Pollard. Sir Sidney did not have ail the facts that Schoenbaum and
others have unearthed nor did he have any experience with what I call the
womanifestoes and other sex-sensitive political approaches to The Bard. Sir
Sidney is just mentioned in passing in David Bevington (familiar to readers
here)'s Shakespeare and Biography (Oxford University Press, 2010) which
briefly sums up biographers of Shakespeare. They are ail pretty much in the
position of the man who wrote The Quest for Corvo. Shakespeare biographers
have even fewer personal facts to consider than anyone who tries to winkle
out the real Fr. Rolfe. One thing that Sir Sidney was a little weak on was the
appréciation of dramatic poetry. I think of a line in Mordecai Richler's novel
Joshua Then and Now in which a cultivated woman criticizes her uncouth
husband. «'Shakespeare', he said. 'Take away the fancy costumes and the
swordplay and what are you left with ? Poetry, for Christ's sake.' » Or the largely
fact-free biography.
*
As for Shakespeare's personality, or the comparison of the work itself

with that of ail his contemporaries and maybe every other writer, the task
is monumental. Peter Holbrook in Shakespeare's Individualism (Cambridge
University Press, 2011, US $ 95.00) takes on the task boldly and faces up to
the chaos and contradictions in the now popular Theory of literature that tends
to feature politics over persons and regards mere stageplays as simply grist for
the critical rather than works of art, texts to be interpreted in terms of today
rather than as relevant to the societal matrix for which they were long ago
created. The old Humanism is inherent in his focus on humanity and the New
Criticism resurfaces in his close explications de texte, many of them having
what we call now the «Wow factor». Holbrook speaks of both the left and
literature, of both Marx and morality, of both the individual and society, ail
as he sees them treated in Shakespeare's works and in the modem, slanted,
often wrongheaded criticism. He has a bad word for the New Historicism. He
assaults fascist-minded libérais. He takes a highly principled and consistent
stand and is certain thereby to arouse ire in some quarters and even more
critical writing both defensive and denunciatory. His opponents had best take
care, for Holbrook is well armed and in good fighting fit. He raises questions
about what Shakespeare's personal values may have been and the extent to
which they may or may not have shaped the work of a commercial playwright
who had to face not only the restrictions imposed by the authorities of his
time but the préjudices and principles held by the members of his audience,
groundlings included. Shakespeare was one of Her Majesty's Servants and
also the servant of his paying public. Under such constraints it is amazing he
has served the whole world of culture ever since his time. That is his true value.

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148 CHRONIQUE
Rodopi (Amsterdam and 248 East 44th Street in New York City, 10017) has
a nice sériés in values inquiry and I have seen and much enjoyed the papers in
Nicold Machiavelli (2011, € 25.00 in paperback of about 100 pages) edited by
the founder of the Value Inquiry sériés, Leonidas Donskis (Vytautas Magnus,
Lithuania). The other contributors of essays are Timo Airaksinen and Olli
Loukola (both of Helsinki), Hubert Schleichert (Konstanz), Catalin Avramescu
(Bucharest), and Juhanna Lemetti. They show as they discuss «history, power,
and virtue » that the shrewd Florentine has had wide influence way beyond his
native Italy and they give us wiser insights than the Americans who look to
Machiavelli as a business management guru. They «understand him against
the historical and political backdrop», as one of them says. There are obvious
statements («he did not think highly of ecclesiastical principalities and the
papal state») but also quite a few surprises here.
Cambridge University Press is a reliable major source for Renaissance

books of scholarly worth. Recent paperbacks (2011) include The Cambridge
Companion to Rabelais US $ 28.99. It ought to have included a piece by M.
A. Screech, the only translator who brings across the magnificent wordplay in
Rabelais' delightful and demanding French. This collection more than some
others contains some connections. Too often essays are collected which might
well have appeared separately in the appropriately peer-reviewed scholarly
journals, but you have heard me go on about that before. What we need most
are new discoveries, novel approaches, originality.
There has been a lot of effort of late to take a new tack on Machiavelli and
as Machiavelli and Sun Tzu are used these days in unusual applications, so even
is Shakespeare. Kenji Yoshino is a professor of law at New York University
who teaches a popular course in which Shakespeare's plays are paired with
modem law cases such as that of O. J. Simpson. This only works now and
then but I have found that if you allow students to talk about anything but the
literary text (race instead of Othello or Huckleberry Finn, for instance) it does
produce class discussion, albeit not in the field in which the lecturer is expert.
The book is A Thousand Times More Fair (HarperCollins, 2011, US $ 26.99).
It contains 10 essays on the whole inventive corpus and on individual topics.
Read Machiavellian Democracy by John R McCormack (Chicago, US $ 27.99),
a very interesting approach by a professor of political science, who here
applies theory to the famous Discourses) ; Actors and Acting in Shakespeare 's
Time by John H. Astington (Toronto), which surveys the players' training
and performance from Richard Tarleton to Thomas Betterton and is a notable
contribution to this aspect of theater now increasing in popularity among

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CHRONIQUE 149
scholars ; and The Cambridge Companion to English Renaissance Tragedy

(US $ 29.99), a collection of 10 essays on context, form, and performance
onstage and in film followed by 9 on individual works : The Spanish Tragedy,
Dr. Faustus, Edward II, Arden of Faversham, The Revenger 's Tragedy, The
Tragedy ofMiriam, The Changeling, The Duchess ofMalfi, and 'Tis Pity She 's
a Whore, the whole edited by Emma Smith (Hertford, Oxon.) & Garrett A.
Sullivan, Jr. (Penn State). Hardcover books 2011 from Cambridge include
English Revenge Drama by Linda Woodbridge (Penn State) with an emphasis
on fairness especially in economic redress (US $ 95.00 and well worth it);
Cupid in Early Modem Literature and Culture by Jane Kingsley-Smith
(Roehampton) and is original in topic of spécial interest to students of Sidney,
Marlowe, Spenser, and Shakespeare and benefits from her popular lecturing at
Shakespeare's Globe (US $ 90.00); Shakespeare's Memory Theatre by Lina
Perkins Wilder (Connecticut College) connecting objects both present and
absent with the theater of memory and theatrical performance (US $ 90.00) ;
The Language of Space in Court Performance by Janette Dillon (Nottingham)
in which she surprises with détail about not only space as manipulated for
drama in theatrical présentation but even at the execution of Mary, Queen of
Scots (US $ 90.00), informative and insightful ; The Strugglefor Shakespeare 's
Text by Gabriel Egan (editor of the journals Shakespeare and Theatre
Notebook), the first général survey, and very convincing as it demonstrates
how in the twentieth century the New Bibliography taught editors to appreciate
better the early éditions of Shakespeare and in the latter half of the century
computer technology aided éditorial work (US $ 90.00) ; and A History ofthe
[Inca] Khipu by Galen Brokaw (Buffalo) in which the Andean non-literary
society from pre-Columbian through the first 120 years of colonialism under
the Spanish handled semiotic functions, oral transmission, khipu records
(thought idolatrous by the conquistadores) as natives and occupiers lived and
worked together in Peru. Cambridge University Press alone cuts out the work
of keeping up for Shakespeare scholars and really the only thing to do is to
specialize, otherwise one cannot keep up. Later we shall mention the annual
global Shakespeare bibliography. That makes it abundantly clear that there is
more every year than anyone can handle. We cannot even mention here ail the
university press books that come out each and every trimester. See the annual
international Shakespeare bibliography, mentioned later here. We try to bring
to your attention some of the ones most likely to be useful to you.
Connections between «visuality» and ethical standards and behavior in

James A. Knapp (Palgrave/Macmillan, 2011) takes about 200 pages and costs
US $ 85.00. Knapp (Loyola, Chicago) contends that these authors operated at a
moment when traditional assumptions about knowledge, virtue, and perception
were breaking down. If you believe that you will find his short book interesting
and if you do not you will not. The phenomenon of phenomenology's rise

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150 CHRONIQUE
does not get universal agreement, but certainly anything so common deserves
discussion.
*
Shakespeare and the Grammar of Forgiveness (Cornell University Press,

2011, US $ 45.00) by Sarah Beckworth (Duke) deals with a time of change, the
undeniably crucial Reformation, with ail its altérations of religion including
the concepts and rituals of confession, absolution, penance, forgiveness,
and redemption. Examining the language of Shakespeare - that is where the
grammar cornes in to what otherwise might be Shakespeare and Forgiveness
- she finds new détails and new richness especially in the late dramas. We
must remember, however, that Shakespeare was not a professional philosopher
or theologian but a man of the theater. Fortunately Ms. Beckworth is from a
theater department, but she has been busy in the library.
What we modems make of plays designed for physical stages other than
ours is of great interest to some. Plays may owe their scripts to the platforms
on which the works were first produced, for example the way Dr. Faustus starts
with a chorus and an inner stage or the way two actions in Middleton's Women
Beware Women run simultaneously on upper and lower stages (so we used a
barn with a hayloft for a summer theater production when I was in college).
Joe Falocco (Penn State at Erie) in Reimagining Shakespeare 's Playhouse (D.
S. Brewer, 2010, US $ 90.00) surveys the attempts to put on Shakespeare's
plays in what we think The Globe looked like. William Poel tried that, critics
such as Adams urged it, people came up with one version of the platform stage
or other in Stratford (Canada) or Stratford (England), and so on. It seems to me
that unless you are going to act the way the Elizabethans did, presentationally
and not conversationally, and let the closely gathered audience interact with
the actors, as the groundlings did ion Shakespeare's time, you are much better
off without any attempt at a pseudo-Elizabethan stage. Make it look more like
a movie or télévision if you want to please modem audiences. If you want
a more authentic Renaissance stage do not guess about The Globe but look
at the drawing of The Fortune and build that as well as you can, but Globe
or Fortune is Ye Olde Fakerie, really. And audiences do not want to stand
for hours at a play. Where is your authenticity if they do not and casting,
performing, costume, etc., are modem, even kooky ? Are you really ready for
a boy as Lady Macbeth or Julius Caesar in doublets, ruffs, and hose ? That
would be rather Elizabethan. Macbeth in a kilt or Brutus in a toga is not the
way Shakespeare's audiences saw the plays. These days such things are pretty
much recommended - unless you stage the plays in modem dress or in some
fantastic way from the Far East, or Far Out.
Involving regular people rather than artists looking for beauty or novelty
(or attention or self-indulgence) is Changes of State : Nature and the Limits

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CHRONIQUE 151
ofthe City in Early Modem Natural Law (Princeton University Press, 2011,
US $ 35.00), one of the most reasonably priced hardbound books I have read
recently and one of the most reasonably argued. Annabel S. Brett (Cantab.) has
amassed a great deal of information and delivers it and, as importantly, original
insights of great value, with elegance, impressively, memorably. Early Modem
discourse of what the community and commonwealth is and ought to be is
a riveting topic, especially in these days of immigration and naturalization,
environmentalism and preservationism, and debate over ail sorts of boundaries
both physical and mental, personal and political, what is «in» and what is
«out» at ail levels. Highly recommended. What The Renaissance coped
with in terns of balance between tradition and modernity, between mankind
and nature, between freedom and order, between «a fortress built by nature
for herself» and expansionism, between city and country, states and a new
relationship between God and His création, proves a worthy topic for an
exceptionally talented scholar and a good read for the rest of us.
For the 2011 season The Globe in London undertook to present ail 38 of
Shakespeare's plays in 38 différent languages, such as Titus Andronicus in
Cantonese and The Taming ofthe Shrew in Urdu. As far as I can determine they
did not attempt (say) Hamlet in Cornish or Macbeth in Manx but the company
did offer Love's Labour's Lost in Sign Language (British variety). I have been
unable to get numbers about what attendance records their 38 productions were
able to draw in London, historié capital of a famously monolingual English
world although by now London is very multicultural and quite possibly could
fill the Wooden O for The Tempest in some dialect of Arabie. The plan does
underline Shakespeare's worldwide acceptance. It is no more weird, perhaps,
than a recent film of The Tempest with a strong minded Pospera, not a Prospero.
I have always thought Michelangelo ought to have stuck with sculpture

and not painted (pictures of statues, I often feel), because there were better
painters around, but one cannot présumé to tell geniuses what to do. One thing
he seems to have done is a pietà for Vittoria Colonna, featured in a new book
by the art historian and restorer (of Moses, etc., where he left the stupid horns
on the original) Antonio Forcellino. On the cover and much discussed in the
book is this painting, a somewhat regrettable example of (to use a phrase in the
book as translated by Lucinda Byatt) «devotional melodrama». It shows the
dead Christ having slipped from the lap of His mother and supported by two
putti quite unequal to the task of supporting a dead adult. The Virgin, busty
and with a waist as broad as the shoulders of the dead Christ, is posed in an
anguished expression I can only describe as oy veh. This picture on a panel
escaped the widespread cleaning binge of the nineteenth century and now is

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152 CHRONIQUE
being restored for a private American collector. In any case, though I do not
like the painting, it is always interesting to hear of new technologies applied to
the restoration of Renaissance art, so you may enjoy The Lost Michelangelos
(Polity Press, 2011, US $ 22.95). The book could have been shorter if the
author had spoken less about himself, colorful art detective though he is. I
fear people want A Michelangelo rather than a great work of beautiful art. One
alleged Michelangelo found recently behind a sofa is said if real to be worth $
300 million, and it is not even a finished painting. Buy a Raphaël if you can get
one ; it will be cheaper and more décorative.
Arthur Phillips has published the forged play Vortigern (a clinker) with
a fake memoir as The Tragedy of Arthur (Random House, US $ 26.00). The
play has its moments, though few and far between, and its clumsiness makes
us wonder if anyone wants to collect and comment upon the lines in authentic
Shakespeare which Jonson says the master should have « blotted » out. Where
do they occur, why, what is wrong with them, and why ? One answer is padding
to fill out an iambic pentameter, but Shakespeare on occasion will divide a
line between two or three speakers, which helps. Remember that objectionable
lines in texts can resuit not only from the carelessness by the writer and/or
editor (as when Thomas Hardy speaks of the largest érection on the heath)
but from changes in the language for which the writer cannot be blamed
(Wordsworth's «a poet cannot help be gay»). You may not want to take on
the task of determining when, you might say, Shakespeare was not himself but
you will be intrigued by this novel as the author struggles with his publisher
over the authenticity of the play. It ail is handled with a certain deviousness.
The eighteenth-century forger William Henry Ireland would quite understand.
Ulrike Kiipper (who teaches «at a college near Cologne »)'s doctoral
thesis has been published by Peter Lang (2011) as William Shakespeare's A
Midsummer Night's Dream in the History of Music Theater (US $ 76.95).
This is a methodical comparison of the play text with the history of musical
présentations and their libretti. We ail wish we could have seen the play, with
Mendelssohn's music, in the extravagant stage production by Max Reinhardt
but there is the film of 1935. There are striking illustrations in this book and
référencés to Offenbach, opéra (including Nicolai's version of The Merry
Wives of Windsor), and much more, great thoroughness if not a lot of depth.
Shakespeare in opéra is interesting. I published an article myself on « Harnlet
as Opéra» (in Point ofView in India) and now Christoph Clausen (Berlin) has
a survey of Shakespeare and opéra in another book from Peter Lang I shall go
on mention. In such attempts we ail run into the same difficultés. The printed
text has to work without the actual music, and who goes to the opéra to hear

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CHRONIQUE 153
the words ? Hardly anyone, and just as well, because the majority of singers hit
the notes but do not get ail the words across, or if they articulate well they may
be drowned out by the orchestra. That other book from Peter Lang contains
essays edited by Stefani Brusberg-Kiermeir (currently at Hildesheim) & Jôrg
Helbig (Alps Adriatic, Austria) and is called Sh@kesperae in the Media. It
was first published 2004 and revised in 2010 for Peter Lang's Britannia Texts
in English. It contains a nice variety of interviews and articles on The Bard
onstage, in silent film, on télévision, etc.
Another subjective paragraph follows. You probably realize that ail

commentary is subjective. Readers here may be tired of hearing my opinion
that Shakespeare on Film is a weak sister in the criticism, perhaps having
something to do with Edward Albee's observation that words are the enemy of
motion pictures. Shakespeare is « words, words, words » with a images for the
imagination and a music of their own. So it is a pleasure to be able to notice
a book by Patrick J. Cook who knows ail the technical détails and gives us
a detailed scene-by-scene study of Hamlet in the hands of Olivier, Zeffirelli,
Branagh, and Almereyda, called Cinematic Hamlet (Ohio University Press,
2011, US $ 55.00). Hamlet is too long for the modem stage and is adapted there
and often more effectively onscreen. In films you can do things impossible in the
theater such as draw attention to small objects or facial expressions with close
ups, use dissolves to indicate the passage of time, and in Hamlet for example
comment on the plot as you stage scenes along the corridors of a castle, get up
on the battlements, orchestrate connections between scenes, use collage to bring
back Hamlet's dying memories of people he has killed, and employ caméra
angles and mood music as much as you like. You can always eut lines, even
scenes, eliminate characters such as Fortinbras, and so on. You can do the whole
text, as Branagh did when Zefferilli beat him to an effective eut version, and you
can try any kind of an update, such as Hamlet in a Blockbuster video store in
Almeretyda's weird version, which also has many allusions to earlier cinéma.
In the cleverest adaptations «devices» are not «overthrown». Shakespeare on
Film has not progressed a great deal since Jack Jorgen and as time has gone
by really kooky screen adaptations, such as Derek Jarman's, challenge critics
to explain precisely how and why «the movie is not like the book» and if The
Bard is somehow entitled to receive spécial treatment in what screenwriters call
«treatments». There are many theorists at work but to me it seems wrong to call
Shakespeare on Film a spécial genre rather than simply another kind of stage to
screen business. That is unnecessary and unwise. Maybe we need a theory of
Theory.
*
From Harvard University Press (2010) come, from TriLiteral distributors

whose paperwork never bothers to cite prices, new books in the extensive and

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154 CHRONIQUE
admirable I Tatti sériés of Renaissance works originally in Latin. A number of

charitable funds account for the publication of these texts which are of limited
readership but serious importance to Renaissance scholars. The latest books
are the following: Panormita (Antonio Beccadelli 1394 - 1471)'s epigrams of
Hermaphroditus (The Hermaphrodite) that were credited with giving support
to The Reformation and in time even the French Révolution (the book edited
and translated by Holt Parker of Cincinnati) ; Florentius Musicus (Florentius
de Faxolis, d. 1496)'s Liber musica (Book of Music), a beautifully illuminated
parchment MS «possessed of wonderful skill» and presented to Ascanio,
Cardinal Sforza (here edited and translated by Bonnie J. Blackburn of Oxford
and Leofranc Holford-Strevens of Oxford University Press); Humanist
Tragedies (Albertino Musato's Ecerinis of 1314, Antionio Loschi's Achilles
of 1374, Gregorio Correro's Progne of about 1429, Leonardo Dati's Hyempsal
of 1492, and Marcellino Veradi's Femadis severatus of 1493), ail basically
upping the Senecan sensationalism of revenge and practically unknown to
most cholars, ail translated by Gary R. Grund (Rhode Island College); and
Federico, Cardinal Borromeo's De Pictura sacra (On Religious Painting)
and Musœum (Muséum, the institution being the Ambrosiana) the Latin texts
edited and for the first time given English translation, by Kenneth S. Rothwell,
Jr, & Pamela M. Jones, both of the University of Massachusetts at Boston. This
last book enunciates the doctrines of, respectively, 1624 and 1625 regarding
the way religious art ought to be created and regarded and so is of importance
to the history of art production and collection. The Humanist Tragedies is a
companion to the basically Plautine and Terential Hunmanist Comedies in this
sériés. The comedies may not be very amusing in translation but perhaps (as
Logan Bester says in Simon Gray's novel Simple People) we may «lay the
responsibility... with the originals ». At least they avoid the bombast of Senecan
tragedy, rediscovered by Lovato dei Lovati in the very early fourteenth century.
Seneca's closet dramas were to have a baleful influence on popular vernacular
Renaissance staged drama although they fitted the virtuoso and oratorical tastes
of the era and gave the public the violence they liked. There is a limited market
for ail these books but they are low priced, generally US $ 29.95 in hardcover.
By the way, Harvard has also published in a lovely little book (2010) David
R. Slavitt's graceful translation of Dante's La Vita nuova. I am not convinced
that Dante's idea of romantic love (infatuation at first glance) always is the first
step toward a spiritual journey. It quite frequently, absent a brush-off, leads to
carnal rather than spiritual enlightenment.
What S. R. Gardiner called the «imaginative Protestantism» in Spenser

is slightly out of favor, long poems more so, and the Mutabilitie Cantos of
The Fairie Queene go unread by a dozen or more college students for each
one subjected to Canto One of that poetic romance, plus légions more. The
critics, however, seek to find something to talk about in connection with this

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CHRONIQUE 155
major if classic (unread but you have to say you read) poet so here is the
first anthology of essays by a number of experts from the UK, US, Ireland,
and India. It appears as Celebrating Mutabilitie (Manchester University Press,
2010, US $74.95). This book has been edited by Jane Grogan (University
College, Dublin). It is for Spenserians only but extremely well done for them.
Morality, mutability, and mortality are still of much concern in literature and
one essay records the reactions of Seamus Heaney to these cantos. Heaney has
also liked Beowulf but I see no evidence of the influence on him of either the
old epic or the Spenserian cantos.
The so-called queering of literature continues apace. Alan Sinfield (who

teaches Sexual Dissidence at Sussex) writes : « In the mid-twentieth century,
the queerness of Trolius and Cressida was so manifest that hardly anyone was
bold enough to mention it, for fear of betraying insider knowledge ». Soon after
in the academic careerist contest insider knowledge was boldly proclaimed not
only by feminists but homosexuals. This was sometimes «coming out» and on
occasion an effective way to claim expertise and demand promotion without
having to meet the standards of the Old Boys because in Women's Studies and
Gay Studies preserves outsiders were not permitted to tread. The libérais can
be as fascist as the conservatives. Mahdavi Menon (American) has now edited
a companion to the complété works (four dozen items, including Cardenio) of
Shakespeare in which the queer theorists have a field day, with, naturally, more
success with some plays than others. What can you make of «Othello's pénis»
or Romeo and Juliet's « love death », not to mention « ass play » in A Midsummer
Night's Dream » ? Where does maie or female bonding leave off and same-sex
sex come in ? I find a some of the essays quite over the top, but then men in
drag calling themselves Bertha Vanation or Fuschia Shock never have been
subtle. Even lesbians have rejoiced in being outrageous. Whatever your sex, or
sexual orientation (as we say now), you certainly will learn a lot if you check
out, dude, this occasionally vulgar and basically vital collection. The book is
Shakesqueer (Duke University Press, 2011, US $ 99,95 in hardcover, US $
27.95 in paperback) and you will not be thought to be flaunting an alternate
lifestyle (formerly called perversion) if you are seen reading it.
Isaac Casaubon, the Jews, and a Forgotten Chapter in Renaissance

Scholarship cornes from Harvard University whose Houghton Library holds
two volumes that belonged to this Protestant scholar (1559-1614). Anthony
Grafton (Princeton) & Joanna Winberg (Oxon.) have brilliantly researched
Casaubon's dévotion to Hebrew literature. They put Casaubon securely into
the history of the revival of Hebrew in the sixteenth century and they explore
many of his and other, related works. It was Tyndal and not Talmud and such

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that was of principal importance. Still both Catholics and Protestants wanted
to understand Hebrew and to read The Torah, The Talmud, the Mishnah and
even such occult texts as The Zohar. Frankly, one can get bogged down in this
book in extensive discussion of the Passover in the Jewish calendar and similar
small matters but indeed the revival of Hebrew study must be counted with
that of Greek and Latin as part of the foundation of The Renaissance in the
sciences and pseudosciences. It affected the secular and the occult outlooks as
well as literary matters. The two English universities were teaching Hebrew
and indeed Arabie, for similar purposes, long before they appointed a professor
of English. Edmund Wilson in « The Jews » (in A Piece of My Mind) says that
The Bible shaped the British character and that « something mystical, tough
and fierce, has a spécial affinity to Hebrew».
An attractive and unusual book is Palaces of Time (Harvard University

Press, 2011, distributed by TriLateral, US $ 35.00) which deals with the Jewish
calendar and culture in Early Modem Europe. Elisheva Carlebach (Columbia)
covers calendars which, as Walter Benjamin said, «do not measure time as
clocks do ; they are moments of historical consciousness ». The Jewish calendar
of The Renaissance has «disappeared with nary a trace», writes Carlebach,
although religious Jews still know of the Jewish months and carefully time
Sabbath observances. Renaissance Christians are claimed to have been
« unaware of the rôle their own culture played in the scenes that unfolded before
them » much as they were unaware of most if not ail of the specified times for
the performance of ritual magie and, often, of the good days and bad days in
superstition. For a clearer view of the mindset and customs of the European
Jews in the larger Christian society of Early Modem Europe, read this book. It
is full of scholarly détail and intriguing illustrations. It brings new information
on the cultural politics, the history of printing, «church time and market time»
astrology and numerology, the tum of the seasons (with some hints of blood and
water traditions), and naturally the «year of the world's création», which both
the Jews and Archbishop Ussher, relying on The Bible, got very wrong just as
people got the heliocentric system wrong. As for time, pre-Jewish sources gave
us counting in twelves (instead of 10, on the fingers, the basis of the Roman
system), 360 degrees, 12 hours of a.m. and twelve of p.m., dozens, and so on.
Shakespeare in production is the focus of L. Monique Pittman (Andrews,

Michigan)'s study as she collects and expands her previous work in Authorizing
Shakespeare on Film and Télévision. This is No. 19 in Peter Lang's Shakespeare
sériés (2010, US $ 78. 95). Here authorizing means the director becoming at
least part author of a production, her or his personal revision of Shakespeare
in minor ways aiming for contemporary notice or in major things such as

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Scotland PA (Billy Morrisette, 2001, that «didn't want to do anything that

really really was over-the-top » with Macbeth. Most of what is found here has
been earlier and better done with « gender, class, and ethnicity » in one or more
of the repetitive studies of Shakespeare on Film. Specialists may, however,
be interested in the TV aspects, BBC, CBC, and so on. TV reaches larger
audiences than staged work. Readers of these chroniques have heard of the
satirical Canadian sériés Slings and Arrows before this. They will recall it with
pleasure if they were lucky enough to see it on the CBC, PBS, or elsewhere.
Ronald Boal Williams (1902-984) taught for some four decades at Lake
Forest (IL). His family now has privately published his extensive study of 96
autos saramentales as The Staging of Play s in the Spanish Peninsula prior to
1600. The book is available from Bob Williams, 3003 South 39th Street, Omaha
NE 68105 at US $ 234.00. At this price the large book (of 727 pages in two
columns, which should have been like War and Peace revised several times
and eut by a third) will find few purchasers. It ought, however, to be available
from Lake Forest College on interlibrary loan. Hispanic specialists will find
a lot of the détail useful. The book reminds me of the fact that a great deal of
humanities studies are conducted over long periods and many never reach print.
My graduate college roommate Albert Edwin Graham spent ail his teaching
years working on an édition of John Gay's Fables and I could never drive him
to finish and publish. When he died I attempted to locate his papers. None of
his colleagues was at ail interested. Ail the years of research in the US and of
summers in the British Library was lost. Would it not be a good idea if scholars'
heirs or friends to deposited unfinished work in some central library or got it
completed and put it into e-books instead of interred with the bones ? Some
unpublished work may well be hardly worth publishing, true, but publishing
now has become so easy and inexpensive I say publish even as work in progress
if necessary and leave it to scholars to judge whether they can make use of the
work or not. Right now it seems to be «want not» ; nobody cares. I say «waste
not». Let's see those unseen efforts and if you are ashamed to show them,
edit them and make them présentable if you can. Dissertations are retrievable
and the books that some people have unsuccessfully attempted to make out of
dissertations may still have some value and so papers should be preserved. No
work is ever definitely completed anyway. We finally abandon it to print, or the
back drawer. We study poets' drafts, so why not scholars' notes?
Marcela Kostihovâ (Hamline) takes us through the post-communist Czech

Republic's affair with Shakespeare, 1989 to date, in Shakespeare in Transition
(Palgrave/Macmillan, 2010, US $ 80.00, a high price for a book of about 200
pages). Specialists will want this study, so the run must have been small and

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therefore the price is more than twice what one might expect. In translation
and production Shakespeare expectably was tailored to new political outlooks
because Hodek's idea of rendering Shakespeare into « seventeenth-century
Czech » was of course unwise on the face of it. The Czechs were »advised »
to redo their laws regarding homosexuality to get into the European Union
and there is quite a lot in this book on «non-normative masculinity» but
surprisingly no Czechs appear to have noticed that Shakespeare distrusted
democracy, clung to the Divine Right of Kings, and had ideas about women's
place not very attractive to feminists and even the rest of us today. The main
thing seemed to be the desire of the Czechs ever since (say) 1924 to look
modem and westernized. Shakespeare is an icon of the West, if not modem. The
Charles University celebrated (1964) the 400lh anniversary of Shakespeare's
birth and the popularity of Shakespeare in various performances aimed largely
at the young has grown since then.
Documents and commentaries on The Origin of Baroque Art in Rome are

well covered in a book of that title published by the Getty Muséum (2010,
US $ 50.00 in paperback). This is a translation by Andrew Hopkins & Arnold
Witte of Enstechung der Barockunst in Rom by Alois Reigl (1858-1905).
The work was first published in Vienna (1908) and first appeared in French
translation in 1995. It now is in English with essays by Hopkins («Riegl
Renaissances»), Witte («Reconstructing» Riegel's work), and Alina Payne
(«Beyond Kunstwollen»). «Ail topics connected with this work could not
be addressed», the editors confess, but its nature and importance are firmly
established and specialists will be grateful. The first chairs in art history were
established in German universities « about fifty years ago », we are told in the
Introduction, and the study of art history in German and other languages has
grown immensely deeper and wider in the intervening years. To this the Getty
muséum and its publications, always extremely scholarly and excellently
illustrated, have contributed importantly and, like Riegl's original lectures,
have brought together painting and sculpture and architecture as they express
the spirit of the âge. Baroque is much at odds with modem taste and practice
but is not to be regarded as inferior to other styles and indeed there are to this
reviewer's mind no modem artists the equal of Michelangelo and very few
ranking at or above the level of Caravaggio. This translation of a pioneering
work along with astute analyses of it clearly shows how the art of the Baroque
1550-1630 differed from but was not a décliné from the early Renaissance
masters. Getty books are distributed in the US by University of Chicago Press
and in the UK by Orca Book Services.

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CHRONIQUE 159
From Getty (2011) in the sériés from Mondavi in Italy of gorgeously

illustrated books on imagery cornes Paola Rapelli's Simboli del Potere
e Grandi Dinastie translated by Jay Hyams as Symbols of Power in Art
($ 24, 95). It runs from Alexander the Great to today but BHR readers will
of course be most interested in The Renaissance. The sériés features Unes to
détails in the illustrations which are explained in text. The expert tells you
what to notice and what it means. My only cavil about this beautiful and useful
book is that sometimes coronets are called crowns.
Also from Getty (2011, US $ 30.00 in paperback) cornes a study of

what happens when sacred art when it moves into a secular setting, Sacred
Possessions, essays on art collecting 1500-1900 edited by Gail Feigenbaum
(Getty Institute) & Sybille Ebert-Schifferer (Biblioteca Herziana, Max-Planck
Institute, Rome). Maria Giulia Aurigemma writes on a cardinal's collection
of paintings and reliquaries in Augsburg in 1566; Karen Butler writes about
Rubens having difficulty selling to a church in Vallicella ; Frances Gage writes
on Giulio Mancini who was writing between 1619 and 1621 ; Andréas Henning
writes on a Raphaël madonna in Dresden ; Todd R Oison writes on Caravaggio's
« dispossession and defamation » ; Brenda Deen Schilden writes on Gareielle,
Cardinal Pallioto (1522-1597)'s dissertation on «sacred and profane images»;
Valeska von Rosen writes on « decontextualization » in Roman collections
of 1600; and there is more, chiefly about later collections. The standard of
scholarship is high, as is usual with Getty publications. The illustrations are ail
black-and-white. The history of « aesthetic dévotion » we can call interesting,
a term critics tend to use when they have difficulty stating whether they think
something is good or bad. In the Getty tradition of beautifully illustrated books
that deserve the scholar's shelf rather than the coffee table is Flowers of the
Renaissance (2011. US $ 39.95) by Celia Fisher, author of The Médiéval
Flower Book previously published by the British Library. In the large format
new book Ms. Fisher writes authoritatively of the lilies of The Virgin, the
classical myth of Narcissus and his flower, irises as «messengers from God»,
fragrant roses, tulips seen in brocades from the Ottomans before the flowers
themselves arrived in Europe, the daisies, grasses, and lots more.
One Victorian found time to list ail the flowers and plants Shakespeare
ever mentioned. Someone has undertaken to list the Top 10 poets of ail time.
Shakespeare cornes in second, after Pablo Neruda. Dante is third. Chinese
and Japanese, Persians and others are missing, reflecting a western bias, in
my opinion. Ail criteria for such lists are personal and some ridiculous. My
opinion that Ezra Pound was the best American poet of the twentieth century
is obviously not widely shared. Still I happen to think that others, who object

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160 CHRONIQUE
to Pound's politics as I do but I do not take politics into account when judging
authors for quality at ail and not too much when estimating artistic influence
either. If I did I should have to rank Shakespeare very low because of his strong
belief in matters I have mentioned above such as the Divine Right of kings and
his fear of the démocratie and often fascist mob. He also seems to have been
hard on his children, as Milton was, and maybe did not sufficiently assist his
younger brother, Edmund, who was a minor actor and died obscure in 1608. If
he had ever had the sister Virginia Woolf wished on him I feel certain he would
never have regarded her as a writer of equal talent. What do you think ?
Back to western vs. eastern in art. Further from Getty (2011, US $ 30,00
in a large format paperback) is a prize winning and well illustrated study of
European contacts with China in commerce and culture, starting in the late
sixteenth century. Trade between Europe and impérial China began as early as
the first century AD, involving the Silk Road. The Italian presence of Marco
Polo in the east was followed as the fifteenth century saw Portuguese commerce
at Macao. We must stop thinking of The Renaissance as an exclusively
European phenomenon untouched by outside influences. Here 36 striking
works on paper document important interaction and are accompanied by
scholarly essays by Marcia Reed & Paola Demattè (who edit) plus Gang Song
& Richard E. Strassberg. There is mention of Juan Gonzalez de Mendoza's
history of China (1585), based a lot on Martin de Rada (1576), Gaspar de Cruz
(1569-1570), and Galeote Pereriera (1565), because Mendoza's was not the
first extensive notice of the Middle Kingdom to appear in the west. Maybe
those old books on China ought to be translated into Chinese these days. While
we are at this, who will write from the Chinese perspective the history of our
western Renaissance? Indeed, who will annually and fully evaluate in English
the publication in Asian languages of criticism of western literature and art of
our period ?
Women and the Practice of Médical Care in Early Modem Europe, 1400
1800 (Palgrave/Macmillan, 2011, US $ 85.00) is a fact packed survey, with
many fascinating insights into Renaissance medicine, from Leigh Whaley
(Acadia, Canada). She gives us pioneering scholarship on women healers as
medicine became a profession supplanting the barbers who drew blood (to
release humours) and wise women prepared healing herbs. There are more than
a hundred pages of learned notes and bibliography. The médical profession
needed and used the assistance of a long tradition of popular culture healing
arts.
*

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The Conquista could not have succeeded if the Spanish had not had the
assistance of native peoples such as the enemies of the Aztecs. John Charles
(Tulane) proves in Allies at Odds (University of New Mexico Press, 2010, US
$ 27.95) that in the highland parishes of the archdiocese of Lima from 1583
to 1671 the Catholic Church was engaged in a shaky partnership with natives
for the religious conversion and political control in the Peruvian Andes. The
church in addition to reaching converts in Quecha taught the natives Spanish
and the natives used the language on occasion to resist the local authorities and
the throne back in Spain. Ail colonial powers, as George Orwell pointed out
so effectively in his essay on Burma («Shooting an Eléphant»), operate in the
presence of and under the strong influence of the cololonized. The year 1583
marked the conquerors' issuance of codified missionary practices and the duties
of the local authorities under the viceroyalty and from then on the church and
the law were imposed upon and used by the indios in various ways. The year
1671 was the final one in the tenure of Archbishop Pedro de Villagomez. His
clérical life was a milestone of importance in the Christianizing of Peru. The
author makes full use of detailed archives and writes cogently and concisely.
The Hispanization ofthe Philippines (University of Wisconsin Press, 2011,

US $ 26.95) is the paperback reprint of the history of this oriental post of
Spain designed to cash in on the spice trade and compete with the Portuguese
in China and Japan (1595-1700). That established a connection with Mexico
at Acapulco and soon put Chinese merchants into power in the markets of
Manila. It was somewhat différent there because there was no gold for the
conquistadores and the missionaries (Augustinian, Augustinian Recollect,
Dominican, Franciscan, and Jesuit) had to deal more with the local chiefs than
in other cases. There was a constant shortage of secular clergy. The Filipinos
were not as amenable to change as were the populations Spain found in Mexico
and Peru. The effort was « a moderately successful experiment » although there
were five major uprisings prior to 1761 and it was not until the latter half of
he nineteenth century that Spain got the islands under full control. Then it lost
them to the United States as a resuit of the Spanish-American War. The author,
John Leddy Phelan (Wisconsin at Madison, d. 1976) in this important work
told the story clearly in the context of his broad understanding of the Spanish
expansion in the sixteenth century and later.
Two entries in a row regarding the Spanish exploits and exploitation abroad
irresistibly tempts me to insert a single paragraph to counter objections, too often
voiced, that Renaissance scholars are not concerned with issues (American for
«problems») of today. Please note that Spanish national outreach is related
to today's confusion about exceptionalism and globalization, as when the US

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162 CHRONIQUE
boldly states it embraces globalization and equal rights for ail peoples while
at the same time it thinks the US is « exceptional » and, consequently, that its
culture and commerce ought to be adopted around the world. A little bit of
violence makes the medicine go down. Global democracy Made in the USA
seems to be the goal, and the nation is ready to go abroad to kill to accomplis!)
that. Well, not the nation, just some leaders and their minority of followers,
because one cannot say that America is at war now, for most Americans are
not at war but at the mail. They are connected to hostilities abroad only by the
fact that as taxpayers they finance them, and hence are morally responsible.
Similarly, the ordinary Spaniard of The Renaissance was not personally
involved in the conquest, forced conversion, and ravaging of distant colonies.
But people in Renaissance Spain and some other impérial nations believed they
had the right or even the responsibility to seize, subdue, and run the Americas
(and more) for the glory of their European nation. There was likewise, of
course, the built-in belligerence of Christianity whose Founder commanded us
to live so as to attract unbelievers to the religion but if and when that failed to
«compel them to come in». That means warfare as a last, or even pre-emptive,
tactic in giving lesser breeds The Law.. This cannot be seen as anything better
than essentially political and mercantile but colonization was conducted in
the habits of religion. The papacy had been arrogant enough to hand out
new territories to Spain, for instance, as if the church owned them. As when
another pope handed Ireland to England, centuries of mayhem and murder
were to follow. Great wealth was accumulated. Spain mostly squandered it.
The powerful empires eventually tottered and fell. Look at Spain and Portugal
and Britain now. The future of the US is unsettled and unsettling. There is an
important lesson in this for us ail. Connecting history to the present can make
things much more involving for you scholars and your dwindling number
of students who are concerned with éducation and not mere instruction and
certification for lucrative careers. The «promise of a new éducation culture»
is everywhere, even in Teaching as if Life Matters (Johns Hopkins University
Press, 2011, US $ 50.00 in hardcover, US $ 25.00 in paperback). It is by
Christopher Uhl & Dana Stuchul, both of Penn State. They are concerned
with making éducation more about relationships in our own lives and with
others and everyone's relationship to society and environment, which they call
the «real world», a term they put in exculpatory quotation marks. They are
influenced by everything from Buddhists and Thomas Merton, both of whom
appear in the index, to Ivan Illich and Rudolf Steiner, who don't. The book
is not really up to this university press' usual high standard but it may prove
popular.
Here is something scholars have neglected: the Primaleon of Greece

romance needs modem study. It appeared in Spanish in 1512 and Richard Eden
translated it into English in 1546. We know a lot about Amadis of Gaul and

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need to know more about this and similar romances that influenced English
poetry, prose, and drama. Such old texts rather than being edited by the likes of
nineteenth-century enthusiasts with spare time could today be put online and
blogged about by scholars. How about a romance Internet site? There could
even be discussion about how deeds of derring-do and a romantic view of the
world have not only persisted to warp modem minds and ail arts. Making use
of the genre even as he warned that that way madness lies, Cervantes has a
message that, as we now say, resonates. Hispanicists ought to examine and
make that clear to students.
For those who want to do quite another kind of scholarship, how about
a complété collection of cartoons for Renaissance tapestries, which could
be online and accept blogs ? Andréa Doria, more famous for the sinking of a
ship named for him in modem times, commissioned a Furti I Giovi sériés of
tapestries. A cartoon that shows Jove relaxing in an over-elaborate alcove, with
the inévitable amorini in attendance, sold at auction in 2011 to the Metropolitan
Muséum for a staggering US $ 782,500, the artist's previous record being
US $ 374,00 (in 1988). The artist was Perino del Varga, a competent but
hardly exciting pupil of Raphaël. The cartoon is a mere 16x17. What can
London's Raphaël cartoons be worth? Perhaps selling them in these days of
British financial crisis and the so-called de-acquisitioning now common in
US muséums might not be beyond considering. The V&A has quite enough
attractions without the Raphaël cartoons, one might say. Some people will be
horrified at both the large purchases and the wide selling of muséum treasures
these days, not to mention auction prices. The Greeks are in no position to buy
the Elgin Marbles. In fact many Greeks may wish to unload a lot on the Getty
rather than default on the sovereign debt. In both art and finance politics and
pride must be taken into account. That is because art is collected and exhibited
as much for those reasons as for love and and public appréciation. Recently
the Greeks contrived to get some returns from the Getty of national treasures
but the extensive repatriation of foreign art now in muséums is never to be
expected. «What we have, we'll hold» Or maybe we shall try to sell it ay
auction, where an Andy Warhol, not a great Renaissance artist, brings nearly
$ 40 million.
Spain's wealth from the New World, a lot of it great art melted for the gold,
raised her as a European power and England came to fear and oppose her. The
«ethnopoetics of empire» appear in Eric J. Griffin (Millsaps)'s rousing study
of English Renaissance Drama and the Specter of Spain from University of
Pennsylvania Press (2009). This is an oft-told Hispanophobic taie but here it
is clearly outlined and well judged, whether in référencé to Spanish queens

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164 CHRONIQUE
of England or an English queen married to a Spanish king and ail the while
a contest between two burgeoning empires. There was plenty of drama both
religious and secular in the conflict. Popular dramatists such as Marlowe,
Kyd, Shakespeare and others made much of presenting it before increasingly
patriotic, xénophobie and prejudiced audiences. Still the threat to Britain was
very real with traitorous agents both religious and otherwise political at work.
The stage was an excellent platform for popular propaganda.
« Relocating race in the Renaissance», Jean Feerick (Brown)'s Strangers in

BloocL (University of Toronto Press, «reprinted 2010», US $ 60.00) brilliantly
grapples with racial discrimination in politics and religion, important and
largely destructive even before God's Chosen People. It is a major threat to
global harmony still. It is a cancer in the body politic even in démocratie
and multicultural republics. With reference to Early Modem constructed and
natural identities and migrations and mixes as reflected in a wide variety of
records and with attention to the challenge new demographies offered to
established ideas of purity of blood (with naturally connection to nationalism),
this book connects the issues of colonialism both historical and current. Here
are « blemished bloodlines » in that famous Irish hâter who patriotically and
self-promotingly launched on writing The Faerie Queene. Here likewise are
trenchant remarks on the author who, this scholar says, connected Cymbeline
with the climate of Virginia and set romances « far from 'home' » on colonized
islands, imaginatively seen. Diversity can bring dissension. Any insistence on
purity can foster pomposity and worse. Social rank and skin color divide the
teams. They battle wearing différent colors, and the game can become very
violent.
Personal violence in Europe from the Middle Ages to the present is the
subject of AHistory ofMurder (Polity Press, 2008 recently reprinted repeatedly)
by Pieter Spierenburg (Erasmus, Rotterdam). Honor and homicide, individuals
and the state, statistics and societal values, have, quite naturally, changed over
time. This has affected rich and poor, young and old, the religious and the
moral and the patriotic and the pathological, everyone. Renaissance does not
appear in this eminent scholar's index here but BHR readers will find much
of interest to them in these pages. From 1450 until fairly recently the murder
rate in Europe declined. Murder by Europeans acting abroad is another matter.
Norbert Elias' theory that we have ail become more civilized needs rethinking
in the light of post-Renaissance events in Europe and elsewhere.

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Another book dedicated to examining powerful beliefs in «purposeful

association» and the contest between societal conventions with received
opinions and personal experience, the individual and family and the larger
local and national community, coming from Polity 2010 is Society in Early
Modem England by Phil Worthington (Cantab.). The Renaissance undertook
to defîne or redefine modem and society. Commonwealth eventually came into
use. The first English book to have modem on the title page was by Léonard
Digges, completed by his son Thomas. It was a treatise on the importance of
arithmetic to military campaigns. It was called Stratioticus (1579).
A more benign foreign influence was seen in the grammars, dictionaries,

and textbooks used in the study of Greek, one of the major founts of The
Renaissance, as previously noted. The Renaissance west sought to incorporate
the civilization of ancient Greece in order to inform and improve the so-called
revived world. These efforts are the focus of Paul Botley (Warburg Institute)'s
valuable introduction to the basics of teaching the classical language in the
European classrooms of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. He appends
useful lists of ail Greek grammatical and lexical publications, texts from Venice
in 1471 (Chrysolauras) to an Alphabetum Grœcum from Paris in 1529 and of
printed Greek lexica from one in Milan in 1478 to one by S. da Sabio from
Venice of 1527. True, comparatively few people were involved in the revival
of Greek philosophy and literature. They were, however, importantly the very
important people in many cases. The world still is in the firm grip of the ancient
Greek ways of thinking in terms of ideals, dichotomies, democracy (supported
by a slave element), and so on if not in the modem Greek irresponsibility
and well deserved financial crisis. This rigorous study may not delve into ail
the ramifications but it certainly is a singular contribution to the history the
distribution and réputation of Greek texts in The Renaissance. It is a worthwhile
addition to the history of éducation, the history of the book, and the history of
scholarship in such centers of Renaissance learning as the Serene Republic and
the Sorbonne. Learning Greek in Western Europe, 1396-1529 was published
by the American Philosophical Society of Philadelphia in 2010. The extent to
which Renaissance learning of ancient Greek was a useful cultural tool rather
than a mere élégant accomplishment for certain of the upper classes requires
still more research.
In the sériés Bibliothèque Littéraire de la Renaissance from Honoré

Champion (Paris) we have with no notice of price of the hardcover book of
some 650 pages called L'Image du labyrinthe à la Renaissance. It is in French
except for the Iikes of quotations and the epigraphs for sections. Even the titles
of works in English are given in French and English quotations are translated

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into French in footnotes. It deals in great détail with «détours et arabesques

au temps de Shakespeare ». « Le monde abstrait de la conjecture, c'est le
labyrinthe». We have a trope shown to govern both style and content. «A
Labyrinth is a place made full of turnings & creekes, wherehence, he that is once
gotten in, can hardly get out againe ». The whole thing goes back to the ancient
world. It was a part of the classical tradition. Extravagant mazes are found in
Renaissance gardens and indeed ways of thought in matters both religious and
secular. In texts poetic, dramatic, and in prose and in « palimpsestes végétaux »
and in « bifurcations existentielles » and more the sort of thing that T. M. Evans
wrote about is in Peele and Shakespeare powerfully evident. There are 16
black-and-white illustrations in this book, chosen with care.
So much for mazes from Herodotus and Pliny, now some héritage from
the Middle Ages in The Renaissance as covered in Konrad Eisenbichler
(Toronto)'s paperback on Renaissance Medievalisms (Center for Reformation
& Renaissance Studies, Toronto, 2009). In this he and 16 contributors
present authoritative papers from a conférence held in Toronto in 2006 on
« the constantly changing continuum », « appropriating for current purposes »,
and «building upon the past». This involved Ashmole, Bishop Baie, Bidpai,
Boccaccio, Joan of Arc, Kepler, Salvago, [Duns] Scotus, Shakespeare, Italian
universities, Early Modem women's writings, fables and fabulist beasts, and
much more. We could have used something more on magie and pseudoscience
- the section of médiéval philosophy as translated into the later âge abounds in
unfamiliar French and German names but some familiar ones were involved in
the occult - and on the perversion as well as revision of médiéval religion and
superstition. Nonetheless this collection of essays is rich in détail and reminds
us that the boundaries of the Middle Ages and the Early Modem and even of
disciplines at any one given time are ill-defined and debatable.
Angus Vine (Sussex)'s study of antiquarian writing in Early Modem

England is In Defiance ofTime (Oxford University Press, 2010). It is based on
a doctoral thesis at Cambridge which addressed the works of John Camden,
John Leland, John Stow, John Twyne, and others. We recall that theirs was
an âge in which it was not impossible that a jury of 12 good men might ail be
forenamed John. A great deal of antiquarian interest was fueled by the interest
of the Tudors in claiming antiquity as a kind of certification of their shaky
tenure and of course in claiming the property of the médiéval church that they
seized with The Reformation. In Camden and Michael Drayton and some
others the search for and love for the glorious past produced men of genius.
The British love old costumes although to us foreigners it looks a bit strange to
see a woman these days in the uniform of a Beefeater or, in court, in a man's

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wig. The British can retaliate by asking us Americans why female lawyers in
the US tag themselves as «Esq. ». They may ask why our judges, who may or
may not have earned actual doctorates, may wear black doctoral gowns that
the Middle Ages picked up from the Muslims. The point has something to do
with legitimizing of the present. This brief book could have been longer had it
gone more into that aspect of antiquarianism.
In A Writer's Notebook Somerset Maugham remarks on Torquemada

calling him « the most pious créature of his âge, who perfected an instrument
of persécution which has cost more deaths and greater misery than many a
long and bloody war». I believe we need a good long book on the evils that
piety was responsible for in The Renaissance. That was an Age of Intolerance
more than an Age of Faith. I am one with the great French politician who kept
on his desk a warning : « Not too much zeal ».
Ashgate produces first-rate books in our scholarly field. We briefly group

a number any one of which is deserving of more space than we can afford due
to the fact that so many have arrived in a single packet. Request the Ashgate
catalogues for more, and the prices. The books are the following, each with its
own interest and virtues. Anne E. B. Coldiron (Florida State) contributes to
the study of women's writing particularly and the subject of pre-Elizabethan
cross-cultural connections in général in English Printing, Verse Translation,
and the Battle of the Sexes 1476-1557 addressing Christine de Pizan, Wynken
de Word, John Heywood, and more neglected others. Hassan Melehy (North
Carolina) spent years researching and writing The Poetics ofLiterary Transfer
in Early Modem France and England and gives us remarkable material on
Shakespeare, America and Western Dreaming, etc. Exceptionally good and
like ail good scholarship opening up new corridors of promise is Anthony Ellis
(Western Michigan) as he takes up the maies in Old Age, Masculinity, and Early
Modem Drama and «comic elders on the Italian and Shakespearean stage»
derived from the commedia dell'arte old pantaloons as seen in Machiavelli,
Lorenzino de' Medici, and Scala among other Italians and Shakespeare,
Jonson, and Middleton among others in English. The Italians are to the fore
in two translations of Machiavelli's II Principe discussed methodically and
at length (for US $ 60.00) by Alessandra Patrina (Padua) in Machiavelli in
the British Isles, England and Scotland but no Ireland, with particular and
extensive attention to William Fowler (b. 1560). Also from Italy were said to
come not just sly manipulators but prancing perverts. The homosexuals and
androgynes feature along with the gay minions of Henri III and others in Gary
Ferguson (Delaware)'s book (twice as long as most here listed) called Queer
(Re)Readings in the French Renaissance with faggotry, flagellation (the so

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168 CHRONIQUE
called «English vice», often blamed on corporal punishment in the Public

Schools)), and more. More conservative and concise is Elizabeth Mazzola
(City College CUNY)'s Women's Wealth and Women's Writing in Early
Modem English on the «little legacies» and materials of motherhood with
political parts played by Elizabeth and Mary, Queen of Scots and Arabella
Stuart as well as the very wealthy and influential Bess of Hardwick. If one did
not inherit power and money as a widow one could turn to piracy, if a man, as
we see in a very engaging survey of maritime rapacity as reflected in English
literature. This has been industriously and intriguingly put together by Claire
Jowitt (Nottingham Trent) and refers to many popular romances and dramas
as well as geopolitical boundaries, Elizabethan enthusiasm and expansionism,
and international law and commerce. Finally, in this list of books we are several
years late getting to sum up, cornes William E. Engel of the University of
the South (Sewannee), an expert of death and memory, with Chiastic Designs
in English Literature from Sidney to Shakespeare. Ail BHR readers know of
the scholars of theaters of memory such as Dame Frances Yates but not ail
scholars link systems of memory, so popular in The Renaissance and still in
use as recent contests among memory experts have shown us, with the way
those who use such systems wrote. The memory systems of Matteo Ricci and
others were are clearly influential as the length of Emund Burke's library floor.
Measure that distance and pace out a similar walk, turn, walk back as you read
Burke aloud and you will see what I mean.
Speaking of chiasmus and the ordering of literature, permit the intrusion

here of a jazzy paragraph with personal riffs. We tend to ignore, no matter how
much evidence we encounter, the habit of thinking in terms of opposites (« on
the one hand, on the other hand »), thinking in terms of three, selecting a string
on which to place a sériés of beads of a certain size, perhaps graduated like
pearls from smallest to largest and then diminishing to smallest, and so on.
Chiasmus bespeaks an unquenchable desire for order as well as the workman's
comfort in patterns given and restrictions applied. Firm arrangement can be
achieved by a number of rather simple means. Ordering can also lead thought
as obviously as stanza form can dictate content. There has to be a music to
which words are set if they are going to be effective. The rhymed couplet
makes everything sound more wise but the tune can bore us. The rhymed
couplet threatens the rinky-tink. The annoying bell that sounded, as some
readers may remember, at the end of the line in a typewriter can demolish.
Pope, for my money, is the most ingenious writer of rhymed couplets. In some
early drama and especially in the classical French drama I personally cannot
abide the ding at the end of the line, whether it was originally intended for the
actor to remember more easily or the dramatist to show off more elegantly.
Once in a while I yearn for enjambment, or someone taking off on a 450-word
paragraph like Faulkner, or daring a list of fours, or even tens, but not those

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damned threes. Once in a while I think that the substructure ought not to show.
Once in a while I believe great beauty calls for great bones being just visible
enough. Thank God that Shakespeare habitually took off from the givens and
was not «too précisé in every part». He achieves the priceless rather than
the preciousness of the likes of Sidney. By drawing metaphor from law in a
sonnet, for instance, Shakespeare avoided being too conventional. Sonnets ? It
is difficult to believe that a cry from the heart would run exactly 14 lines, don't
you think ? I like the rule of order to be given a bit of a twist. Let me surprise
you by taking an example of an old popular song called Ail by Myself which
begins «Ail by myself in the evening» and ends, as such songs used to do with
the title/opening words, with this delightfully deft wordplay :
I want to lean my lonely head on somebody's shoulder.
I don't want to grow older
Ail by myself.
That is even superior to How about Me ? Which concludes

And maybe a baby
Will crawl upon your knee
And wrap its arms about you—
But how about me ?
'Nuff said. Back to work. But, readers, and writers too, shake 'em up. Look
what you can do with defying the expected : « Babylon is fallen, is fallen, that
great city ». That beats «The great city of Babylon is fallen» ail hollow -and
biblical + slang works well. Once read, that sentence from holy writ will really
linger in the memory !
With the extensive «queering » of literary criticism and history of late why
has there not been a book on what led to the law of Henry VIII c.6 (1533)
which made sodomy a capital offense? D. J. West mentions it in passing in
his history of Homosexuality (1955). Before that secular English law did not
notice the offense.
Broadview (P.O.Box 1243, Peterborough, ON K9J 7H5, Canada) has a

nice line in inexpensive paperback éditions of individual Shakespeare plays
for classroom use. We have seen two 2010 examples: Twelfth Night (David
Swain, Southern New Hampshire, ed.) and King Lear (Craig Walker, éd.), with
extra materials such as sources, each US $ 12.95. Students will appreciate
the notes and may be amused by some of the extra materials such as Nahum
Tate's upbeat wrap up of King Lear, a happy ending or a bit surprised to see the
illustration in Twelfth Night from Helkiah Crooke in connection with gender.

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Tom Conley (Harvard) has published on the cartographie in cinéma and

on The Graphie Unconscious and the Self-Made Map in Early Modem French
literature and now (2011) he présents a clever, indeed intriguing paperback
called An Errant Eye (University of Minnesota Press, US $ 25.00). In that he
discusses poetry and typography in that literature, maps as literature, literature
as maps, a «new poetics of space». This takes him not only into emblem
books and woodeuts but also eclogues, sonnets, essays, many Renaissance
literary genres seen in terms of spatial invention and description. We gain new
perspectives on Pieter Apian, Gilles Corrozer, Gilles Deleuz, and others as well
as the better known Holbein, Petrarch, Rabelais, Montaigne, et al. We learn
that « the poet's vision is much like that of the typographer, who sees, discerns,
and orders the world in consort with the art of illustration» and undertakes
to «describe the world by mixing images, visual designs, and both aurai and
optical traits of language». Ancillary to this, there is matter here for the now
fashionable study of the printed book and to the study that got a big boost in
the last century of iconographie référencé. Of particular interest in the modem
world, where the visual is so important because of the new technology, is the
connection of ail this to our ever increasing concern with image, politics, and
subjectivity in time of faster and faster change in «the way we see things» and
ourselves in relation to them.
Richard Scholar (Oriel, Oxon.) gives us a pellucid survey of Montaigne's

search for truth in the Essais in Montaigne and the Art of FreeThinking (Peter
Lang, 2010, US $ 51.95), a pursuit which he gives «two cheers». Identity,
friendship, faith, freedom, these are but a few of the important topics taken up
in the honest essays which a gentleman of independent mind and independent
means wrote in Périgord. Scholars thinks of him as a Don Quixote, but he was
not mad if a little obsessed, and he was both idealist and realist. We are invited
to ruminate, digest, and absorb. By free-thinking he means not religious
unconformity but dedicated to letting the mind freely indulge in introspection
and conclude, with freedom of conscience and freedom from prejudice. The
Essais was once a banned book. Now it can be and ought to be read by anyone,
and Scholar helps us to read it with deeper appréciation and even to see how it
lits into the history of literature.
Jim al-Khalili (Surrey) is a theoretical nuclear physicist who offers us an

enlightening survey of «how Arabie science saved ancient knowledge and
gave is the Renaissance» in The House ofWisdom (Penguin, 2011, US $ 29.95
in hardcover). He explains the basis of Renaissance science, the theories

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and inventions (starting with astrology, a pseudoscience), mathematics and

medicine and more, inherited through the Arabs from earlier thought and
technology, and even how and why Arab science eventually went into décliné,
this author says previously too simplistically described. As a lecturer and
broadcaster he brings an accessible style to the story whether he is discussing
algebra or astronomy or the immateriality of the soul, the Egyptian background
or the efflorescene of Moorish Spain. Whether he is reporting the médicinal
use of the berries of « a bush called bunnu » (coffee, coming first from Yemen)
or the optics of al-Haytham six centuries before Newton, he is always to the
point and entertaining as well as highly informative. He is balanced regarding
what Europe knew from non-Arab as well as Arab sources and how Arab
science of today compares with the old. He concludes with this :
A scientific renaissance will not happen overnight and requires not only the
political will but also and [sic] understanding of the meaning of both academic
freedom and the scientific method itself. But if the Islamic world managed it
before, it can do it again.
Muses and Measures: Empirical Research Methods for the Humanities

(Cambridge Scholars Publishing) put together by Willie van Peer (Lancaster),
Jèmeljan Kakemulder (Utrecht) & Sonia Zyngier (Fédéral University of Rio de
Janiero) came out in 2007 but we did not see it until 2011. For the humanities
and studies ranging from aesthetics to cultural history this is a groundbreaking
and practical work on the connection between statistics and literary and
other study. It has many tables and charts and cornes with a diskette. It deals
with the différences between information in the humanities and sciences,
conceptions and misconceptions about empirical research, data collection
and interprétation, construction of questionnaires, inference statistics, and the
communication and importance of results. «Empirical research is not the only
way through which you can inform yourself and explore the world, but it is one
of the most powerful, perhaps even the very best of the methods we have as
humans to learn to know ourselves and the world in which we live. »
Besides reappraisals of well covered topics - one thinks of books on

Shakespeare's historiés, major Renaissance figures such as Machiavelli and
various sovereigns, productions of Renaissance plays onstage and for télévision
and the cinéma, and the list goes on - new topics are needed for dissertations
and books. Recently I saw on télévision an old movie called Noah 's Ark. It not
only combined silent movie scenes (with screen cards) and sound but also two
stories, a gritty World War I love story and a biblical epic on the scale of some
scenes in Intolerance. This brought to mind the better organized combination
of stories in King Lear. There was also the combination of comedy (often in

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172 CHRONIQUE
a subplot) with something else in the business of supplying popular drama

to the Renaissance stage. There must be a project or two in that quarter. If
readers will communicate to BHR subjects in Renaissance studies that need
investigation we can notice them here and comment on books that need to be
published as well as books that are being published. This would be a useful
service to graduate students and their advisers, established scholars looking for
the next opportunity, and publishers.
There are a number of recent books on English queens, inévitable with

the feminist movement. Here is an attractive one. However much you know
or think you know about Anne Boleyn, G. W. Bernard (Southampton)'s Anne
Boleyn: Fatal Attraction (Yale University Press, 2010, US $ 30.00) will seem
radically new to you. Bernard gives us a portrait of a headstrong woman who
long held out against not only Henry Percy (Northumberland) and Sir Thomas
Wyatt but for quite a while against Henry VIII (who previously seduced
and discarded her sister Mary) and finally sealed her fate with what Bernard
strongly argues were very likely some of the adulteries with which she was
charged. We may think of the current Prince of Wales being rejected by Diana's
sister before a younger Spencer woman married him. As a blog quoted in the
book says, Anne Boleyn was « a truly amazing woman, strong, independent,
intelligent, wittily seductive, ambitious, determined and fiery ». She never had
the Princess Diana's popular following but she was far more than someone a
royal wanted to bed. Anne Boleyn (her father was made Earl of Wiltshire) was
not nearly as noble nor as pretty as Merle Oberon (seen briefly, with only a
few rather stupid lines) in the film in which Charles Laughton was an obese,
blustering boor with a somehow unconvincing laugh, but she is described as
the film commences as the successor of Catherine of Aragon, said to be « a
respectable woman» (daughter of Ferdinand V), while Anne's failure was due
to quite the opposite character. So the movie's prologue states. At least Henry
was « fatally » attracted to Anne Boleyn as he was not to the severe Spanish
widow of his brother Arthur, whose marriage to the infanta was soon eut short
by Arthur, Prince of Wales's death. There are also new books on Katherine oif
Aragon : from Macmillan (US St. Martin's Press, 2011, US $ 27.99) Katherine
the Queen by Linda Porter, and from Faber & Faber (US Walker & Co., 2011,
US $ 28.00) Catherine of Aragon by Giles Tremett. Tremlett as the Guardian
's correspondent in Madrid is stronger on the historical background but both
biographers do well with the dramatic life of a queen whose Roman Catholic
faith did not fit well with the English king who broke with the pope, if basically
because he wanted to be defender of the nation, with a maie heir, rather than to
be Defender of the Faith. Despite the status of women, however royal, in their
era, ail these women were strong willed and influential.

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CHRONIQUE 173
For exciting fiction set in the reign of Henry VIII try a detective novel
(Heartstone, Viking, 2011, US $ 27.95) by the London lawyer C. J. Sansom.
He is also the author of a whodunit with the background of the rape of the
monasteries, Dissolution. Sansom's latest in a popular sériés featuring
accurate historical trappings présents his detective Matthew Shardlake and the
Battle of the Soient when France threatened to invade and sank the pride of
the RN, Mary Rose (1545). As for modem relevance, that war was costly and
unnecessary. The government, or at least the Court of Wards, as archives are
discovered to reveal, was riddled with corruption.
Madhavi Menon (American) continues her work on queer theory and

Shakespeare as editor now of «A Queer Companion to the Complété Works
of William Shakespeare« titled Shakesqueer (Duke University Press, 2011, US
$ 99.50 in hardcover, US $ 27.95 in paperback). The Bard is «queered» in
«forty-eight acts» with «absonate desire» in Cardenio, masochism in Henry
IV, Part 2, sodomy in Timon ofAthens, and « the leather men and lovely boys »
in Troilus and Cressida. There is some stretching to find perversion in more
famous works both where expected (as in the sonnets) and unexpected. This
book amply makes the point that queer theory is alive and well, though some
may find it sick. From this odd angle a great deal of startling and quite a bit
of valuable new insight into The Bard may come. Naturally with such a large
team the work is very uneven but there are some outstanding pieces.
Katherine Crawford (Vanderbilt) examines The Sexual Culture ofthe French

Renaissance (Cambridge University Press, 2010, US $ 33.00 in paperback).
She shows how after the last decade of the fifteenth century the Italian ideas
about masculinity and femininity, lust and procréation influenced French
thinking and practice. There are the Platonic and the promiscuous, minions and
mistresses, sexual (un)certainty and « polymorphous unperversity » as well as
queer promiscuity, lots more, and at ail levels of society. Interdisciplinary,
the study surprisingly and rewardingly connects sex with a range of topics
from horoscopes to politics as a heteronormality was being worked out. The
connection to literature, especially «bad» poetry, is underlined but this deeply
researched book is more a contribution to intellectual history than literary
history and indeed it is of value in the study of how «sexual culture was
written and performed » and it goes well beyond the boundaries of France and
The Renaissance
*
Shakespeare in Parts (Oxford University Press, 2010, $ 27.95) is the

paperback of the 2007 book by Simon Palfrey (Brasenose) & Tiffany Stern,

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174 CHRONIQUE
both of Oxford. Actors desiring to improve their understanding of the play

in production and academics seeking literary history and criticism have
made this reconstruction of the sides actors received compulsory reading for
Shakespearians. The actors read over the parts together (rehearsal) and without
directors blocking them went on and played, played with the parts handed
them (or, if they could not read, which now and then might have been the
case, read to them). A play might have 30 or more différent parts distributed.
The Elizabethan theater did not enjoy long runs and new plays were always
coming along to be learned while old ones suitable for revival were on the
boards. After Macbeth, a play analyzed with immense skill here, we learn that
Shakespeare tried to make his materials less ambiguous to the actors. They
still had to memorize, internalize, call on their talents, and after memorizing
go on. The collaborators here imaginative re-imagine whole characters and
scenes. We come away with sometimes radical revisions of our knowledge
and estimation of the plays. If you do not recall the 2007 book or never read
it, read it now.
Calvin Hoffman was an American of the non-Stratfordian school who was

convinced that Marlowe, even though Marlowe died many years before the
most of the plays we generally accept as by William Shakespeare, wrote the
works of Shakespeare. He and his wife set up a prize for the best work on
Marlowe. Presumably it is not required that it deals in attribution or discuss
any play other than those traditionally attributed to Marlowe. Information on
the 2012 compétition can be obtained before September 2012 by contacting
the Hoffman Prize administrator at the King's School, 25 The Precincts [of the
cathedral], Canterbury CTI 2ES, UK.
A critical examination by a knowledgeable expert of ail the works that have
won the prize over the years would be a welcome addition to the scholarship of
Marlowe. Who will take on the task ?
People keep asking why instead of still another book on some topic
(Shakespeare in the movies or Shakespeare and gender are often mentioned,
as well you know) there are not studies of neglected topics. What would I
suggest for a book or doctoral dissertation ? Off the top of my head cornes
the suggestion that The Renaissance is famous for the spread of a germ of
an idea so why not study the spread of actual germs in The Renaissance?
Europeans decimated native populations by bringing diseases to which they
had no immunity to the New World and syphilis, for instance, is often said
to have been brought to Europe and elsewhere as a resuit of Columbus' men
contracting the disease in the New World. The date 1494 is often given for
the start of a plague in Europe and 1505 for syphilis reaching China. Was in

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fact the disease unknown in Europe before the end of the fifteenth century ?
Creighton's neglected history of épidémies in Britain states that syphilis was
known there in the early fourteenth century. What are the facts, insofar as they
can be obtained and what, to go further, were the cultural and commercial
and political ramifications of this disease in Europe and elsewhere during
the expansion of The Renaissance ? Did syphilis have noticeable effects on
sufferers from it such as Erasmus, for instance? Did Edward VI die young
« wherein he sinned » as his sister Mary alleged ? (I think she disliked him on
religious grounds.) To what extent did religion or superstition still attribute
syphilis to demonic rather than pathological forces ? There have been a number
of books on Renaissance ideas of death and mourning, etc., so why not a full
investigation of this devastating disease ?
The astounding, prize-winning World Shakespeare Bibliography Online

costs US $ 340 a year.
*
Then there is what some consider to be pathological behavior rather than

pathological biology, in which some venture to include the vows of chastity
taken by nuns. «Women of God» are sometimes considered crazy (hysteria,
delusions, visions, hearing voices) as well as holy. Extraordinary women such
as Birgitta of Sweden, Louisa de Carvajel y Mendoza, Juliana of Norwich,
Margery Kempe, Catherine of Siena, Margaret Gascoigne, Gertrude More, and
more, including Benedictine nuns at Paris and Cambrai, Brigittines of Syon,
Carmelites of Antwerp appear in The Embodied Word (University of Notre
Dame Press, 2010, US $ 36.00), as Nancy Bradley Warren (Florida State) who
has written before about female spirituality here repeats much of that material
while examining what Ms. Warren terms « incarnationality » and nationality,
religion and other kinds of politics, spiritual exercises and autobiography,
and more. In early Christianity it may be that, as with the Mormons, more
women became converts than did men but women long remained second
class members of any congrégation. Sometimes they were shut away from
society. The médiéval period was marked not only by younger sons of the
nobility entering the church and by abandoned boys being brought up by the
church often becoming monks. There were also the daughters of rich and
poor families who for one reason or another did not marry and who joined
abandoned girls brought up by nuns in the convents. In Britain as in Italy many
women were put into convents for financial reasons because the convents
asked less dowry for nuns than families would have to pay to husbands. Of
course there were as well those who had a true vocation for the religious life.
Among cloistered and somewhat more secular women there were many of
remarkable intelligence and some of these left a record of their thoughts and
experiences, writing them down themselves or following directives to dictate

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them to their confessors. Sex entered in, in a way. «My lord Jésus Christ
has espoused me with His ring.» The nun was «like a bride» and no dowry
needed to be paid in some cases, never as much to join a nunnery as to get a
husband. For that aspect and may others nuns' writings are interesting, as is
the extent which illness (mental or physical) or other suffering was common
the nuns' lives. Perhaps suffering does bring people closer to God, or perhaps
it is over stressed in a religion whose symbol is a crucified man. To that Savior,
many pious women were wedded in spirit. This book explains something of
their lives. It is particularly informative as it bridges from the Old Religion
to Protestantism in The Renaissance. It took almost 1000 years for canon law
(an eleventh-century Catholic obsession) to be generally replaced by civil and
criminal law for ail. Both still discriminate against women. In the twenty-first
century women nevertheless are much engaged in church work, though the
number of nuns has declined. Many of those who have chosen to be nuns are
working importantly at this time in social service of some kind, commonly
less cloistered than ever. Women, married or not, single or even to use an
old phrase living in sin, are playing an ever larger rôle in modem society.
Women are gaining economic power, i. e. power and place in society. In The
Renaissance they had less chance of that.
More nuns. Sherry Velasco (Southern California) has written before this on
maie sexuality. Now she turns to Lesbians in Early Modem Spain (Vanderbilt
University Press, 2011, US $ 55.00). Recent scandais involving priests and
little boys so far have not set many thinking about nuns and little girls but
many people must have had a few suspicions about lesbians in convents. Ms.
Velasco has found plenty of evidence of lesbian desire if not so much overt
action in early Hispanic literary and historical documents. The idea that there
were no homosexuals before 1800 and the idea (Gore Vidal's) that homosexual
ought to be solely an adjective - that there are homosexual acts but not a
homosexual identity that some are born with rather than develop under certain
social conditions - now are much debated indeed. Eroticism and intimacy,
affection and activity among them also. Such persons as « Lieutenant» Catalina
de Erauso (who received a soldier's pension) startle us as much as later on the
Chevalier d'Eon or Charlotte Charke and female pirates, or female soldiers in
the US Civil War. Fear of female sexuality was closely connected to the Early
Modem persécution of witches. And was it rampant in the cloistered life where
some truly had a vocation to be brides of Christ but many were heterosexual
women locked away by their families or otherwise there pretty much against
their wills and inclinations. Lesbian ? Sure, just as same-sex female attraction
and action are to be found in La Celestina and the poetry of Sor Juana. Here
are not simply vague yearnings but couplings, threesomes, and more as Ms.
Velasco tells us of Spain and Mexico and so on. Here is something real to
put up against the fîctional heterosexual goings on so famously attributed to

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CHRONIQUE 177
a Portuguese nun. It turns out that celibates female as well as maie are not
always as celibate as you might think. Maybe we ought to consider celibacy
as a sexual perversion.
John L. Kessell (New Mexico, emeritus) in Pueblos, Spaniards, and the

Kingdom of New Mexico (University of Oklahoma Press, 2010, US $ 19.95)
présents a neat paperback narrative history that tells the story basically from
the refounder Diego de Vargas (governor 1691-1607, 1703-1704). Those who
want to know about what happened there after Onate (governor 1598-1609)
should read here. The Black Legend has new light thrown upon it.
Archipelagoes as a title suggests a collection of islands, of course, and the

book of this title by Simone Pinet (Cornell) from University of Minnesota
Press (2011, US $ 25.00 in paperback) speaks of insularity offering places for
adventure in the Spanish literature of chivalric romance (Amadis of Gaul, the
Island of Baratavia in Don Quixote and more, into the seventeenth century).
There is référencé to maps, cartography, etc. This is a very ambitious and eye
opening work of original scholarship concerning space, maravillia, and the
early novel, even «the foggy islands of truth». Highly recommended.
Two expensive books, one hardcover, one paperback, come lately to us

from Edinburgh University Press via the distributor Perseus. The hardcover
is Renaissance Transformations (2009, US 95.00). In that Margaret Healy
& Thomas Healy (both of Sussex) edit a collection of essays on English
writing by known and anonymous individuals and collaborators 1500-1650,
a time when the nature of authorship and publishing changed radically. The
contributors, mostly British, are Danielle Clark (University College. Dublin),
Andrew Hadfïeld (Sussex), Bernard Klein (Kent), Michelle O'Callaghan
(Reading), Neil Rhodes (St. Andrews), Jennifer Richards (Newcastle),
Michael Schoenfeldt (Michigan), William H. Sherman (York), Alan Stewart
(Columbia), and Susan Wiseman (Birbeck, London). Passing mention of the
daily journals that the East India Company after 1606 mandated be kept for
voyages suggests a promising.topic for research. The paperback is a Festschrift
for Stanley Stewart as Ben Jonson Journal 16: 1-2 (2009). Stewart was a co
founder of this journal. The editors are M. Thomas Hester (North Carolina
State) & Jeffrey Kahan (La Verne). The contributors besides the editors are
John Channing Briggs (California at Riverside), Tom Clayton (Minnesota),
Cyndia Susan Clegg (Pepperdine), Scott F. Crider (Dallas), Robert C. Evans
(Auburn), Richard Harp (Nevada at Las Vegas), Grâce Ioppollo (Reading),

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178 CHRONIQUE
Arthur F. Kinney (Massachusetts at Amherst), John Mulryan (St. Bonaventure),

Paul J. Voss (Georgia State), and Robert V. Young (North Carolina State).
Kahan questions Jonson's statement to William Drummond that Shakespeare
lacked «Arte», Tom Clayton has a «modest suggestion» regarding meter and
meaning in Shakespeare, and the winner of the Ben Jonson Discoveries Award
for 2009, Sarah van den Berg, writes well on Milton's Sonnet 23 («Me thought
I saw my late espousèd saint»), among other features.
You may happen to believe that Marshall McLuhan or even Robertson

Davies is a more important literary figure from Canada but a lot of Canadians
think the late Northrop Frye most eminent. His Collected Works have
reached Volume 28 with Northrop Frye's Writings on Shakespeare and the
Renaissance (University of Toronto Press, 2011). Troni Y. Grande & Garry
Sherbert, the couple who are the editors, both from the University of Regina
(Saskatchewan), state in their introduction that the volume includes almost
ail of Frye's published books, public lectures [including CBC broadcasting],
and introductions, along with one review, pertaining to Shakespeare and the
Renaissance, but excluding Milton». One wonders what has been omitted, and
why. Frye was essentially a charming lecturer and ail the work here appears in
chronological order of being first delivered orally. On winning the Governor
General's award for his 27th book (on Shakespeare) - he had been several
times nominated previously but had not been chosen - Frye did not turn up in
person but in a communication confessed it just landed on his desk on a «pile
of lecture notes». As to whether ail or most or just a small selection of the
material needs this expensive embalming, individual Renaissance experts will
have to judge for themselves. Some may say of this volume what Frye said of
the rhetoric of Hotspur: «Beautiful but self-indulgent». As in the Winter's Taie
(Act IV) some time has passed, and with it the old-fashioned lecturers whose
présentations in person were as polished as they were later in print, and the
question remains as to whether more recent scholarship is as humanistic and
as solid or more solid than Frye's. Still, on comedy and romance he has long
been read and quoted if not copied. The editors in the course of collecting,
editing, and arranging ail this material go so far as to claim that Frye has
« left his indelible mark on Shakespeare », but, frankly, not since Heminge &
Condell has that actually been done, not by any critic really, not Dr. Jonson,
not Bradley, no one. We critics are ail controlled by our birth and death dates
and our work suffers in the long run from two of the great forces Frye liked to
discuss, Time and Death.
Chris Adrian's third novel The Great Night (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2011,
US $ 26.00) is a retelling of A Midsummer Night's Dream, moved to San

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CHRONIQUE 179
Francisco, with a whole new look at fairies. This strays far from Shakespeare
but readers of BHR may enjoy it.
Catholic Culture in Early Modem England (University of Notre Dame

Press, 2011, US $ 40.00) deals with both religious and political aspects of
the Post-Reformation and involves ritual vestments, gender, autobiography,
conversion, subversion, and other matters. It is difficult to see why a paperback
of some 300 pages needed four of the contributors to edit the 11 papers. The
editors are Ronald Corthell (Kent State), Frances E. Dolan (California at Davis),
Christopher Highley (Ohio State) and Arthur F. Marotti (Wayne State). The
Roman Catholic community within the larger Protestant community involved,
Queen Henrietta Maria, William Allen who wrote of two English seminaries
although many Englishmen studied in collèges abroad in the period, and
Robert Preston who wrote of English collèges abroad. The essays touch on the
Catholics' houses and gardens as well as their interior lives, often involving
secrecy. Priest holes were necessary when priests were called traitors. Some
attention is given to English nuns abroad such as Dame Barbara Constable at
Cambrai. There is not enough about Catholic spies and martyrs but Fr. John
Gérard turns up with a mention of his underground activities as a hunted priest.
There is even a mention of him having a thorn from the crown of thorns,
among other relies. We need a comprehensive work on the relies honored in
The Renaissance and Reformation and their connection to art as well as to
superstition or piety. It would also be useful to have a study of precisely what
changes in doctrine and practice among the papists occurred as a resuit of the
establishment of the Anglican church and the extent to which various classes
were or were not able to follow their traditional Roman Catholic ways in a
Protestant nation which did not see their émancipation until 1825.
Charles Lamb said that he did not want to go to the theater to see King Lear
because he could stage it better in his mind while sitting in his chair at home. But
the play was written to be played, not played as it is today onstage and in other
média but played. Lynne Bradley (an independent scholar in Toronto) writes of
the « ironie double gesture » of its stage adaptations, whether rewritten (as by
Nahum Tate) or otherwise adapting Shakespeare's words to changing tastes.
His two plots, cleverly cobbled together because neither was long enough for
a play as his âge defined one, have told father/daughter stories and blindness as
to good and evil children, in drama and fiction. Sometimes there is an intention
to be true to Shakespeare however much one départs in détail ; sometimes
there is disagreement with Shakespeare's personal views, or, better, the views
expressed by Shakespeare's characters. There have also been burlesques and
other distortions. Most recently, after the New Criticism rose against the idea

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180 CHRONIQUE
of taking the text as point of departure rather than centrally important, the New
Criticism explication has been replaced by an emphasis on relevance to current
social and political agendas. There are fads, interestingly here well handled
feminist adaptations. There is always the swing of the pendulum. There is
always the director's and the actors' urge to put their own impress on the work
and in the case of plays there is almost always the commercial necessity to
listen to what Dr. Johnson called «the public voice», because any production
that does not please audiences closes, as theater folk say, like an umbrella. The
book that as the jargon goes historicizes adaptations is Adapîing King Lear for
the Stage (Ashgate, 2010. US $ 99.95).
The nature of critical discourse, it is no surprise to learn, reflects the nature

of those expressing themselves. (What I dislike is when it is so narrowly,
narcissistically, about themselves, so self-congratulatory, so self-serving.)
Increasingly, the humanities have involved a whole new class of academics,
not devoted to aesthetics but utility as they redefine it. The field is now full of
idealists and revolutionaries and thrashers and trashers. In my corner it is very
lively but essentially not about what we used to regard as literature very much.
Belles lettres has given way to bellwethers of new social movements. Kerwin
Lee Klein (California at Berkeley) has taken a high position above the fray and
explains in essays notable for clarity and grâce now sadly unusual in criticism,
in From History to Theory (University of California Press, 2011, US $ 39.95),
how the troops of American Politics and French Theory are lined up on the
battlefield, not to mention the insurgents, Freedom Fighters, terrorists and so
on. Klein explains the languages and the devious tactics. It is ail not so much
about the appréciation of texts but about the application of texts, usually used
as weapons in anti-establishment skirmishes by and between self-regarding
single-interest minorities of the formerly tired, poor, huddled masses, workers
in chains, etc. Révolutions take place not when the underclass is thoroughly
oppressed but when authority makes the fatal mistake of allowing them a
tiny bit of freedom. Then cornes révolution, which as I always say means
simply that the bottom goes to the top and the top goes to the bottom but the
tyrannical system does not disappear. The libéral left is just as fascist as the
conservative right. The formerly despised and rejected and oppressed become
just as oppressive as their former masters. They come into power and try to
make strict rules of their own, bend language to their will, quash ail freedom
of speech, rewrite history and re-read literature, frame the narrative to their
own will, shape thinking («philosophy») and reality («history», «politics»),
even redefine old words by the quote/unquote method. Ail this is to advance
their own agendas, their own préjudices even as they argue against controls
and préjudices. Maybe this has something to do with establishing a new order
on ground cleared by destruction (deconstructure, poststructuralism) for ail
but often it seems more a symptom of a burning desire for individuality,

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CHRONIQUE 181
even eccentricity. This book is essentially an episodic, and eventful, survey

of recent historiographie movements and academic language escaping from
common meaning into new, if very vague, critspeak. Those who study and
teach The Renaissance will find it ail very Relevant to the way the past is to
be Used. The so-called postmodern period needs to be seen more clearly in the
era now of tribal politics and culture wars and having to justify everything's
practical even monetary value. As Shakespeare's Henry V asks about the
battlefield, «Who hath measured the ground?» The answer is, largely, Klein.
He has bravely scouted. He has waded through reams of dauntingly difficult
critical writing. He has characterized the forces and counted the corpses left
by recent skirmishes. I had not realized death had undone so many or that
that fighting had been so fierce and so desperate, as in many wars of ail sorts,
so foolish. It has ravaged what we used to think as the Great Tradition of
history, philosophy, art, and the rest of the humanities. What taking the hill,
Mt. Fuku (Fukuyama), mobilizing and throwing into play what Klein calls
« antidemocratic forces » inside and outside the academy, has done to cultural
memory (to cite one victim) and what it has cost is staggering. In 2011 the
governors of US states got together to urge collèges and universities to get
more practical and stop any old-fashioned, non-commercial «emphasis in
broad libéral arts éducation». What is in the offing for Renaissance studies in
the US, or indeed in other countries that are being pushed to get with it for the
twenty-first century ?
Likewise certain to start conflict are sélections from Book 50 of Gonzalo

Fernândez de Oviedo y Valdés (1478-1557)'s extraordinary, giant and invaluable
Historia général y natural de las IncLies presented in English translation by
Glenn F. Dille (Bradley, emeritus) as Misfortunes and Shipwrecks in the Seas
ofthe Indies, Islands, and Mainland ofthe Océan Sea (1513-1548) (University
Press of Florida, 2011, US $ 64.95). Oviedo himself was involved in some of
these misadventures in the New World. He heard reports from others who were
involved as well as examined documents. He contributed this immense report
of a significant aspect the Spanish Conquest. It is a contribution to the history
of exploration and navigation and colonization, of commerce and trade routes
and political and social movements, of the island of Hispaniola and elsewhere,
and a great deal more. The narratives are fine examples of a certain kind of
unfussy narrative, often very entertaining and informative. He wrote not in
Latin as some advised him to do but in «mere Castillian». Oviedo claimed to
be no language scholar but a « plain-spoken » Spanish military man with 30
years of experience. He was decidedly not one of those whom he describes
as «promising to report marvels of the Indies, being themselves in Europe
and never having seen them». He began the «fourth part» of his history in
1594, he says. Once in a while we come up short at the sight of such a phrase
as «the city of Puerto Rico on the island of San Juan» or at some fearful

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182 CHRONIQUE
loss at sea. This is entrancing reading from an expert on the impact of the
conquista on the drama of the Golden Age of Spain. The translater notes:
«... I worked with the suspicion that in the end it was unlikely that any press
would be interested in sixteenth-century shipwreck accounts». We must
congratulate him for pressing on regardless. The University Press of Florida
also deserves crédit for recognizing the value of this material. There must be
many other scholars of The Renaissance out there uncertain about whether
publication of specialized material is possible. They should do their work and
seek publishers, subventions or grants, and in the end if ail else fails self
publish or at least deposit their manuscripts in university libraries. Few can
expect advances and guaranteed publication before they launch on projects
that interest them and for which they are wholly qualified. Attractive labor
and psychic rewards always drive the best scholars. If you want to read the
whole Historia, J. Pérez de Tudela y Bueso edited the text in Spanish (1992)
and Sterling A. Stoudemire published The Natural History of the West Indies
(1959) for readers of English.
However much readers here may be centered on The Renaissance,

the specialist essays in The Oxford Handbook of Médiéval Literature in
English (2010, edited by Elaine Treharne of Florida State & Greg Walker of
Edinburgh) are useful, especially in terms of the current interests in politics
and gender and, more neglected, the médiéval underpinnings of Renaissance
drama. There ought to be another volume on Neo-Latin literature in England
or in Europe both médiéval and Renaissance as well as volumes related to
vernacular languages other than English. A survey ought to be made of which
literatures of The Renaissance in Europe remain to be covered adequately and
the médiéval period as well. That is a useful thesis or dissertation topic in any
foreign language and this Oxford handbook may offer a template.
Eva Kushner (Toronto) is director of the vast Histoire comparée des

littératures des langues européennes in which the third volume (over 600 pages)
is L'Epoque de la Renaissance : Maturations et mutations (1520-1560) (John
Benjamins, 2011, US $ 297.00). An expert group contributes essays in chapters
on the transformation of the West, reform movements and literature, diffusion
and impact of evangelism, defense and illustration of national languages, the
new civility, conscience literary and artistic, « for the aristocracy of the spirit »,
humanist learning, the progress of science, the New World, popular culture,
and «The Renaissance in crisis ». There is a giant bibliography. The whole is a
monument to the late Henri Remak and a triumph of an organizing committee
which has assembled experts to tackle a truly impressive project. The whole
documents the continuing language and literature traditions (classical as

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CHRONIQUE 183
well as médiéval) and Early Modem fashions. Most of ail it emphasizes and
evaluates the immense changes that took place in an era of vast cultural and
commercial expansion and radical change in politics and religion, in both of
which literature served as a crucial factor. It deals indeed with ail aspects of
society in Europe in The Renaissance. It is regrettable perhaps that it is in
French, which is no longer what it used to be as the international language
of European culture. English, now the world's second language, would have
guaranteed this massive work a much wider readership. The price will also
limit its availability in these days when the budgets for reference desks have
already been eut to the bone and are certain to suffer more cuts.
We are not really interested to learn that Keith Osborn's dog Milly enjoyed
ail the fun of the fair but certain other aspects of this 30 year vétéran minor
actor's report of a year with the Royal Shakespeare Company may captivate
readers here. It is in Oberon Books' lively line that includes Perry Pontak's
Codpieces and Nick Asbury's report of his experience with RSC. It contains
something for students of A Midsummer Night's Dream, Hamlet, etc. The book
is wittily titled Something is Written in the State of Denmark. It is from 521
Caledonian Road, London N79RH, 2010, £ 10.99. By the way, Something is an
attractive book but color snapshots of the acting troupe really tell us nothing.
Costume designers' sketches might be more useful, but then most designers
want to be Original, sometimes wildly so. It is difficult to photograph sets
adequately. Osborn fiddling with a sword or is it looking at his watch in a
photo in which he is seeking «my inner Marcade.» (in Love's Labour's Lost
in case you do not recall the character) is unnecessary. I suppose, however, we
must get used to actors talking about themselves. It is alleged that the average
one after telling you about everything (s)he played recently or even went « up
for» may add «But enough about me» and then continue with more of the
same. Ail performers are showoffs, bless them. Moreover, they are the brief
chronicles of the time if wordier in blogging and journals. What we sadly lack
are more reports on their art from directors of the caliber of Harley Granville
Barker of Préfacés to Shakespeare and of course Stanislavsky, even though
Shakespeare hardly calls upon finding the « inner self » in his actors as much as
modem realistic plays may do. If the only court you have ever been in is traffic
court, digging into your own experience and feelings may not be of much use
when reciting the lines of Marcade or Hamlet.
From the Modem Language Association come eminently practical and

distinctly politically correct books containing brief essays by classroom
teachers on Teaching Early Modem Prose (edited by Susannah Brietz Monta
of Notre Dame & Margaret W. Ferguson, of Califomia at Davis with an

143.207.2.28 on Fri, 17 Mar 2023 17:33:27 UTC
184 CHRONIQUE
introduction, 2010) and Teaching Narrative Theory (edited by David Herman

& Brian McHale & James Phelan, ail of Ohio State, with an introduction). The
prose is non-fiction such as essays, martyrology, autobiography, letters, essays
(Bacon, Montaigne), chronicles, voyages, etc., and there is fiction (Gascoigne,
Deloney, the emergence of the novel). Authors dealt with are Elizabeth I,
Sidney, Nashe, Donne, Lady Wroth, Bacon, Milton, Browne, Hobbes, William
Harrison for Lyly's euphemism, Lodge, Mary Astell, Aphra Behn, and there is
The Bible, etc. There is a useful list of source material by Monta & Ferguson.
The theorists cover theory courses both undergraduate and graduate, story
elements, genres, média, and «interfaces» in ethics, ethnicity gender, and
«ideology and critique». The termiinology («diegesis», «focalization»,
« transmedial narratology », and so on) can be off-putting. There is a glossary,
much needed.
From Brepols (Begijnhof 67, 8-2300, Turnhout, Belgium) there are two
very scholarly books. The first is L'Hospedale de'pazzi incurabili (Venice,
1586) by Tomasao Garzoni, a collection of « a wide range of social deviance »
due to both disease and anti-social behavior This is translated and with notes
by Daniella Pastina and the research psychiatrist John W. Crayton, with an
introduction by Monica Calabritto (Hunter CUNY). The book (2009) is part
of the literature of fools (Brandt, Erasmus) and part of the history of medicine.
A section on Garzoni's female patients - we must remember that hysteria was
thought to be from the womb - is of importance in regard to the Early Modem
attitude toward women. Women are said to be foolish or mad, sometimes
violent and sometimes suicidai. The second book is Latinity andAlterity in the
Early Modem Period. This is a collection of learned essays (2010) edited by
Yasmin Haskell (Western Australia) & Juanita Feros Ruys (Sydney). Here are
the respect for the classical tongue, translation from it and into it, the politics
and the literature of Latin in The Renaissance, etc., with contributions from
scholars in Australia, Canada, the US, Germany, Spain, and New Zealand. We
have an international group addressing the nature and importance of Latin as an
international language in The Renaissance among writers, scholars, diplomats,
and others. These books are both in a long sériés from the Arizona Center
for Médiéval and Renaissance Studies which publishes in association with
Brepols and from whom in the US these books can be obtained at, respectively,
US $ 40.00 and US $ 50.00.
From Brepols directly cornes a packet of four interesting books. First,

in random order, The First Translations of Machiavelli's Prince (€ 66.00 in
paperback, also available as an e-book) edited by Roberto De Pol (Genoa),
with essays by various hands on translations from the sixteenth century to the

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CHRONIQUE 185
nineteenth, including in French of the 1530s, the essay in French), the first
printed in Latin (1560), four in English during the reign of Elizabeth (three
of them anonymous), an anonymous Spanish translation (in MS, seventeenth
century, essay in Spanish), the first in Dutch (1515, the first in German (1602),
the first in Swedish (with a translation of Frederick the Great's Anti-Machiavel,
1757), and the first in Arabie (by command of Mehmet Ali, viceroy of Egypt
from 1805 to 1849), Ail this testifies to Machiavelli's popularity. Second,
Solo Performances : Staging the Early Modem Self in England, 13 essays
on authoring and authority, self-invention and pathology, and fashioning
sovereignty, edited by Ute Berns (Hamburg) at € 54.00 in paperback. Third,
Bethinke Thyselfe, «writing women's identifies» in Early Modem England,
by Ulrike Tancke, based on her 2006 doctoral dissertation at Trier, at € 55.00
in paperback, extremely learned. The Fourth, The Scottish Romance Tradition
c. 1375-c. 1550: Nation, Chivalry and Knighthood by Sergei Mainer
(Edinburgh) is original and highly informative on a usually neglected topic, at
€ 57.00. It includes John Barbour on The Bruce. It is a real contribution to the
extension of chivalric romance into The Renaissance and a valuable addition
to Scottish vernacular history. The material covers romances of Alexander
the Great, Charlemagne, King Arthur and his knights, Wallace, Blind Hary,
and more, usually very thoroughly. Ail these books are quite expensive for
paperbacks but are written by specialists for specialists.
Early Modem Jews were no différent from modem ones in their liking to
stick together with their own kind and networking with related Jews over a wide
spectrum and tansregionally. This is what we might call Jews without Borders.
Acultural history of Early Modem Jewry (Princeton University Press, 2011,
US $ 35.00) sees David B. Ruderman (Pennsylvania) tracing with skillful
research the movements of the Chosen People and their relationship with
state authorities, their settling in ghettoes or expulsion or movements to Italy
and Amsterdam, to German lands, to eastern Europe, to the Ottoman empire,
etc. He does this without undue emphasis on what Salo W. Baron, writing a
social and religious history of the Jews, called « the lachrymose conception of
Jewish history» and he wisely works without accepting the basic and flawed
belief in the concept of early modem that there has been something quite new
and always better in not only a specifically Jewish movement from servitude
to citizenship but in a wider improvement in terms of the médiéval giving
way to a progressive modernity. There is attention to conversos and various
spiritual movements within Judaism and the publication that goes with piety
and propaganda. There is careful description of divided loyalties. We see Jews
torn between.tradition and innovation, between orthodoxy and assimilation.
We hear of crises in rabbinical thinking and authority. We examine divided
loyalties among Christians who took an interest in Hebrew and Jewish
mysticism. We learn a lot about what Ruderman labels «mingled identities».

143.207.2.28 on Fri, 17 Mar 2023 17:33:27 UTC
186 CHRONIQUE
What we do not get is a fearless look at the persécution of the Jews. It is

calling for fury, I suppose, if anyone asks two burning questions. First, what is
it about Christianity, which started as a Jewish religion, that makes Christian
Love so unloving toward the Jews and made them as a people the équivalent
of one of their famous symbols, the sacrificial scapegoat ? Second - and now
the howl of anger gets loudest - what is it that the Jews have been doing, if
anything, to bring such terrible fates upon themselves ? The answers, I suggest,
are not to be found so much in religion, because both groups hardly follow ail
the dictâtes of their scared texts, but in other factors that are even less rational.
Do you have an idea what those might be ?
With ail the scholarship that pours forth even as university career advancement
militâtes against large and long-term researches and rewards that sometimes
are niggardly compared to work in other professions. The current academic
system favors the narrow specialist and frequent publication. Once in a while
we must feel sad that now vigorous investigation is being conducted chiefly in
a few specialties and that increasingly the business of universities calls upon
employees to prove themselves commercially viable and always utilitarian. In
the light of ail that, critics of work in the whole field must advise scholars to pay
attention to certain new publications which may be particularly useful. Long ago
the time was lost, as Virginia Woolf wrote, when Shakespeare was alive « and
might tell one, if one plucked him by the sleeve, to whom he wrote the sonnets,
and what he meant by Hamlet». Of course critics tend to doubt that aurhors
are the best expolainers of their own work. Today scholars try to delve into an
author's private life and read his mind seeking his personal intentions. About his
work and that of others they have arguable opinions, one hopes conscientiously
held and not eut to fit the current fashions. Don't count on that.
Brooklyn, New York. Léonard R. N. Ashley

143.207.2.28 on Fri, 17 Mar 2023 17:33:27 UTC

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RECENT PUBLICATIONS ON ELIZABETHAN ENGLAND AND RELATED FIELDS

Author(s): Leonard R. N. Ashley

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/23264115

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As 2011, the quartercentenary of the publication of the King James

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Sir Sidney Lee (1859-1926) was notable biographer of Shakespeare (after

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fashioned enough to be involved in bibliography, too, and had disagreements

As for Shakespeare's personality, or the comparison of the work itself

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Cambridge University Press is a reliable major source for Renaissance

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scholars ; and The Cambridge Companion to English Renaissance Tragedy

Connections between «visuality» and ethical standards and behavior in

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Shakespeare and the Grammar of Forgiveness (Cornell University Press,

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I have always thought Michelangelo ought to have stuck with sculpture

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Another subjective paragraph follows. You probably realize that ail

From Harvard University Press (2010) come, from TriLiteral distributors

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admirable I Tatti sériés of Renaissance works originally in Latin. A number of

What S. R. Gardiner called the «imaginative Protestantism» in Spenser

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The so-called queering of literature continues apace. Alan Sinfield (who

Isaac Casaubon, the Jews, and a Forgotten Chapter in Renaissance

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An attractive and unusual book is Palaces of Time (Harvard University

Shakespeare in production is the focus of L. Monique Pittman (Andrews,

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Scotland PA (Billy Morrisette, 2001, that «didn't want to do anything that

Marcela Kostihovâ (Hamline) takes us through the post-communist Czech

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Documents and commentaries on The Origin of Baroque Art in Rome are

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From Getty (2011) in the sériés from Mondavi in Italy of gorgeously

Also from Getty (2011, US $ 30.00 in paperback) cornes a study of

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The Hispanization ofthe Philippines (University of Wisconsin Press, 2011,

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Here is something scholars have neglected: the Primaleon of Greece

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« Relocating race in the Renaissance», Jean Feerick (Brown)'s Strangers in

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Another book dedicated to examining powerful beliefs in «purposeful

A more benign foreign influence was seen in the grammars, dictionaries,

In the sériés Bibliothèque Littéraire de la Renaissance from Honoré

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into French in footnotes. It deals in great détail with «détours et arabesques

Angus Vine (Sussex)'s study of antiquarian writing in Early Modem

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In A Writer's Notebook Somerset Maugham remarks on Torquemada

Ashgate produces first-rate books in our scholarly field. We briefly group

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called «English vice», often blamed on corporal punishment in the Public

Speaking of chiasmus and the ordering of literature, permit the intrusion

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