TY - JOUR
AU1 - Archer,, Harriet
AU2 - Wood,, Richard
AB - Abstract This chapter has three sections: 1. General; 2. Sidney; 3. Spenser. Section 1 is by Harriet Archer; sections 2 and 3 are by Richard Wood. 1. General The dominant Elizabethan personality of 2017 opens this year’s review in fighting fettle, in Pers Sivefors’s ‘“Maymd soldiours or poore schollers”: Warfare and Self-Referentiality in the Works of Thomas Nashe’ (CahiersE 95[2018] 62–73). Sivefors posits war ‘both as a figurative embodiment of intellectual conflict and as a tangible context for [Nashe’s] work’ (p. 63), and suggests that despite Nashe’s natural association with combat, physical and verbal, this essential parallelism has been critically overlooked. Both war and peace, in fact, are central to the experience and representation of his life and career. In Pierce Penilesse [1592], Sivefors shows, soldiers and poets are framed as benefiting from a state of peace, yet while idle soldiers also foment urban unrest, poets might contribute to the mitigation of such instability by affording cultural distractions. Meanwhile, Nashe’s poem Strange Newes [1592] reflects on his snowballing pamphlet war with Gabriel Harvey in martial terms, presaging the real physical harm which Nashe risked with the seditious Christs Teares Over Jerusalem [1593]—a text which implies that ‘scholars and soldiers are alike in being neglected or unduly attacked’ (p. 66). Treated head-on in The Unfortunate Traveller [1594], war becomes a crucial context for Lenten Stuffe [1599], composed when ‘the English campaign in Ireland was at its most heated and potentially disastrous stage’ (p. 69). The mock-heroic military organization of Nashe’s herring is deeply and incisively topical, while the author ‘drift[s] around the margin, outside the metropolitan centre of literary production … charting the circumference of England’ (p. 70) like Yarmouth’s fishing fleet and its parodic analogue, King Edgar’s navy. Sivefors concludes that ‘phrases like “paper-war” cannot capture’ the interrelation of warfare’s ‘political, intellectual and aesthetic’ (p. 70) dimensions in Nashe’s oeuvre. The early chapters of Rebecca Totaro’s Meteorology and Physiology in Early Modern Culture: Earthquakes, Human Identity, and Textual Representation return to 2017 favourites Thomas Churchyard and Gabriel Harvey, in the context of a useful and lively study which also troubles the scholarly relegation of physical, material referents to metaphor. Chapters 3, 4, and 5 investigate further examples in the writing of Spenser, Shakespeare, and Donne. Totaro explores the intimate interrelation of human and non-human matter, building on the insights of Gail Kern Paster into the openness of the human body to meteorological flux in the early modern imaginary. The book’s central focus is the earthquake, a phenomenon which for Totaro ‘exemplif[ies] the complex relationship between meteorology and physiology’ (p. 6), and which carried transformative epistemological force. The 1580 Dover Straits quake in England, a relatively rare occurrence, ‘called into question what it was to be stable as a nation, a Christian, and even a human being’ (p. 6). As such, Renaissance representations of earthquakes, from Harvey’s reflections on that specific event to abstractions and allusions in literary discourse, offer a constructive way into contemporary habits of thought, and their disruption. Chapter 1, ‘A Tale Put in for Pleasure’, cautions against thinking of meteorology in its ostensibly banal guise as ‘the weather’ (p. 15). Renaissance meteorophysiology, Totaro suggests, allowed sixteenth-century observers rhetorically to elide the ‘polytheistic’ and ‘materialist’ understandings of the origins of natural phenomena, derived from Hesiod and Aristotle respectively, inheriting the notion of the anima mundi via Ovid and integrating these paradigms in their imaginative work. Arthur Golding’s 1567 translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses is therefore central, and encouraged his successors to ‘turn the volume up on rather than diminish the polytheistic notes strongly sounded by his source’ (p. 21). A purely materialist approach, it was feared, would eliminate wonder from the perceived world, and potentially open up ‘a path to atheism’ (p. 27). Nonetheless, materialist meteorology could also be set up in opposition to the practice of prognostication, as the theologian William Fulke did in the 1560s, first in Antiprognosticon [1560] and then in A Goodly Gallerye [1563]. Totaro attributes Fulke with the familiarity of the materialist paradigm by the time of the 1580 earthquake, and Harvey’s response. Chapter 2, then, attends to the textual record produced by this earthquake, ‘The Sneezing of the Earth’ which ‘shook people into an inquisitiveness that was expressed in many forms … including two dozen entries in the Stationers’ Register’ (p. 38). Thomas Churchyard reported his take in A Warning for the Wise [1580], a tract which set out Churchyard’s theory of memory as well as his interpretation of the quake as an admonition to Elizabeth I’s subjects, a thread taken up later by Abraham Fleming, while Totaro also suggests that latent within Churchyard’s commentary was an acknowledgement of ‘the threat posed by materialist meteorology’ to Christian orthodoxy (p. 41). The physician Thomas Twyne, by contrast, endorsed the materialist perspective, having translated Petrarch’s ‘materialist leaning’ Physic Against Fortune [1579] the previous year—a disparity which evinces the multiplicity of readers’ inclinations. Keen to impose stability from above, the Church of England issued prayers ‘intended to bring community minds and bodies back into prescribed union’ (p. 51), and Totaro ably demonstrates the similarities between official treatments of the earthquake and outbreaks of plague (the focus of previous work: see Totaro, The Plague in Print: Essential Elizabethan Sources, 1558–1603 [2010]), while showing none other than Golding pressed into state service with his reassuring homily, A Godlie Admonition for the Time Present. The chapter concludes with Harvey’s approach in the Three Proper, and Wittie, Familiar Letters [1580] exchanged with Edmund Spenser, a repudiation of both Christian and materialist viewpoints. Harvey’s ‘living earth—a drunk and sneezing one, no less—triumphs among explanations’ (p. 68), and emblematizes, for Totaro, Harvey’s subversion of condescending, authoritative claims. A similarly wide-ranging take on a specific phenomenon, Tina Skouen’s The Value of Time in Early Modern English Literature intermittently treats late Tudor subject matter, including Geoffrey Whitney’s emblems, various bons mots of notorious scribblers Nicholas Breton, Robert Greene, and Thomas Nashe on the merits and demerits of haste, and, in chapter 5, ‘Urgent Books of Christian Exercise’ by Robert Persons and Edmund Bunny. Other figures encountered here include Henry Peacham, Margaret Cavendish, and Alexander Pope, before an afterword on ‘The Digital Age of Speed’. ‘Early modern literature shows evidence that writers of the period are perpetually short of time’ (p. 1), Skouen begins, citing the likes of Samuel Daniel, Nashe, and Thomas Campion’s complaints about the speed and volume involved in the business of print in the 1590s, neglected by critics who have assumed that this trope is a variation on the standard modesty topos. Does such a preoccupation in early printed paratexts register ‘anxiety about the changing socio-material and technical conditions of bookmaking and bookselling’ (p. 2)? Skouen argues that concerns over undue speed were aesthetic and ethical: ‘haste and rashness broke not only with social decorum but also with moral and poetic rules of conduct’ (p. 3). Conceiving of the Renaissance book as a multiply multi-temporal phenomenon, through the theoretical framing of Jean-François Lyotard, Bruno Latour, and Michel Serres, Skouen’s monograph shows how classical and medieval understandings of time interacted with changing notions of writerly authority in the age of the printing press, and of nascent capitalism. ‘Speedy efficiency’ (p. 14) was a fundamental condition of the successful running of the early modern printing house, and writers found themselves mandated to accommodate the Horatian aesthetic impetus to laborious perfectionism to the demands of the marketplace. Chapter 1, ‘The Poetics of Slow Writing’, shows how the proliferation of printed texts amid the appropriation of the classical canon generated new perspectives on the relationships between value, privilege, durability, and usefulness, while the emerging notion of literary fame often deferred writers’ sociocultural rewards to their posthumous futurity. The stigma of professional literary production was fuelled by its associations with ‘rash and rude imperfection’, such that hack writers like Greene sought ‘to elevate the status of [their] work by playing on the commonplace link between care and quality’ (p. 47). Nevertheless, a substantial body of work was also a prerequisite for adulation down the ages, while authors had to negotiate shifting fashions for sprezzatura and brevitas, both of which were more time-consuming to achieve than their proponents were allowed to let on. Chapter 5, ‘“The Danger of Delay”: The First Booke of the Christian Exercise and Its Afterlife’, posits a further dimension to the debate, addressing the question of religious conversion in which ‘speed was considered uniformly positive’ (p. 146). The Catholic Persons’s First Booke [1582], as well as its Protestant incarnation pirated by the Calvinist Bunny, urged immediate personal reform, insisting that ‘Delay is the Devil’s doing’ (p. 147). Paradoxically, however, Persons is shown to be a poor manager of his own time, prone ‘to boast about ambitious but unrealistic deadlines’, and guilty of ‘the writer’s other great sin besides too much haste—the vice of procrastination’ (p. 158). Bunny’s appropriation of Persons’s work forced Persons to issue a stop-press emendation, a disruption to print temporality in keeping with the writers’ competitive haste. Skouen concludes that Persons’s ‘subjective time consciousness’ feels recognizably modern (p. 184), shedding light on how the ‘temporally defined norms of aesthetic evaluation that we currently take for granted have been shaped over time’ (p. 202). Mike Rodman Jones considers adjacent territory in ‘The Uses of Medievalism in Early Modern England: Recovery, Temporality, and the “Passionating” of the Past’ (Exemplaria 30:iii[2018] 191–206). Beginning with Richard Tarlton’s News Out of Purgatory [1590], this article explores a ‘generational sense of time’ adumbrated by Elizabethan engagements with the pre-Reformation past in which ‘Nostalgia and opportunism go together’ (p. 192). Jones argues that the rise of affective reflections on medieval history in the late sixteenth century allowed writers and readers to ‘feel something (indeed, many things) for the premodern’ (p. 193), contesting as well as bypassing linear narratives of change and continuity. ‘Part of a wider milieu of historiography as riposte and reply’ (p. 195), authors such as the confessionally antithetical John Foxe and Thomas Stapleton deployed their active, emotive histories to contrary purposes, generating a performative reconstruction of the past to gain contemporary political traction, while Robert Greene’s revisioning of literary history and his own life story is predicated on an aesthetic of ‘momentariness’ (p. 198). Jones concludes with Francis Meres and Michael Drayton, whose ‘recuperative response’ (p. 202) to the past combines antiquarian with formal and generic interests which theorize the medieval as a distinct temporal zone, which ‘could be—almost simultaneously—emotive and expedient, tragic and desiring, scandalous and controversial’ (p. 205). A peripheral subject of Jones’s study is reanimated as the central focus in Jan Machielsen’s ‘On the Confessional Uses and History of Witchcraft: Thomas Stapleton’s 1594 Witchcraft Oration’ (Magic 13[2018] 381–407), which presents Machielsen’s original English translation (the first) of Stapleton’s oration (pp. 389–407). The introductory commentary notes that ‘the impact of new confessional identities and regimes on witch-hunting was by no means clear cut’ (p. 382), and the Catholic Stapleton’s Why Has Magic Grown Today Together with Heresy? [1594] sheds light on one mode in which religious reform was used to contextualize the late sixteenth-century witch craze. Having studied at New College, Oxford, during the 1550s, Stapleton had relocated to the University of Leuven in the Spanish Netherlands following Elizabeth I’s accession. Despite his intellectual credentials and ‘deep knowledge of the Bible and Church Fathers’, however, Stapleton’s reading in demonology was relatively shallow, and his references fairly piecemeal (p. 385). In fact, Machielsen argues, witchcraft was really a vehicle for Stapleton’s observations on heresy: ‘The oration’s concluding rhetorical questions urged the listener to treat Protestants, who once had been tolerated under the Pacification of Ghent of 1576, no differently from demon worshippers’ (p. 388). Patricia Phillippy’s essay collection, A History of Early Modern Women’s Writing, is a fruitfully ambitious project, bringing together and integrating the insights of some twenty-two contributions spanning the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and headed up by Phillippy’s aptly titled introduction, ‘Sparkling Multiplicity’ (a phrase taken from Margaret Ezell’s chapter in the volume). The volume builds on Ezell’s own Writing Women’s Literary History [1993], and its success in representing early modern women’s writing as more than autobiography, as well as embracing the more recent emphasis on sites of women’s literary production. Overall, it seeks ‘to present a history that respects … the multiplicity of women’s writing’, as well as the ‘grounds in the subject to support a unified narrative and to work against the unfeatured accretion of names and titles’ (p. 6). To this end, the introduction organizes the volume’s contributions under a series of themes and debates, including ‘(1) Recoveries and Transmissions; (2) Authorial Agency and Identity Politics; (3) Subversion, Orthodoxy, and the Canon; and (4) Tradition and Truth in the Archives’ (p. 11; see table, p. 7). The volume is additionally broken down according to chronology. Following Part I, ‘Critical Approaches and Methodologies’, the second part addresses ‘The Tudor Era’ (although coverage here begins only in 1526, rather than 1485). Jaime Goodrich’s ‘Reconsidering the Woman Writer: The Identity Politics of Anne Cooke Bacon’, among the methodological chapters, also fits our remit. A translator of reformist tracts, such as Fourtene Sermons of Barnadine Ochyne [1551] and John Jewel’s Latin An Apologie or Answere in Defence of the Churche of Englande [1564], Anne Cooke Bacon was a Protestant ‘now understood to have multiple identities’ (p. 47) in addition to her recognized roles as wife, mother, and widow. However, Goodrich notes, this ‘decentering of gender’ is not enough to prevent ‘the female author’s identity’ from being ‘still defined by womanhood’: the chapter aims to provide ‘new paradigms for understanding the identities constructed by and for female authors’, to reconsider ‘the very nature of the woman writer’ (p. 47). We might achieve this by focusing on religious identity, as Bacon’s anonymous translations encourage us to do. An alternative is to analyse Bacon’s ‘overlapping identities as a woman, an aristocrat, a Protestant, and a humanist’ (p. 59), borrowing from intersectionality studies, exemplified here in the recent work of Kimberlé Crenshaw. Early modern women’s textual authority derives, Goodrich concludes, from ‘intersecting identities that include, but are not limited to, gender’ (p. 65). In Part II, Susan M. Felch’s chapter, ‘Common and Competing Faiths’, touches briefly on Anne Lock as a figure who amalgamates ‘traditional and reformist stances’ in the later sixteenth century (p. 115) as Margaret More Roper and Joan Fish had done earlier in the Tudor period. The similarities between Lock’s Calvinist translation of Jean Taffin’s Of the Markes of the Children of God [1590] and Robert Southwell’s Catholic Epistle of Comfort [1587?] demonstrate ways in which, despite political factionalism, ‘the vocabulary and imagery of Catholic and Protestant literary culture still remained intertwined, supported by the ongoing roles of female patrons and the active work of laywomen’ (p. 118). Julie D. Campbell returns to Margaret More Roper and Anne Cooke Bacon, among others, in ‘Humanism, Religion, and Early Modern Englishwomen in Their Transnational Contexts’. The chapter focuses on the active participation by Englishwomen in continental intellectual networks, be they Catholic exiles in the early part of the century, or later reformists. Campbell agrees with Gemma Allen that Anne and her sister Elizabeth Cooke ‘stand as prime examples of the argument that humanist educations for girls were not simply for ornamental purposes’ (p. 165), demonstrating how their learning and epistolary networks played a role in shoring up political and confessional communities. Likewise, verses composed by the elder three daughters of Edward Seymour, duke of Somerset—Anne, Margaret, and Jane—served pointed political ends, despite their ultimate fall into literary obscurity, ‘suggesting to a French readership that the English and French could unite over the sacred memory of Marguerite de Navarre, as well as the newly minted peace between their countries’ (p. 168). Mapping out still less familiar territory, Micheline White’s chapter, ‘Women in Worship: Continuity and Change in the Prayers of Elizabeth Tyrwhit and Frances Aburgavenny’, explores the contribution of women writers and readers to the genre of the private prayer book. White analyses two prayers, one each written by Tyrwhit and Aburgavenny, which are both ‘deeply indebted to the [Book of Common Prayer] Communion service’ and evocative of their authors’ independent creativity. This intersection, White argues, ‘reveal[s] that their authors were acutely aware of the ways in which the BCP had reworked material from the older, Catholic liturgy’, and demonstrates how they ‘either reproduced, recuperated, or resisted’ these changes for their personal use (p. 172). On secular subject matter, Dana E. Lawrence reads ‘Isabella Whitney’s “Slips”: Poetry, Collaboration, and Coterie’ through Gérard Genette’s theory of the palimpsest and transtextuality. Lawrence identifies traces of Christine de Pizan’s Book of the City of Ladies in Whitney’s A Sweet Nosgay, in addition to the acknowledged appropriation of Hugh Plat’s Floures of Philosophie [1573]. This haunting allows Whitney herself ‘to assume the role of heir to the literary present’ (p. 121), Lawrence argues, while negotiating the stances of shame and misery which her narrative adopts. Subsequent chapters handle such Stuart stalwarts as Aemilia Lanyer, Mary Wroth, Margaret Cavendish, and Anne Clifford, as well as topics including nuns, motherhood, monuments, and medicine. Emphasizing the significance of collaboration and multiplicity to female authorship in the period, this volume usefully carries forward the project of troubling ‘women’s writing’ as a category, while reinforcing its vitality as a flourishing field of study. Sara Trevisan’s article, ‘Genealogy and Royal Representation: Edmund Brudenell’s Pedigree Roll for Elizabeth I (1558–60)’ (HLQ 81[2018] 257–75), elucidates the history and historiography of one early modern woman in the making. Brudenell, a Catholic antiquary, constructed this ninety-foot-long parchment pedigree roll to trace Elizabeth’s genealogy back to Adam and Eve, through biblical and legendary history, as well as knitting her descent into a wider European royal network. Providing ‘important evidence on the intersection between late medieval and early modern traditions of royal genealogical discourse’ (p. 258), the roll seems to have been prepared as a gift for Elizabeth within the first two years of her reign, although it is not known whether the gift ever reached her. If it did, she would have seen her pedigree mapped out on the model of twelfth- to fifteenth-century royal rolls, accessible to Brudenell through his family’s extensive antiquarian collections, within a somewhat sanitized, but still monumentally complex, illustration of British history. The queen’s own coat of arms ‘is depicted as “impaled”—a design reserved for married women’ (p. 269), on which the dexter side is left suggestively blank, in readiness for the arms of Elizabeth’s future husband. As such, this elaborate, painstakingly constructed artefact seems not just to bear witness to Brudenell’s enthusiasm to be perceived as a loyal subject of the new Protestant monarch, but also to ‘encourage Elizabeth I’s active role in the genealogical and political continuity of the English royal line’ (p. 275). Elizabeth I is subjected to extensive further scrutiny in Donatella Montini and Iolanda Plescia’s edited collection, Elizabeth I in Writing: Language, Power and Representation in Early Modern England. Montini and Plescia combine studies of Elizabeth’s own writing with investigations of her representation by others—as author in Part I and ‘authored’ in Part II—in order ‘to take a closer, updated look at the role that textuality plays in Queen Elizabeth’s life’ (p. 4). In addition to their critical insights, many chapters also usefully provide transcriptions of pertinent manuscripts as appendices. Beginning with Elizabeth’s childhood, Brenda M. Hosington opens the collection with ‘The Young Princess Elizabeth, Neo-Latin, and the Power of the Written Word’, focusing on translations and letters composed before her accession. In ‘Ethics from the Classroom: Elizabeth I’s Translation of Cicero’s Pro Marcello’, Alessandra Petrina argues that while the queen’s ‘poems, prayer, and speeches … may be said to be the expression of the public persona’ and ‘her letters offer a fascinating testimony of her ability to assume different characters’, it is through her translations that ‘we seem in fact to be closer to Elizabeth as a private person’ (p. 38). The chapter focuses on a specific, very literal translation, probably drafted in 1592, which survives in manuscript. Cicero’s oration allows Elizabeth to ventriloquize ‘one who sees ruling, as it were, from the outside’ (p. 50), as well as offering her the opportunity to reflect on its theme of clementia, which Petrina suggests was central to the queen’s self-representation. The chapter interprets both Elizabeth’s faithful rendering and misreadings of Cicero’s Latin within the context of mid sixteenth-century educative practices, before assessing her more private approach to translation in later life. Mel Evans utilizes digital techniques in ‘Styling Power: A Corpus-Linguistics Approach to the Correspondence of Queen Elizabeth I’, in order to consider, in particular, the holograph letters ‘more explicitly against the royal epistolary norms of the period’ (p. 61). Much has been uncovered about early modern letter-writing practices thanks to a recent upsurge of critical attention, while this renewed interest has led to digitization projects such as The Corpus of Early English Correspondence and State Papers Online which make projects like Evans’s feasible, she stresses. Insights generated through electronic identification of keywords are then used to close-read two messages sent to Thomas Heneage in the 1580s. Montini’s subsequent chapter, ‘“Beholde me thy handmaiden”: The Pragmatics and Politics of Queen Elizabeth’s Prayers’, looks to a neglected collection of texts which ‘is likely to provide one of the best documents available of the progress of Elizabeth as political persona’ (p. 87). The prayers show Elizabeth ably adhering to the stylistic conventions of the genre, so Montini undertakes linguistic analysis to expose ‘traces of Elizabeth’s idiolect’ (p. 96) in four examples from the 1560s to 1580s; one result is to demonstrate ‘how the variations in gender that Elizabeth habitually displays in her political speeches when referring to herself disappear altogether in the prayers in favour of the feminine’ (p. 100). ‘Elizabeth appears to translate her political strategies into a religious context … in which even the Heavenly Father is assigned a courteous, tributary role in her self-representation’ (p. 105). Christina Vallaro turns to ‘Elizabeth I as Poet: Some Notes on “On Monsieur’s Departure” and John Dowland’s “Now O Now I Needs Must Part”’. Elizabeth was lauded during her lifetime by George Puttenham and others as a great poet, but Vallaro notes that uncertainty still exists as to whether ‘Elizabeth took to writing poems as an escape from her troubled life as a monarch’ or simply ‘as straightforward literary exercises extolling her abilities as a writer’ (p. 112). Her poem on the departure of François of Anjou following their apparent brief engagement also participates in the political double-dealing necessary to retain authority while saving face with respect to her refusal to marry. Despite its status as a private composition, ‘On Monsieur’s Departure’ is shown to share much with Dowland’s contemporary ‘Now O Now I Needs Must Part’ such that, Vallaro suggests, we might understand Elizabeth’s personal literary endeavours in the context of a certain amount of interaction with the wider recreational life of her household and court. Carlo M. Bajetta and Guillaume Coatalen supply ‘A Critical Edition and Discussion of SP 70/2 f.94: A Letter and Two Sonnets by Celio Magno to Queen Elizabeth I’, texts composed in Italian by the Venetian poet and official early in his career, and in the first months of Elizabeth’s reign, praising the new queen and celebrating her linguistic aptitude. In doing so, Magno constructs Elizabeth as a skilled reader of language and literature, as well as a valued friend to the republic. Carole Levin considers a related theme in ‘Queen Elizabeth and the Power and Language of the Gift’, focusing on the practice of gift exchange throughout Elizabeth’s life, such as those given to and received from Mary Tudor, Mary Stuart, and the earl of Essex. These, too, legibly constructed public relationships, as well as giving expression to their latent dynamics, although Levin concludes that through her fluency in ‘gifts as the language of power, Elizabeth stayed in control’ (p. 232). Jane Stevenson also contributes to this conversation with ‘Inventing Early Modern Women’, part of Early Modern Women’s ‘Cluster on Historical Fiction’ (EMW 12:ii[2018] 99–116). Stevenson foregrounds the aspects of early modern life which impose barriers to reconstructing women’s experience in scholarship and historical fiction, including the centrality of religion, ‘family honor’ (p. 99), and considerations of status. She uses Elizabeth Hoby, later Lady Russell, as a case study with which to explore the manifestations of these aspects in late sixteenth-century England, drawing on Russell’s letters, before reflecting on her own evocation of Elizabeth of Bohemia’s life in her novel Astraea, or The Winter Queen [2001]. Russell’s grief on the death of her husbands was articulated, Stevenson shows, through the public, monumental architecture of the Russell-Hoby tombs, and the spectacular performance of funereal rites, as well as the period’s associated costume of mourning. It was through the outward display of bereavement that women negotiated their new social roles, as well as private emotions. The article concludes with a discussion of the Seymours, and the marriage of Lady Jane Grey, to illustrate further the importance of collective status and loyalty in mediating the Tudor experience of personal tragedy. Beyond the field of women’s writing, Leila Watkins expands, in ‘Forms of Exclusion: Early Modern Lyric and Religious Difference’ (MP 115[2018] 348–70), on the translation of private religious experience into literary culture, addressing the much-debated significance of lyric both to confessional intimacy and interiority and to the construction of community experience and identity. Watkins suggests that attention to the ‘undevotional’ religious lyric, a neglected facet of manuscript verse culture, informs this debate by offering ‘a more combative vision of how early moderns used poetic form’ to explore religious enmity through parody, humour, and obscenity (p. 349). Usually employed by more conservative Anglican factions, religious lyric was used to attack nonconformists by ‘explicitly appropriating literary forms the English church employed to cultivate and express unity’ (p. 350). In doing so, they ‘created a parallel liturgy of exclusion that constitutes an important, but underexplored, facet of Protestant poetics’ (p. 351). Watkins details these poems’ often bawdy anti-Puritan humour, which approaches serious doctrinal divisions through attacks on Puritan readership and intellect, dismissing ‘what many conformists saw as Puritan pretensions to learning’ (p. 363) by ventriloquizing their lapses of wit, attention, or even sanity. ‘[T]he deliberate exclusion of religious others’, then, is shown to be ‘an integral feature of early modern religious lyric’ (p. 369), complicating our sense of how poetic genres generated community feeling. Angela Andreani seeks to highlight a controversial but neglected clerical personality in ‘Meredith Hanmer’s Career in the Church of England, c.1570–1590’ (EIRC 44[2018] 47–72). Hanmer began his career as a conservative Anglican translator, antiquarian, and polemicist, producing early anti-Jesuit pamphlets and a ‘pioneering’ sermon on The Baptizing of a Turke in 1586 (p. 48). An apparently promising career trajectory was derailed, however, by ‘foiled ambition and misconduct’ (p. 49), Andreani suggests. The article serves to collate what is known of this intriguing character, and contextualize his extant writings using available biographical details. ‘A pattern seems to emerge’ (p. 56), by which Hanmer repeatedly alienates his parishioners through shady dealings and offensive behaviour, ‘fail[ing] in the exercise of his pastoral duties’ even while he proves he has ‘a sincere and committed Protestant bent to scholarship’ (p. 59). His Ecclesiastical Histories translated a compilation of accounts by Eusebius, Socrates, and Evagrius to present ‘a body of key sources to be perused and scrutinised to establish truth from “fables” and trace the actual story of the Christian Church’ (p. 62); his text went through six editions before 1663. Although Hanmer’s career later took a surprising turn in the 1590s, he succeeded, through his scholarly and polemical activities, in ‘courting the favour of the Church and Privy Council’, and ‘established his name in the canon of Protestant English authors’ (p. 68). Classical translation, Christian history, and bibliography are also topics of Freyja Cox Jensen’s article, which asks ‘What Was Thomas Lodge’s Josephus in Early Modern England?’ (SCJ 49[2018] 3–24). While Lodge’s translation of Josephus’s complete works, registered to Simon Waterson, Peter Short, and Thomas Adams in 1598 but not printed until 1602, has attracted critical attention in the light of Lodge’s conversion to Catholicism, Cox Jensen argues that the text ‘also functioned as a work of ancient (classical) history in the early modern world, and sensitivity to the religious preoccupations of early modern minds should not cause us to overlook this role’ (p. 5). The article therefore reads the evidence of the material book as well as its context and contribution, to redress the undue scholarly focus on Lodge’s confessional identity and literary activity. The Josephus has been of interest to historians of early modern women’s writing, as it has been shown to have influenced both Elizabeth Cary’s Tragedy of Mariam and Anne Clifford’s Great Books of Record; this divergent readership stands as ‘testament to the universality of the book’ (p. 22). Cox Jensen frames her analysis as a case study in ‘the wealth of new insights that can be yielded by analyzing the physical artifact in its economic context’, and suggests that Lodge’s Josephus emerges as a work with ‘appeal far beyond any Catholic readership that existed in early modern England’ (p. 11). Crucial to this appeal is Lodge’s propounding of generic humanist historiographical poetics in his paratexts, as well as his tactical positioning of the work through dedications to establishment figures. As we are reminded throughout the year’s work under review, ‘The overlap between Catholic and Protestant, particularly in the way they interpreted others’ texts, was far greater than has been traditionally recognized’ (p. 22); Cox Jensen also urges us to pay more attention to ‘the invisible majority of contemporary consumers’ who risk being sidelined in our enthusiasm for ‘the extraordinary examples of individual readers’ (p. 24). Another major collection to address the place of women in English literary history, and featuring many of the same personnel, Leah Knight, Micheline White, and Elizabeth Sauer’s edited volume, Women’s Bookscapes in Early Modern Britain: Reading, Ownership, Circulation, perhaps rises to Cox Jensen’s challenge. This work focuses on the intersection of the representations and realities of book ownership among early modern women, largely in the seventeenth century. Knight and White’s ‘bookscape’ originates with James Raven, whose Bookscape: Geographies of Printing and Publishing in London Before 1800 [2014] used the term primarily in relation to the topography of premodern book production. The present study, by contrast, sets out to focus on ‘cultural forms, values, and temporalities’ (p. 6), which nevertheless encompasses the environmental force of terms like ‘landscape’ and ‘survey’ which are also brought to mind. The collection ‘seeks to exhibit new types of evidence, such as lists of confiscated books and convent rules’, and to ‘dismantle binaries of private and public, reading and writing, female and male literary engagement and production, and ownership and authorship’ (p. 18). Mary Ellen Lamb’s chapter, ‘Isabella Whitney and Reading Humanism’, in Part I, ‘(Book) Case Studies’, discusses Whitney’s evocation of the scenes of buying and reading in her own anthology, A Sweet Nosgay [1573]. Here, books ‘present new opportunities for self-definition’ (p. 43), and Lamb presents a ‘profoundly reasonable self produced through humanist reading practices’ (p. 44) as Whitney first repackages Senecan sententiae for the literary marketplace, and then responds calmly to the uncertain economic landscape in which her poems situate the narrative. In common with Dana E. Lawrence’s analysis, reviewed above, the chapter interrogates Whitney’s relationship to the books she invokes, and the body of classical learning which her work seems to reject, before exploring Whitney’s treatment of the text by which the Sweet Nosgay is inspired, Hugh Plat’s The Floures of Philosophie [1572], which, Lamb suggests, ‘offered her the benefits and also exposed the limits of a commodified humanism’ (p. 58). In Part II, ‘Reading Communities’, Elizabeth Patton turns to ‘Women, Books, and the Lay Apostolate: A Catholic Literary Network in Late Sixteenth-Century England’. At the height of anti-Catholic anxiety in 1587, Patton notes, English women—unlike their husbands and fathers—were ‘free to travel about London, visiting priests in the city’s permeable prisons and participating in the reception and distribution of Catholic imprints’ (p. 117). These female readers made up a Jesuit distribution network which allowed texts like Richard Hopkins’s translation of Luis de Granada’s Memorial of a Christian Life [1586] to circulate. The chapter addresses how the readership of the Memorial might be reconstructed from the Marshalsea-Newgate book inventory, a secret ledger which kept track of illicit continental texts loaned to imprisoned Catholic figures during the period. The inventory ‘testifies to the existence of a tightly organised distribution network—an underground Catholic bookscape—operating in the netherworld of London’s prisons as well as in the private drawing rooms of its more visible and presumably reformed cityscape’ (p. 119), including readers of the Memorial such as Dorothy Arundell of Lanherene, Anne Dacre Howard, and Magdalen Dacre Browne. Patton explores the significance of the work to these women’s households, in relation to evidence of their spiritual practice left by their own writings (like Arundell’s Life of Father John Cornelius [1594]), and those of their personal confessors. She identifies ‘a pattern of shared behavior suggestive of common readership of the Memorial’ (p. 133), extrapolating from its archival traces to make visible a female apostolic practice which persisted throughout this era of heightened persecution. A further edited volume for which students and scholars of sixteenth-century writing will be hugely grateful is Claire Loffman and Harriet Phillips’s Handbook of Editing Early Modern Texts. The collection takes advantage of ‘The current abundance of editorial activity’ in a climate of ‘intense critical interest in materiality and the history of the book’, but observes that such ‘attentiveness to the details of textuality has been a movement against the idea of editing itself’ (p. 1), and Loffman and Phillips reflect on the status and practice of editing amidst this new awareness of the strengths of the ‘unedited’ book or facsimile. The Handbook is therefore a polyvocal exploration of scholarly editing’s value, as well as a starry and thorough run-down of all the essentials, from ‘Before Editing’, including sections on archives, proposing an edition, and edition protocols, through ‘Principles and Practice’ (apparatus, collation, modernization, and arrangement), ‘Digital Editing’ (digital methods and online editions), and ‘Case Studies’ such as ‘On Error’ (Cathy Shrank) and ‘On Mess’ (Kate Bennett). Contributors provide state-of-the-art detail and salutary caveats in short, focused segments, on topics from desk etiquette and glove-wearing in the archive (Anna Sander) to the theoretical and metaphysical. While it is difficult to do justice to such a wealth of expertise, not to mention humour, here, particularly presented as it is in numerous brief chapters on a wide variety of subjects, the following examples aim to offer a snapshot of the collection’s pertinence to later sixteenth-century, non-dramatic projects. Andrew Hadfield and Jennifer Richards share advice in ‘Getting Started on Proposing an Edition’ based on their forthcoming Complete Works of Nashe (and hint that Thomas Churchyard, Robert Greene, and John Lyly are ripe for similar treatment), while Daniel Carey and Claire Jowitt reflect on ‘Edition Management and Protocols’ through the lens of their critical edition of Richard Hakluyt’s Principal Navigations [1598–1600]. At the other end of the spectrum, Steven W. May describes manuscript editing in ‘The Form of a Documentary Edition’, as well as the collation of manuscript witnesses in a later chapter. Joseph L. Black looks back on his edition of the Martin Marprelate tracts in the context of the modernization debate in ‘Modernisation Versus Old-Spelling for Early Modern Printed Prose’. Matthew Symonds and Jaap Geraerts report on the digital technicalities of the ‘Archaeology of Reading’ project, which examines a corpus of books annotated by the likes of Gabriel Harvey and John Dee, while Alison Wiggins also attends to the use of XML in her online edition of Bess of Hardwick’s letters. As ever, the digital specifics as well as wider publishing mores detailed here will doubtless date rapidly, but in the meantime this is an invaluable and entertaining companion for the would-be editor of Tudor texts. Bibliography returns in Peter W.M. Blayney’s article, ‘Thomas Marshe Invents the Press Figure’ (Library 19[2018] 455–68), a personally reflective piece which traces the origins of the ‘Small symbols, letters, or numbers, distinct from signatures but sporadically found in some books in the direction lines below various pages’ (p. 455) to Marshe’s liturgical editions of the 1550s. Central to the reconstruction of this narrative is the Book of Common Prayer [1557], in whose composite print history Marshe figured, flagging his contribution to the volume with roman capital M figures on selected sheets. Blayney suggests that while Marshe ‘was certainly the first printer in England known to have devised a system of marking the sheets that he (or at least his employees) printed as part of a shared book’, ultimately ‘The claim that Thomas Marshe “invented” press figures is … something of an exaggeration’, and he could hardly be called a pioneer since ‘nobody followed in his footsteps’ (p. 467). Yuval Kramer discusses Marshe’s rather more trail-blazing contemporary in ‘The Shaping of Wit in the Euphuistic Prose of John Lyly’ (EMLS 20:i[2018] 1–15). Locating Lyly’s inspiration in Roger Ascham’s The Scholemaster [1570], which listed euphues as one of the seven requirements of wit, Kramer anatomizes the workings of euphuism according to its origins in humanist, rhetorical education, to explore the interrelation of wit and eloquence, before analysing the ways in which Lyly’s Ciceronianism sees ‘rhetorical wit … placed in both moral and epistemological peril’ (p. 7). Kramer shows how Lyly ‘suggests a playful but sober view of rhetorical wit in practice’ (p. 10), which may satirize but in fact upholds the central tenets of humanist learning. Where wit fails in active life, the text endorses a pragmatic approach to imperfection. However, Euphues’s prodigal reform in the second part of the book does not precipitate improvement on this front: both his wit and his recently acquired wisdom remain insufficient. Kramer reads this as ‘a move towards thematic ambiguity that matches the ambiguous nature of wit and rhetoric, both morally and epistemologically, that is inherent to euphuism’ (p. 13). Ultimately, Euphues’s shortcomings may reflect ‘Lyly’s own anxieties regarding the place of his wit between the demands of patronage … and those of the emerging market, whose notions of value escape universality’ (p. 15). As we have seen, the representation of shared cultural experience looms large in the year’s work, and this is also true with respect to two very different treatments of the place of the popular. Neil Rhodes’s Common: The Development of Literary Culture in Sixteenth Century England stands out for its impressive, holistic approach, which reframes a fundamental question about a familiar canon with humour and weighty cumulative insight. Using the prismatic concept of the ‘common’ to provide a series of points of entry to the century’s literature, Rhodes shows how the term yokes the political, economic, and legal spheres to notions of popular and elite, epitomized by the Latin–vernacular binary (p. 7). The book ranges widely across the Tudor period, but is arranged broadly chronologically, beginning in Part I with Erasmus and More, and the humanist cultures of classical translation in which they worked in the early part of the century. Part II consists of a single chapter, ‘Translating for the Commonwealth’, on the reigns of Edward VI and Mary. Edward’s England, Rhodes suggests, ‘was not [a state] in which literature could easily flourish, since antipathy towards fiction as just another branch of image-making was too deeply ingrained in the thinking of radical reformers’: ‘this was not a renaissance’ (p. 112). What these middle years did witness was a new era of Erasmian translation into the vernacular, which laid the groundwork for the project of remediating English’s ‘cultural deficit’ (p. 123). Translation, Rhodes asserts, ‘is the art of making common, providing knowledge for the many that could previously only be accessed by the few, but it is also an activity that is directed towards increasing the store of common wealth’ (p. 125). Thus, translation is positioned as the condition for a putative ‘golden age’ of literary production, although it is also ‘an act of vulgarization’ (p. 127) which met with staunch resistance in, interestingly, medical circles, where status was dependent on highly policed access to information. The increased availability of medical and other kinds of knowledge, then, imbued translation with a moral imperative. Part III attends to what might be broadly termed ‘imaginative literature’, made possible, Rhodes argues, by the social project of translation which the Reformation had endorsed and embodied. In ‘Of Reformed Versifying’, Rhodes pursues the sixteenth century’s ‘search for style’ (p. 158). The chapter touches on Spenser, Tottel, ballads, and psalms, as well as the theoretical considerations of Sidney and Gascoigne. The ideological motivations of commentators like George Puttenham and Thomas Wilson made them imperfect arbiters of the period’s prosody, in which ‘matters of expression had the broadest possible cultural impact’ (p. 157); ultimately it is Spenser who makes Elizabethan poetry’s ‘step towards the common’ (p. 158). ‘Vulgar Italian and the Elizabethan Short Story’ focuses on the adaptations of Italian prose novellas by characters like William Painter, George Pettie, and George Whetstone, following on from the appropriation of Boccaccio by Thomas Elyot in the 1530s. As their authors and editors navigated Italian’s risqué reputation, these translations carried ‘the theme of the common in later Elizabethan prose’, by means of their Italian models’ ‘social inclusiveness’ and their ‘opening up of new critical perspectives on established social norms’ (p. 224). The volume ends with a chapter on ‘The Common Stage’, and concludes, convincingly, that ‘the changing idea of the common is our best guide’ to ‘the development of literary culture in sixteenth-century England’ (p. 302). Jenni Hyde’s Singing the News: Ballads in Mid-Tudor England sets out two aims: ‘to address the disconnect between ballads as texts and ballads as songs’, and ‘to show that in the sixteenth century, ballads could play a significant role in the transmission of news’ (p. 2). Orality, and aurality, are central to the intersection of these aims (although Hyde notes that we should approach ballads as ‘a multimedia resource’ (p. 15)), and the book focuses on reconstructing the extratextual dimensions of ballad culture (including through extensive provision of musical scores, and an accompanying website which hosts recordings) as well as assessing material evidence. This material evidence derives from printed broadsides, manuscript miscellanies, traces left in the Stationers’ Register, and songs incorporated into other kinds of text, and adds up to some 430 extant ballads in total—probably only a fraction of those which would have been in circulation. Hyde argues that ‘ballads formed a hitherto neglected part of sixteenth-century public debate about matters of state’ (p. 6), and emphasizes the way in which medium and message were intertwined in the relaying of current affairs. The first chapter, ‘“Now lesten a whyle & let hus singe”: The World of the Sixteenth-Century Ballad’, provides a contextual backdrop for the work of the monograph, and ‘makes a case for the centrality of ballads in sixteenth-century popular culture’ (p. 10). Defining the genre based on its manifestations between 1550 and 1700, Hyde notes that ‘The boundaries between ballads and other forms of song seem to have been fluid’ (p. 10), but specifies that a ballad should contain a narrative element. In terms of subject matter, the genre is endlessly capacious, but Hyde shows balladeers careful to protect themselves from charges of treason through the technique of ‘implicitness’ (p. 16), a concept which recurs throughout the study. Chapter 2, ‘“Lend listning eares a while to me”: The Production and Consumption of Sixteenth-Century Ballads’, tours the evidence of print production, including printed music and illustrations, as well as assessing the elusive figure of the balladeer; chapter 3, ‘“I praye thee Mynstrell make no stoppe”: The Music of the Mid-Tudor Ballads’, explores the flexible relationship between music and lyrics, which saw popular and elite poetic cultures overlap as tunes were shared and repurposed. Ballads found their way into courtly dance and theatre, while ballad tunes were appropriated by the Protestant Church ‘in its attempts to create congregational music’ (p. 71) with familiar appeal. Here, then, Hyde addresses the intersection of ballad culture with the Reformation, an intersection which was ‘not only tolerated’ but ‘actively encouraged’, since ‘The Protestant church’s emphasis on lay involvement in worship meant that it privileged the vernacular and the simple tune’ (p. 72). The bawdy ballad is handled in chapter 5, while chapters 6 and 7 deal with the mediation of political news and confessional identity through popular song during the reigns of Henry VIII and Mary I; ‘Radical Ballads and the Commonwealth’ are the subject of chapter 8, which tracks ‘the transmission of seditious ballads’ (p. 189) in manuscript collections, and explores the evidence of personal and collective morality produced by such miscellanies. Hyde suggests that devotional songs collated or circulated privately ‘provided people with a way to practise their faith outside formal public worship’, and stood in ‘for the Catholic penitential cycle’ (p. 200). Looking outwards, too, collections of ballads which combined the seditious and the devotional ‘demonstrated an attempt to understand and perhaps to influence’ social change (p. 212). Engaging a rather different facet of sixteenth-century musical culture, Katherine Butler sheds light on the practicalities of reproducing music on the page in ‘Printed Borders for Sixteenth-Century Music or Music Paper and the Early Career of Music Printer Thomas East’ (Library 19[2018] 174–202). Butler also celebrates the increasing accessibility of images of early modern printed books online, which makes such a study possible. The article uses attention to two features of the design of printed music paper, the fleuron and blank printed stave, to elucidate aspects of Thomas East’s career and practice, as well as his place in the print industry at large. Butler notes that ‘Why East should suddenly have chosen to specialize in music printing [after 1588, as the assign of William Byrd] has always been something of a mystery’ (p. 175), as he previously enjoyed a successful career as a printer and publisher of works by authors including Lyly and Spenser, and of a series of romances translated from Spanish. The evidence brought together here shows, however, that East may have been involved in the production of blank printed staves from much earlier, during his partnership with Henry Middleton in the 1560s and 1570s, further illustrating the understanding to be gained from analysis of neglected material details. Relevant among the illustrious line-up in Subha Mukherji and Tim Stuart-Buttle’s essay collection, Literature, Belief and Knowledge in Early Modern England: Knowing Faith, is Torrance Kirby’s chapter on the significance of music to ‘The Hermeneutics of Richard Hooker’s Defence of the “Sensible Excellencie” of Public Worship’. In his treatise, Of the Lawes of Ecclesiasticall Politie [1597], Hooker briefly considers liturgical music, the object of some disapproval on the part of Puritan reformers. ‘The use of music in liturgy … came to be framed as a question of both hermeneutical and theological significance’ (p. 64), as not merely a distraction or aesthetic bum note, but a challenge to scriptural authority. Hooker’s discussion returns to Pythagorean and Platonic first principles to make the case for the spiritual value of musical harmony, ‘whereby the soul is connected to a higher, cosmic principle of order’ (p. 66), and defends the use of music from Puritan attacks through analysis of semiotics, to question the hermeneutics of Catholic ritual. The Lawes propounds the view that ‘there can be an aesthetic correspondence between the visible beauty of the church militant on earth and the invisible glory of the church triumphant in heaven’; thus, music may be ‘modelled on an exemplar of a cosmic order epitomised by the hierarchy of the angels’ (p. 71). Hooker’s hermeneutics, Kirby shows, cut to the heart of central doctrinal questions governed by the relation of sign and signified, such as in the framing of sacraments as ‘necessarily dynamic events where the instrumentality of signs works through an act of interpretation on the part of the receiver’ (p. 77). Hooker treads a conservative line, but clearly speaks to the wider project of the Cultures of Knowledge series of which this volume (otherwise largely concerned with the seventeenth century) is a part. Also noteworthy, K. Dawn Grapes’s article, ‘Italian Artistry, English Innovation: Thomas Watson’s Italian Madrigalls Englished (1590)’ (Mediaevalia 39[2018] 345–85), is the first of a series of studies on Anglo-Italian exchanges to be reviewed this year. Grapes nominates Watson’s Hekatompathia [1582] as the first English sonnet sequence printed in London (discounting Anne Lock’s Meditation of a Penitent Sinner, printed in London in 1560 by John Day), by way of illustrating Watson’s debt to Petrarch, which also, Grapes argues, lies behind the importance of the Italian Madrigalls Englished. Part of the vogue for madrigals launched by Nicholas Yonge’s Musica Transalpina [1588], Watson’s collection ‘was a musical presentation of the poet’s greatest literary achievements’ (p. 346) featuring ‘a sort of self-authoriality not often seen in other English musical works of the time’ and ‘hark[ing] back to Petrarch’s own self-referential practices’ (p. 347). Watson’s madrigals are also lexically distinct from Yonge’s, deviating from the Italian they purport to translate. However, Watson exhibits sensitivity to the melodic properties of his sources, ‘translating the music, not the words’ (p. 351), or in Watson’s own terms, ‘not … the sense of the originall dittie, but after the affection of the Noate’ (p. 360). Its innovative spirit is borne out in the posthumous dedication to Philip Sidney, as well as in its Sidneian assimilation of Italian tradition to a new English sound. Next, Anthony Archdeacon picks up the baton in ‘The Influence of Ovid’s Echo and Narcissus Myth on English Petrarchan Poetry’ (EMLS 20:i[2018] 1–29). Archdeacon suggests that the centrality of the Echo and Narcissus myth to 1590s English literary culture has been unfairly sidelined, and seeks to re-establish the significance of the story to the development of English anti-Petrarchism. The readings of Ovid’s narrative by the poets in question also served to shift ‘the interpretative focus both from the moral content to the psychological, and from consideration of the two protagonists as individually emblematic figures to consideration of their relationship or the nature of desire’ (p. 3). Having absorbed a moral-laden Ovid from their grammar-school education, the poets of the 1590s found themselves trying to accommodate their classroom classics to the Petrarchan forms they wished to emulate, when ‘Ovid seemed to be both antithetical to Petrarchism and yet embedded in its discourse’ (p. 5). The story of Echo and Narcissus provided a scenario of suitable complexity, incorporating play with perspectives which transcended the traditional male stance of Petrarchan verse: Archdeacon notes that the influential female patrons of the late sixteenth-century coteries may have indirectly encouraged new attention to Echo’s voice. In Thomas Watson’s rendering in Hekatompathia [1582], for example, far from being presented traditionally as flattering, Echo’s interjections ‘are contradictions or rebuttals, comically challenging the author’s Petrarchan posturing’ (p. 14). Later, in Teares of Fancie [1593], Watson’s speaker persona goes so far as to identify himself with Echo ‘both emotionally and poetically’: Archdeacon suggests that ‘The poet-as-Echo scenario is at once Petrarchan and yet also its opposite’ (p. 16). In aligning Narcissus explicitly with the Petrarchan poet, later writers including Spenser and Constable point up ‘the pointlessness of his endeavour’ and ‘its essentially self-obsessed and self-destructive character’. Archdeacon concludes with Thomas Lodge, Michael Drayton, and Barnaby Barnes, who engage with the latent sexual violence of the Petrarchan stance. In Barnes’s case this leads to a ‘dark parody’ of the sonnet sequence genre, and fed into this era’s acknowledgement of Petrarchism’s ‘bleak negativity’ (p. 28). Reception of a different kind is central to Alice Equestri’s ‘Writers and Readers in Early Modern Italianate Verse Narratives’ (CahiersE 97[2018] 20–38), which focuses on the role of inset letters in Elizabethan verse translations of Italian novellas. In contrast to the fulsome scholarly treatment of Italianate prose translations, Equestri notes, verse translations, aside from Arthur Brooke’s Romeus and Juliet [1562], have received little credit. Really, these are closer to ‘adaptations’ than ‘translations’, Equestri argues, since ‘When Italian novellas reached England’—often via French prose—‘they underwent a series of transformations, a major one being a notable enhancement of verbal interchanges’ (p. 22). Letters, in particular, are added, where their source material had mentioned but not quoted such forms of communication. ‘[C]onnected with frustrated love’ (p. 23), these letters heighten the poems’ rhetorical force, and complicate narrative intrigue, while underlining ‘the material practice of writing’ (p. 28), at a time when the nature and function of letter-writing were shifting. Added ‘to investigate human feelings, the psychology of love and the conflicting emotions it generates’ (p. 32), letters imbue their stories with a dynamic, almost dramatic quality, as they imitate the soliloquy or complaint within a narrative framework. The tragedies they almost invariably hasten are moral yet also morally ambiguous, Equestri suggests, and this ambiguity is frequently facilitated by ‘characters’ articulation of their own motives and feelings’ (p. 34), enabled by the simulation of epistolary exchange. John-Mark Philo pursues the English reception of classical texts abroad in ‘Henry Savile’s Tacitus in Italy’ (RS 32:v[2018] 687–707). While the Italian impact on English literature and culture in the sixteenth century is well known, Philo uncovers an example in which ‘the flow of influence is reversed’ (p. 688). The article presents sections of Italian commentary on Henry Savile’s English translation of Tacitus [1591], and Savile’s own controversial English-language commentary on that text, undertaken, Philo argues, by Savile’s friend, Gian Vincenzo Pinelli, and Savile’s former student, Henry Cuffe. Each of these three figures was ‘reading Tacitus as a guide to life at court and as a means of negotiating the rivalries inherent to a political career’ (p. 689), and the article’s analysis of the work in its English and Italian contexts explores a further dimension to the reception of a text which has been the subject of much recent critical interest. Cuffe arrived in Italy in the late 1590s and acted as translator of the English of Savile’s commentary for Pinelli, evidently taking some trouble over the process, as Philo observes from the proliferation of extant drafts. These efforts ‘speak of Pinelli’s keen interest in classical historiography as well as the esteem in which Savile was already held as a classical scholar’, and the translation is accompanied by a treatise which responds to his interpretation as well as incorporating ‘a heavily misogynistic digression’ (p. 701) on the conduct of female courtiers. Among the manuscripts’ points of interest is the window provided onto an example of ‘early-modern translation as a collaborative process between two speakers, one fluent in the source language, the other in the target language’ (p. 706). Philo concludes with the suggestion that there is more to discover about the links between Pinelli and late sixteenth-century British scholarship. Relatedly, Marie-Alice Belle and Brenda M. Hosington’s Thresholds of Translation: Paratexts, Print, and Cultural Exchange in Early Modern Britain (1473–1660) combines two recently popular fields of study, to investigate how the activities of translation and transmission are figured by their authors and editors in the prefaces and margins of Renaissance printed books. Sometimes, these spaces were used to exert control over texts and readers, as William Slights suggested some time ago, ‘Yet even in cases of strong paratextual intervention, the multiplication of authorial—or quasi-authorial—voices could also reveal the instability of both text and meaning’ (p. 7). While common to Renaissance print culture at large, the instability generated by a proliferation of voices might be particularly keenly felt in the case of translation, such that ‘The complex construction of meaning and authority in the margins of printed translations therefore offers a privileged perspective on early modern conceptions of textuality’ (p. 7). Two chapters fit the purview of this YWES entry. Alessandra Petrina revisits the theoretical ground at the beginning of ‘Approaching Petrarch’s Trionfi: Paratexts in the Early Modern Scottish Translations’, to combine ‘Genette’s definition of the paratextual space with Harold Love’s reflections on early modern scribal communities’ (p. 162). The chapter focuses on two Scottish translations of the Trionfi, following Henry Parker Lord Morley’s first English edition of 1555, the first of which was William Fowler’s in 1587. Unusually, Fowler’s draft for the edition still exists in manuscript, allowing access both to Fowler’s ‘occasional, extempore, or … topical’ literary practice alongside his more ‘determined, deliberate act[s] of reader-orientation’ (p. 166) in his dedications. Next, Gabriela Schmidt attends to the fluidity of the paratextual framing around incarnations of Thomas More’s bestseller, in ‘Marketing Utopia: The Protean Paratexts in Ralph Robinson’s English Translation’. Printed in 1551, Robinson’s translation emerged into an unstable political atmosphere which ‘seemed anything but favourable for its reception’ (p. 184). Paratexts, Schmidt argues, hold the key to the work’s resilience and success. The suggestive discourse of Robinson’s translated title, for example, negotiated the text’s position in the radical milieu of the Tudor ‘commonwealth men’, and the contemporary publication of tracts by Thomas Elyot and Thomas Smith, and Thomas Chaloner’s translation of Erasmus’s Praise of Folie [1549]. Meanwhile, her reading of Robinson’s preface seeks to break down ‘facile dichotomies’ (p. 188) between conservative and popular, or Isocratic and Lucianic, mid-century cultures, as unlikely parallels with Thomas Nicolls’s 1550 translation of Claude de Seyssel’s French Thucydides demonstrate a more capacious and contradictory association between different facets of the Edwardian literary landscape. Robinson’s paratexts also played up More’s popularity, a feature which was transformed from potential ‘liability’ to ‘major asset’ (p. 192) on Mary Tudor’s accession. Robinson’s edition is reshaped in 1556, in such a way as to suggest that More’s humanism and martyrdom were inextricably linked, bringing the text into line with Marian propaganda, while Utopia’s narrative was fictionalized by its reframing as fictive travel literature. Yet, Schmidt concludes, this flexibility led to the work’s falling out of favour in the seventeenth century, as it lost ‘the specific topical appeal that had been its chief asset’ (p. 202). The year’s international focus is rounded off by Sandra Young’s article, ‘Richard Hakluyt’s Voyages: Early Modern Print Culture and the Global Reach of Englishness’ (SCJ 49[2018] 1057–80). This article unpacks the relationship between ideology and textual form, foregrounding the role of Hakluyt’s travel narratives in reifying nationalist ambition, and English national identity. The compilations ‘project a vision of England as politically coherent within its borders and as ascendant beyond them’ (p. 1058), and in turn brought this idea of Englishness to an extranational readership. Young reads Hakluyt’s practice of compilation and arrangement as belonging to a colonial mode in itself, grounding his intellectual formation in ‘colonization’s dependence on and contribution to the tools of learning’ (p. 1062). The race to colonize the Americas is also reflected in Hakluyt’s own intellectual ‘race to establish the economic and political upper hand’ (p. 1064) among the learned community of mapmakers and chorographers in the 1580s. ‘Hakluyt’s genius’, Young suggests, ‘was to recognize the role that print could play in creating’ a lineage and future narrative for English colonial exploits (p. 1066), fuelled by his lifelong fascination with geography and navigation, and their patriotic and religious underpinnings. Young turns to Hakluyt’s early work, Divers Voyages Touching the Discoverie of America and the Islands Adjacent [1582], as a case study. Hakluyt presents himself here as a compiler rather than an author, maintaining a detached stance while foregrounding the orality and ephemerality of the accounts he has collected. ‘In this way, he obscured his own critical role in the creation of these texts and bolstered the allure of the more direct eyewitness account’ (p. 1075), even as he promoted the English right to colonial expansion through their arrangement and prefatory paratexts. Hakluyt’s lists and tables also serve to assimilate indigenous alterity into a familiar framework, ‘to demonstrate the civilizing prowess of Englishness’ and to subdue or mute alternatives (p. 1079). This review concludes, habitually, on a presentist note: this year, William R. Jones’s Satire in the Elizabethan Era: An Activistic Art explicitly embeds its analysis of sixteenth-century satire, a form characterized by ‘unapologetic interest in topicality’ (p. 2), within reflection on contemporary culture and politics from Charlie Hebdo to Donald Trump. Jones warns against an excessively historicist treatment of satire, which, he argues, is liable to reduce its analysis to reference-spotting, as well as imposing ‘a unidirectional cause-and-effect relationship’ to historical forces (p. 2). However, the converse is also to be avoided—formalists risk erasing satire’s radical contingency by emphasizing persistent features of structure or rhetoric. Jones suggests that what remains most important is the mode’s ‘purposefully antiliterary synchronic dialogue with its immediate historical and cultural contexts, as well as the socio-political effect of that dialogue’ (pp. 5–6); ‘Satire was, and remains, a weapon’ (p. 9). The book’s introduction extensively outlines the position of satirical discourse in the early twenty-first century, particularly focusing on satirical responses to unfolding events in the Middle East, and their suppression or censorship. Elizabethans Thomas Drant and John Marston identify what is still central, for Jones: that ‘satire’s most significant threat to systems of authority is ideological’ (p. 14). Reformative and performative, satire is designated not activist but ‘activistic’—its intervention ‘more representational than tangible’ (p. 15)—while stress is laid on its role as public ritual, generative of community consensus. Building on Bourdieu and Bakhtin, the introductory first chapter concludes by laying out a series of ‘Directions for the Study of Satire’, including ‘attention to authorial intention’, alertness to the specifics of historical engagement and Bakhtinian sociolinguistic systems, and the recognition of ‘neglected cultural studies perspectives’ including feminism and Marxism (pp. 25–6). Subsequent chapters seek to put these directions into practice, through the analysis of Thomases Wyatt and Drant in ‘Satire and Empire: The Ideological Encoding of English Renaissance Imitative Satire’, Joseph Hall, Marston, and others in ‘Satire Unleashed: The Rise of Juvenalianism and the Bishops’ Ban of 1599’, and the satirical discourse pertaining to Elizabeth I’s putative marriage and fitness to rule in ‘Anti-Feminist Satire and the Bishops’ Ban’, before ending with a chapter on ‘Shakespearean Satire: Redux’. Jones suggests that sixteenth-century England saw a ‘need for synergizing cultural products … as vital as it was during the early years of the Roman empire’, rendering ‘the popularity of a centripetal informing spirit like Horatianism understandable’ (p. 41). This neoclassical strand shares properties with the ‘native’ tradition of William Langland, Geoffrey Chaucer, and John Skelton, whereas the emulation of Juvenal marked out a divergent, more radical sensibility. The Bishops’ Ban of 1599 impacted the Juvenalian satires of Marston, Hall, Everard Guilpin, and John Davies, as well as all works by Harvey and Nashe: ‘the apparent generic heterogeneity of the list suggests that the categorization of a work as satire in the period (just as today) was determined in no small part by the activistic nature of the mode’ and its intent ‘to reimagine authorized images of society’ (p. 66). Satire in support of and opposition to the 2016 presidential campaign of Hillary Rodham Clinton provides a way into discussion of the anti-feminist satirical writing included in the Bishops’ Ban, such as the translation of Hercole and Torquato Tasso’s Of Marriage and Wiving. Jones suggests that this inclusion demonstrates the ban’s encompassing ‘both conservative and progressive qualities’ (p. 105), while satirical attacks on, for example, the chastity of Elizabeth I’s inviolable body served as challenges to the legitimacy of the imperial state. The task of satire was to reveal how no orthodoxy is unassailable, with the aesthetic battle pitched in the 1590s over shades of satirical intent from ‘representational liberality’ to ‘cultural revolution’ (pp. 91–2). 2. Sidney There were two issues of the Sidney Journal in 2018. The first contained four articles. William Oram’s ‘What Shakespeare Made of Sidney’s Arcadia’ (SidJ 36:i[2018] 1–17) looks at the transformations that Shakespeare made to the Paphlagonian episode of Sidney’s New Arcadia in the composition of King Lear. Oram finds the playwright reshaping plot and character in two ways. For Oram, in Shakespeare’s play, ‘there is a destabilization, in the sense the play takes the beliefs largely assumed in the Arcadia and opens them to question, forcing the characters … to ask themselves where they stand’ (p. 8). Shakespeare’s Edmund, who represents ‘the view that morality is merely the product of human convention, a character, like Richard III and Iago, calculated to create ambivalence in the audience’, is significantly less reassuring than Sidney’s ‘comfortably detestable’ Plexirtus (pp. 11–12). Also, in Shakespeare’s Lear, ‘there is an increased radicalization of the vision that the play affords’ (p. 8). For Oram, ‘Sidney’s radical politics remains aristocratic’ (p. 12), whereas Shakespeare’s play ‘attacks the Jacobean hierarchy’, not least in Lear’s ‘most radical utterance’: ‘“Thou hast seen a farmer’s dog bark at a beggar,” he asks, “And the creature run from the cur? There thou mightst behold the great image of authority: a dog’s obeyed in office” (4.6.154–5; 157–9)’ (p. 16). Michael G. Brennan, in ‘Philip Sidney’s Book-Buying at Venice and Padua, Giovanni Varisco’s Venetian Editions of Jacopo Sannazaro’s Arcadia (1571 and 1578) and Edmund Spenser’s The Shepheardes Calender (1579)’ (SidJ 36:i[2018] 19–40), examines Sidney’s ‘involvements with the book trade at Venice and Padua during his residence there from November 1573 until August 1574’, paying particular attention to the 1571 and 1578 Venetian editions of Jacopo Sannazaro’s Arcadia, a text that provided inspiration for Sidney’s own Arcadia and for the woodcuts in Spenser’s Shepheardes Calender (p. 19). Brennan suggests that Sidney (if indeed he purchased a copy) or one of his travelling companions (Lodowick and Sebastian Bryskett), could have provided Spenser with a Venetian edition of Sannazaro’s Arcadia directly or through Gabriel Harvey. Andrew Keener’s ‘A 1562 Petrarchan Italian–English Dictionary Inscribed by “Maria sidney”’ (SidJ 36:i[2018] 41–52) considers a copy of William Thomas’s bilingual grammar-dictionary Principal Rules of the Italian Grammer [1562], which appears to have been owned by the Sidney family during the sixteenth century. More specifically, it appears, from the evidence of an inscription, to have been owned by Mary Dudley Sidney, Philip’s mother. There is another inscription that could be in the hand of a young Mary Sidney Herbert. This latter inscription, alongside the name ‘Maria sidney’, includes an Italian terzina from Petrarch’s ‘Trionfo della Morte’, which Sidney Herbert translated. Keener suggests that if it is the work of a young Mary, ‘this would also mean that Sidney Herbert’s contemplation of this Petrarchan poem precedes the 1590s, the decade traditionally (if questionably) associated with her English translation’ (p. 50). Margaret Simon, in ‘Re-reading Mary Wroth’s Aubade’ (SidJ 36:i[2018] 53–67), re-examines a poem, an aubade, unique to the manuscript version of Mary Wroth’s Pamphilia to Amphilanthus: ‘The birds do sing’. Simon reads Wroth’s poem ‘within a deep history of dawn songs’ and in the context of its immediate literary milieu (including Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella). The author finds that Wroth’s work is more ‘broadly metapoetic’ than has previously been recognized, and, in the context of Pamphilia to Amphilanthus, the aubade displays a use of genre that ‘reaffirms her work’s connections to Petrarchan predecessors and Donnean contemporaries even as it gestures to the sequence’s position within a much more geographically, thematically, and temporally extensive lyric history’ (p. 67). The second issue has a special focus on ‘Beyond England: Spain, France, Wales and the New World’, and includes four articles and a note. The first article, José Juan Villagrana’s ‘The Sidneys and Spanish Verse’ (SidJ 36:ii[2018] 1–27), considers Sidney as a translator of Spanish verse by examining two poems from Jorge de Montemayor’s Diana and an imitation of a villancico collected in Certain Sonnets. Villagrana compares Sidney’s approach to translating Spanish poems—by which Sidney seeks to illustrate his theory (in the Defence) that English accentual versification is superior to the Spanish quantitative system—with those of his brother Robert Sidney and niece Lady Mary Wroth. Sidney’s brother and niece display ‘a sense of competition’ (p. 18) with their relative in terms of fluency and innovation, and establish their own poems’ relationships to ‘concerns over amorous piety and reliquary devotion’ found in the poems of Sidney and Montemayor (p. 22). Anna Waymack’s article, ‘Paradoxes, Pibrac and Phalaris: Reading beyond Sidney’s Silence on the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre’ (SidJ 36:ii[2018] 29–49), examines Sidney’s works for traces of the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, and finds an ambivalence on the subject of poetry as a means for resisting tyranny. Sidney’s allusions to the Greek mythological figure of the tyrant Phalaris in the Defence, Astrophil and Stella, and ‘Lamon’s Tale’ suggest a paradoxical response to the massacre, a formative event that ‘led him to a conundrum he may not have resolved: whether poetry, “overthwart,” can nonetheless resist the very tyrants provoking and transforming it’ (p. 49). In ‘The Career and Writings of Wiliam Midleton, Sidney’s Welsh Ensign-Bearer’ (SidJ 36:ii[2018] 51–72), Gruffydd Aled Williams presents evidence that Midleton—a Welsh poet and soldier who served as secretary at Wilton under William and Henry Herbert, first and second earls of Pembroke—also served as Sidney’s ensign-bearer in the battle of Zutphen in 1586. Midleton also produced a Welsh metrical Psalter—Psalmæ y Brenhinol Brophwyd Dafydh—published in 1603, which Williams proposes as ‘the first metrical Psalter inspired by the example of Sidney’s psalms to appear in print’ (p. 72). Nandra Perry, in ‘Books, Blood, and Tears: Philip Sidney, Thomas Lodge and the Currencies of Early Modern Eloquence’ (SidJ 36:ii[2018] 73–91), reads Lodge’s A Margarite of America alongside the Prosopopeia Containing the Teares of the Holy, Blessed, and Sanctified Marie, and finds the explicitly Catholic Prosopopeia to be articulating ‘a reformed poetics’ (p. 73), which is both a development of the Sidneian poetics of Lodge’s Margarite and a bridge to the post-Sidneian ‘tear literature’ of the 1590s. ‘Ou-topia or, the Road Not Taken: Florida, Its Narratives, and Sir Philip Sidney’ (SidJ 36:ii[2018] 93–101) is a note by Roger Kuin in which the author adds to his work on Sidney’s interests in the New World (‘Querre-Muhau: Sir Philip Sidney and the New World’, RenQ 51[1998] 549–85). Here, Kuin examines the events surrounding the little-known fact that in 1582 Sidney received a grant of 3 million acres in Florida as part of a putative project for a Catholic refuge in the New World. Kuin suggests that Sidney, who counted a number of Catholics as friends, possibly agreed to participate in the project, which was overseen by Sir Francis Walsingham, because it ‘would do much to rid England of a troublesome population always in danger of becoming a fifth column for Spain’ (p. 99). The refuge does not appear to have materialized, possibly because Spain saw through the scheme and discouraged Catholics from participating. Timothy D. Crowley’s article in Renaissance Quarterly, ‘Sidney’s Legal Patronage and the International Protestant Cause’ (RenQ 71[2018] 1298–1350), highlights a legal treatise of the 1580s by John Hammond on diplomatic and royal immunities and the authority of magistrates that ‘survives in two known manuscript witnesses, both scribal copies in distinct English secretary scripts (with Latin quotations in italic script) and both connected to the Elizabethan Privy Council’ (p. 1304). This study argues that the treatise was commissioned by Sidney ‘with various factors in mind: the Throckmorton Plot and Mendoza’s diplomatic immunity; English fears of further conspiracy and prospective criminal justice against Mary Stuart following the 1584 Bond of Association and the 1585 parliamentary Act for the Queen’s Surety; the precarious state of international Protestant alliances in 1584–5; and, most importantly for Sidney, his own prospective future as a foreign magistrate’ (p. 1300). In Crowley’s assessment, biographical evidence for Sidney’s motives for commissioning the treatise ‘points away from Mary Stuart and toward the Netherlands as a central focus for the international Protestant cause’ (p. 1338). The first of three articles from Studies in Philology is Thomas Ward’s ‘Arcadian Ineloquence: Losing Voice in The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia’ (SP 115[2018] 286–311). Ward, looking closely at Cleophila’s sonnet in Book I of the Old Arcadia, finds that, contrary to other scholarship on the ‘unstable medium of embodied vocal sound’ in early modern literature that finds it to be a threat to the logocentric, patriarchal order, in Sidney’s Arcadia, ‘the alienability of the voice is often precisely what endows it with oratorical power and what enables it to become a site for the performance of elite, homosocial intimacy’ (p. 286). The effect might have been different for non-elite readers of the printed text, for whom ‘the titillating offer of illicit reading presented by the text in print [might] also have come at the price of acknowledging the necessary alienation that voyeuristic gaze implies between author, text, and audience’ (p. 308). Michael Hetherington’s ‘“The Coherence of the Text” in Sixteenth-Century England: Reading Literature and Law with Abraham Fraunce’ (SP 115[2018] 641–78) reads the works of Fraunce, an early reader and acquaintance of Philip Sidney, ‘as an exemplary Elizabethan attempt to coordinate the varied intellectual arenas in which humanistically trained graduates might be expected to perform’. Coherence is important to Fraunce, ‘the coherence of his culture, of his professional identity and practice as a lawyer, and of the literary texts he wrote and read’ (p. 641). Though Fraunce is Hetherington’s subject, this article ‘shows how a hermeneutic of coherence might have been at play in some of the literary debates shaping the culture of the age of Sidney and Spenser’ (p. 645). Lauren Shufran’s article, ‘At Wit’s End: Philip Sidney, Akrasia, and the Postlapsarian Limits of Reason and Will’ (SP 115[2018] 679–718), looks again at the ‘erected wit’ and ‘infected will’ of Sidney’s Defence, in particular how they ‘transfigured the classical concept of akrasia—weakness of will, or acting against one’s better judgment—for reformed ends, and how this infection of the will/heart plays out in Sidney’s love poetry’ (p. 682). Shufran suggests that Astrophil and Stella ‘is conscious of … the reformed position on postlapsarian reason and will (heart). That is, both have been so corrupted that even after the reception of grace, spiritual man experiences a struggle between the part of him that has been regenerated and the part of him that remains’. In this way, Astrophil ‘exemplifies the reformed attitude that regenerate man is more struggling than his reprobate counterpart’ (p. 684). Daniel T. Lochman, in ‘“[T]he fault of the man and not the poet”: Sidney’s Troubled Double Vision of Thomas More’s Utopia’ (Ren&R 41:iii[2018] 93–115), interrogates Sidney’s equivocal praise of More and his Utopia in the Defence. Sidney welcomed the way ‘Utopia sought to pattern “a whole commonwealth” even as he doubted its literary presentation as dialogue’ (p. 115). Sidney deemed narrative to be more effective than dialogue in moving readers to virtue, and he puts this into practice in his revisions of the Arcadia. For Lochman, ‘Sidney’s revisions correspond to reassessments of Utopia at the turn of the century: its wit and poetry could be admired, yet its hybrid, contemplative genres seemed less compelling than narratives whose delight invites virtuous action’ (p. 93). György Szőnyi’s article, ‘“Speaking Pictures”: Ways of Seeing and Reading in English Renaissance Culture’ (SAP 53:i[2018] 145–76), engages with the Renaissance debate about the primacy of inspiration or imitation, and tackles the notion of ‘speaking pictures’ in Sidney’s Defence in particular. Sidney’s ‘speaking pictures’ are found to ‘successfully … harmonize the quite different views of Plato and Aristotle about the nature and purpose of literature’ in what Szőnyi terms a form of ‘multimedial syncretism’ (p. 153). The article proceeds to plot Sidney’s influence on, and representation of, ‘emblem theory in England and in Renaissance literary practice related to that’, concluding with an examination of Shakespeare’s practice, which emphasizes inspiration and imitation equally (p. 145). Katharine A. Craik’s article in Renaissance Studies, ‘Poetry, Anatomy, Presence’ (RS 32[2018] 755–77), begins by noting how ‘Sidney and Spenser imagine reading and writing as forms of anatomy, allowing them to describe how literary features can be neatly severed from one another and seamlessly rejoined’. Craik goes on to suggest that, rather than providing a neat, logical basis for poetic composition, ‘anatomical vocabulary proved useful to Renaissance literary theorists not so much because it recognized how poetry’s diverse parts added up to a systematic and relational whole, but rather because it provided an unusually rich spatial vocabulary, encompassing height and depth, to describe afresh the experience of being immersed in a poem’ (p. 755). This vocabulary was useful to Sidney ‘not for its ability to scrutinize a landscape dispassionately through methodological order and containment, but rather for its re-negotiation of the spaces between texts and those who encountered them’; he and others were ‘exploring novel ideas about literary reception using newly circulating rhetorical theories of height and depth, and were formulating revised phenomenologies of reading which could draw on the same experiences of vividness, or presence, which animate our most involved and involving encounters in the world’ (p. 777). Two short pieces in Notes and Queries discuss Sidney. ‘Did Philip Sidney Know of Copernican Heliocentrism?’ (N&Q 65[2018] 31–5) by Sharon J. Harris concludes that the ‘poet behind one of the most influential sonnet sequences in English, Astrophil and Stella, had learned of Copernican heliocentrism and placed a star at the centre of the poetic orbit’ (p. 35). Lucy Potter, in ‘Christopher Marlowe’s “Golden World”: Ekphrasis and Sidney’s Apology in Part 1 of Tamburlaine the Great’ (N&Q 65[2018] 37–42), ‘aims to demonstrate that Marlowe employs Tamburlaine-as-artwork to create a poetic kingdom—the play proper—in ways that engage the “golden world” that Sir Philip Sidney’s [sic] theorizes in his Apology for Poetry’ (p. 37). In this study, Part 1 of Tamburlaine the Great releases ‘ekphrasis from its classical moorings, transforming it for the stage with far-reaching dramatic consequences. If nothing in the early modern theatre was ever the same after this play, then Marlowe’s intervention in the tradition of ekphrasis to dramatically realize Sidney’s “golden world” gives us new insights into why and in what ways English drama changed’ (p. 42). Colleen Ruth Rosenfeld’s monograph Indecorous Thinking: Figures of Speech in Early Modern Poetics contains two chapters of interest here: ‘“Such as might best be”: Simile in Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene’ (pp. 95–119) and ‘Fighting Words: Antithesis in Philip Sidney’s Arcadia’ (pp. 120–40). In these chapters (and in a further chapter on Mary Wroth’s Urania), Rosenfeld argues that the texts ‘locate the authority of their imaginative worlds in the figures of elocutio’: ‘simile becomes the primary instrument with which Spenser negotiates poetry’s place between philosophy and history, producing his own variation on the Sidneian ideal’; and ‘antithesis and its characteristic ability to maintain opposing entities in relation to one another … becomes both the defining physical law of the Arcadia’s world and that world’s proof for the existence of the poein, or Poet-Maker’ (p. 39). In The Faerie Queene, what Rosenfeld terms ‘the operations of simile’ enable the ‘multiple and competing configurations of possibility within the world of the poem’. Spenser’s ‘negotiation between philosophical idealism and historical reality’, ‘Such as might best be’ (of Spenser’s ‘Letter to Raleigh’), is set alongside Braggadochio’s goal of ‘such, as he him thought, or faine would bee’ (p. 119; FQ II.iii.v). Braggadochio, a collector of comparative images throughout the central books of The Faerie Queene, represents, ‘like the early modern simile itself’, an organizing principle in the temporality of the narrative, a ‘centrifugal pull against [the] logical abstraction’ of Spenser’s ‘ideal projections of similitude’, ensuring that ‘this abstraction is never complete because of the temporal work of simile’ (pp. 100–1). Sidney’s revised Arcadia ‘lends antithesis a kind of agency that is not circumscribed by the agent (and its attendant structures of character, subjectivity, or personhood)’. In this context, opponents such as Zelmane and Anaxius cannot gain advantage over each other, and they are ‘exhausted by the relentless figure of speech [antithesis] and rendered breathless’. In one of the most insightful passages of a highly insightful work, Rosenfeld asserts that ‘the figural logic of the world of the Arcadia aligns the presence of a creator with the persistence of antithesis such that the resolution of figure would entail the annihilation of the poet-maker’ (pp. 123–4). Barbara Brumbaugh, in Apocalyptic History and the Protestant Cause in Sir Philip Sidney’s Revised Arcadia, argues that Sidney introduced an allegorical Church history into his prose romance during its revision. Brumbaugh begins by elucidating the allegorical methodology that certain commentators have attributed to Revelation, and which, according to Brumbaugh, Sidney imitated in revising the Arcadia. The heroic adventures of Pyrocles and Musidorus in Asia Minor are read as an apocalyptic and allegorical history of the Christian Church up to the beginning of the Reformation. The early Reformation is allegorized in the opening of the revised Arcadia, particularly through images from Revelation and allusions to the Song of Solomon. Furthermore, Sidney both praises and indicts Erasmus’s contributions to the Reformation, for his calls for reform and his willingness to compromise, respectively. The later chapters focus on certain characters, aligning Cecropia with the Church of Rome, for example, and relating the representation of Helen of Corinth to the role of Elizabeth in reforming England’s Church, for good or ill. Brumbaugh also argues that Greville’s edition of the Arcadia published in 1590 is substantially complete, basing her conclusion on analyses of Sidney’s use of generic patterns found in the works of other authors, including Heliodorus and Tasso. That Sidney would have been familiar with Tasso’s Jerusalem Delivered is an intriguing tenet of Brumbaugh’s case here. Brumbaugh suggests that ‘Sidney’s most protracted imitations of the Italian epic occur in his transformation of the Tancred/Erminia/Clorinda subplot into the Amphialus/Helen/Philoclea subplot’ (p. 426). 3. Spenser The first article in the first volume of Spenser Studies in its new home, the University of Chicago Press, is by Syrithe Pugh: ‘Orpheus and Eurydice in the Middle Books of The Faerie Queene’ (SSt 31/32[2018] 1–41). Pugh examines Spenser’s conception of his role as an ‘Orphic’ poet through his use of the Greek version of the Orpheus myth in the middle books of The Faerie Queene. The reworkings of the myth in the rescue of Amoret from the House of Busirane and of Florimel from Proteus’s cave indicate Spenser’s opposition to the tragic conception of the relationship between political necessity and love and art in the version of the myth found in Virgil’s Georgics. In this reading, Britomart’s ‘moral nature is intimately related to Spenser’s conception of his own poetic powers and purpose’ (p. 18). Brian Pietras’s article, ‘Erasing Evander’s Mother: Spenser, Virgil, and the Dangers of Vatic Authorship’ (SSt 31/32[2018] 43–69), highlights a problem with the association of Spenser, in The Shepheardes Calender in particular, and the Virgilian role of poet-prophet, or vates. As Pietras observes, the role ‘depends on the prophet’s physical coercion by outside forces. And in the Aeneid, Virgil only intensifies the sense that the vatic role entails a loss of agency by making the epic’s central vates, the Sibyl of Cumae, suffer an experience of divine inspiration that the text likens to rape’. The article suggests that the Calender suppresses the ‘vates’ deep and often vexed associations with ancient female author-figures’ in an attempt to ‘renovate the role of the Virgilian vates on behalf of its “new Poete”’ (p. 46). Kevin Chovanec, in ‘The Borders of Fairyland: Transnational Readings of Spenser in Stuart England’ (SSt 31/32[2018] 71–96), treats Thomas Dekker’s The Whore of Babylon and Ralph Knevet’s A Supplement of the Faerie Queen as readings of Spenser’s fairyland. Chovanec finds an ‘incorporative’ English/‘fairy’ identity in these works and suggests that, given the nearness of these texts in time and ideology to The Faerie Queene, Spenser’s poem could be considered a transnational epic. Dekker and Knevet’s engagement with Spenser’s work ‘suggests that early moderns negotiated an uncertain relationship between their national and religious identities as they tried to map out the unstable borders of fairyland’ (p. 93). Kenneth Borris’s ‘(H)eroic Disarmament: Spenser’s Unarmed Cupid, Platonized Heroism, and The Faerie Queene’s Poetics’ (SSt 31/32[2018] 97–135) reasserts the importance of Platonism to Spenser’s poetics. The unarmed Cupid of the proem to The Faerie Queene ‘signifies the heavenly love of virtue or amor virtutis in a Platonizing way’ (p. 97). Drawing on literary, iconographical, and hermeneutic precedents that have been overlooked in recent criticism, Borris shows that ‘the presence and absence of Cupid’s weaponry in The Faerie Queene are indeed symbolically important; Spenser’s portrayal of Cupid there draws much on Platonism; so also do his representations of both love and heroism. Thus the significances of Spenser’s Cupid in his armed and unarmed aspects become much clearer than before’ (p. 99). Debapriya Sarkar’s article, ‘Dilated Materiality and Formal Restraint in The Faerie Queene’ (SSt 31/32[2018] 137–66), shows how the philosophy of conserved matter and spontaneous metamorphosis—‘staging continuous alterations in the natural world, indestructible matter refigures itself into different forms’ (p. 138)—that is evident throughout The Faerie Queene ‘originates from the poem’s internal encounters with problems of formal excess, instead of from external philosophical doctrines that precede narrative’ (p. 140). The article is a continuation of the scholarly interest in the materialistic theories that have influenced Spenser’s works. This philosophy, which Sarkar terms ‘dilated materiality’, as well as being a ‘cosmological principle’ at the heart of Mutabilitie’s judgement, is central to ‘the poem’s attempts to reclaim narrative dilatio from its own proliferating tendencies’; ‘a principle of constraint undergirds the poetic form’ (p. 139). Angela D. Bullard’s ‘Tempering the Intemperate in Spenser’s Bower of Bliss’ (SSt 31/32[2018] 167–87) suggests that Guyon’s ‘razing’ of the Bower of Bliss ‘maintains that “temperance” for Spenser is not a state of self-sameness that must be learned by his knight at the end of Book II. Instead, it is an action Guyon completes by “tempering” an immoderate garden’ (p. 168). Spenser’s allegory on temperance ‘cautions against the dangers posed by foreign influences, warning against the extravagance and overcultivation of English gardens and lands for fear the English may over-refine themselves as well’ (p. 170). Sue P. Starke’s article, ‘Glauce’s “Foolhardy Wit” and the Revision of Romance in The Faerie Queene’ (SSt 31/32[2018] 189–214), offers a comparison of Britomart’s mentors Glauce, the old nurse, and the prophetic Merlin that elucidates the key role of the former in Spenser’s poem. In Starke’s reading, Glauce, ‘in her own form of metamorphosis, become[s] a figure of dignity and value in the allegory, transcending her original limits of rank, role and gender at least as much as Britomart … transcend[s] hers. As does Cervantes with Sancho Panza, Spenser invests his unlikely squire with the comic power to improvise and adapt generic worldviews that in isolation may rigidify in their selfseriousness’ (p. 208). George Moore, in ‘Fragmented Time in Spenser’s The Shepheardes Calender’ (SSt 31/32[2018] 215–41), looks at temporality in Spenser’s ‘Calender for every yeare’. Building on the philosophy of Michel Serres (in works such as Hermes: Literature, Science, Philosophy [1982]) and the literary criticism of Jonathan Gil Harris (Untimely Matter in the Time of Shakespeare [2009]), Moore finds a polychronicity—‘in which objects originating from different times come together into what appears to be a single unit’—in this pastoral world. For Moore, ‘Spenser enfolds the Calender itself within a richly palimpsestic temporality in order to defend the book against … antipoetic detractors’ and ‘the dangerously reductive potential of iconoclasm’ (pp. 217–18). Jeff Espie’s article, ‘(Un)couth: Chaucer, The Shepheardes Calender, and the Forms of Mediation’ (SSt 31/32[2018] 243–71), presents the reader with ‘a series of case studies, each of which examines an element of the Calender in relation to a form of Chaucerian mediation, and shows the Calender’s incorporation of English material beyond Chaucer alone’ (p. 245). As a result, Espie shows how the Calender ‘makes poetic succession proceed not according to a path of direct descent but through a circuitous route populated by intermediaries—intermediaries who, as Lydgate and E.K. suggest, themselves share a special characteristic with Chaucer’ (p. 243); ‘the Calender’s mediations appear not as latter-day corruptions that fail to live up to the standard of an initially pure English tradition. Instead, they carry forth a fundamental characteristic of English literary history, a history that was mediated even at its origin: Chaucer’ (p. 265). David Adkins, in ‘Spenser’s March and Sixteenth-Century Philology’ (SSt 31/32[2018] 273–91), places ‘March’ in the context of sixteenth-century French Hellenism, and the method of comparative exegesis developed in Paris in particular. Focusing on ‘how March’s reception of ancient poetry is shaped by the philological advances of sixteenth-century Northern humanism’, Adkins ‘demonstrates how Bion 4, ‘March’s main poetic model, was recovered in the sixteenth century, and thus that Spenser could not have relied on a Poliziano translation’; he then ‘examines how Jean-Antoine de Baïf’s reconstruction of a textual crux in Moschus 1 accounts for the inclusion and relevance of Thomalin’s Plautine emblem’; finally, he ‘looks at the comparative method of poetic imitation developed by the Pléiade, and shows how Spenser receives from Baïf a way of imitating Virgil that is sensitive to Virgil’s own imitation of Hellenistic poetry’ (pp. 274–5). Kreg Segall’s article, ‘Mother Hubberd’s Intervention in Prosopopoia, or Mother Hubberds Tale’ (SSt 31/32[2018] 293–318), uses an analysis of Mother Hubberd’s ‘taletelling voice’ to determine the effects of her tale on the narrator’s illness, illustrating how the poem embodies the trope of prosopopoeia. Segall seeks to answer the question whether the narrator—the subject of Mother Hubberd’s ‘ungentle-but-necessary remediation’ (p. 293)—‘has internalized anything of Mother Hubberd’s disenchanted narrative’, concluding that ‘we see a man who has been struck by Mother Hubberd’s narrative and moved to make a poem of it, with the implicit suggestion that it was valuable and worth recording. But by the time we reach the end, the narrator abruptly distances himself from the tale, apologizing for failure in his writing, his memory, and, finally, Mother Hubberd’s “bad” tongue’. The readers ‘share in the narrator’s disorientation, in his protracted moment of reflection, and in his uncertain response to Mother Hubberd’s tale’ (p. 312). Ryan J. Croft, in ‘Embodying the Catholic Ruines of Rome in Titus Andronicus: Du Bellay, Spenser, Peele, and Shakespeare’ (SSt 31/32[2018] 319–48), seeks ‘to explain both Titus’s extreme violence and its anachronistic monastery by reading the play through Edmund Spenser’s sonnet sequence The Ruines of Rome (1591), a translation of Joachim du Bellay’s Les Antiquitez de Rome (1558)’. Croft argues that ‘Titus’s anachronistic monastery and Shakespeare’s vigorous intervention in the ruin poetics of du Bellay and Spenser indicate a young playwright with deep Catholic sympathies’, adding that ‘the young Shakespeare appears well tuned-in to English anxieties and uncertainties regarding the Henrician and Elizabethan Reformations—specifically the dissolution of the monasteries and the persecution of Catholics’ (pp. 321–2). Margaret Christian, in ‘“The dragon is sin”: Spenser’s Book I as Evangelical Fantasy’ (SSt 31/32[2018] 349–68), reads Book I of The Faerie Queene alongside Frank Peretti’s 1995 novel The Oath, noting that ‘Spenser’s dragon is often interpreted as sin, death, and the devil’, and that ‘Peretti invokes the same cluster of meanings for his dragon’ (p. 349). Christian offers a reminder of the evangelistic purpose of Spenser’s poem, suggesting that, like Peretti—who ‘urges his readers to read morally: to consider that sin, however culturally invisible within secular society, is rotting their hearts’—Spenser possibly ‘intended his evangelical fantasy to prompt readers—us among them—to think about what is rotting our hearts’ (p. 364). In the ‘Gleanings’ section of the first part of this double issue of Spenser Studies, Roger Kuin, in ‘Hands On: Marginalia in a 1611 Copy of Spenser’s Works’ (SSt 31/32[2018] 371–87), examines the eighteenth-century marginalia in a copy of Matthew Lownes’s 1611 composite edition of Spenser’s Works. The annotations are indicative of the reader’s commitment, and they represent an evocative illustration of the eighteenth-century Spenserian revival, which was a bridge between Milton’s generation and Spenser’s Romantic admirers. The articles in the second part of the double volume, introduced by Thomas Herron, arise from the Fifth International Spenser Society Conference, ‘Spenser’s Places/The Place of Spenser’, held in Dublin on 18–20 June 2015. Richard McCabe’s article, ‘“O pierlesse Poesye, where is then thy place?”: Locating Patronage in Spenser’ (SSt 31/32[2018] 397–416), asserts the importance of ‘place’ to ‘authority’ in Spenser’s work. McCabe is interested in ‘Spenser’s lifelong concern with … “the ecology of patronage,” with locating the poetic career, literally as much as metaphorically, in the society of Elizabethan England and English literary tradition’ (p. 402). Spenser is ‘relegated’ to the ‘“salvage” terrain of the Gaelic bards’, and so ‘creates landscapes that both attest to, and simultaneously resist, his fear of cultural assimilation’ (p. 397). He also created ‘fairyland’ to ‘fashion’ his patrons, ‘who (it was hoped) would eventually reciprocate by locating the poet in places “fit” for his art’. McCabe senses a ‘growing suspicion that such patrons and places existed only in “fairyland”’, which ‘raised the terrifying possibility that Spenser’s romance had no objective correlative in the real world, that, so far as patronage was concerned, his allegory signified nothing’ (p. 414). Yulia Ryzhik, in ‘Spenser and Donne Go Fishing’ (SSt 31/32[2018] 417–37), considers Donne’s allusions to Spenser in metaphors of fish and fishing. In ‘The Bait’ Donne draws on Spenser’s river poetry, and in Metempsychosis he engages with Spenser’s allegorical methods. In the ‘The Bait’, the ‘light Spenserian motifs on the poem’s surface conceal a more fundamental point of Spenserian reference that allows Donne to mitigate his satire of the more obvious predecessors’, such as Raleigh and Marlowe. In choosing ‘to make his eclogue a piscatory rather than pastoral one’, Donne indicates ‘his refusal to engage with Marlowe and Ralegh on their own turf’ (p. 425). In the piscine episodes of Metempsychosis, Ryzhik argues for ‘the influence of Spenser’s allegorical poetics on Donne’s narrative and figurative methods’; ‘Donne’s ability to harness Spenser’s structural strategies, such as episodic doubling, reveals his deeper understanding and appreciation of Spenserian allegory’ (p. 426). Jean R. Brink’s article, ‘Spenser’s “Home”’ (SSt 31/32[2018] 439–58), tackles some long-held ‘assumptions that Spenser was banished to Ireland and that he viewed his years in Ireland as an exile’ (p. 439). For Brink, ‘[s]cholars have erred in assuming that Spenser would have wanted to make his home in Whitgift and Bancroft’s England. Ireland was a more congenial place for an independent thinker than England, and there is evidence that intellectuals, particularly those with “Puritan leanings” or “Catholic sympathies,” either accepted positions in Ireland or were sent to Ireland to protect them from officials in the Church of England’ (p. 447). The article makes a persuasive case that Ireland afforded Spenser a greater, and significantly valued, independence, and that ‘[b]y beginning and ending Colin Clouts Come Home Againe with Colin Clout in Ireland, Spenser suggests that it is easier for Colin to sustain his idealized vision of Elizabeth as the “Faerie Queene” while far from the court, a resident of Ireland’ (p. 454). Helen Cooper, in ‘Spenser’s Pastoral Places’ (SSt 31/32[2018] 459–77), sees Spenser, in The Shepheardes Calender and The Faerie Queene, drawing on the pastoral tradition of Virgil, the Bible, and others, and finding his own place within it, as a distinctly Renaissance author as opposed to a classical one. For Cooper, ‘Spenser’s place in that history is reflected in the topoi, the commonplaces, of his pastoral poems, just as it is in the various settings he imagines for them. The Virgilian paradigm is therefore not enough: not enough for the Calender, and even less for Calidore, or for Spenser’s other poems (such as Colin Clouts Come Home Againe, or Mother Hubberds Tale) that call on that history. For all E.K.’s declaration that “so flew Virgil,” and our habit of thinking of the two poets in parallel, the differences between them are much more marked than the similarities; and those differences pick up from the rich and complex history of pastoral in the centuries before Spenser’. Eschewing the topicality of New Historicism, Cooper tackles the ‘historical depth of pastoral’ (pp. 461–2) and reveals a Spenser who ‘sets these rich strands of inheritance in dialectical opposition to each other’ (p. 459). Gordon Braden’s article, ‘The Classical Background of Spenser’s View’ (SSt 31/32[2018] 481–93), looks at the classical literature of the Roman experience of conquest and empire that has a bearing on Spenser’s View of the Present State of Ireland, particularly Tacitus’s Agricola. For Braden, Tacitus’s protest against Domitian’s recall of Agricola, Tacitus’s father-in-law, has a parallel in Spenser’s protest against the recall of Lord Grey. Though Spenser was more circumspect than Tacitus when it came to questioning the imperial project itself, as Braden observes, ‘Agricola and the View still share something of the same ecology’ (p. 491). Nicholas Canny, in ‘Irish Sources for Spenser’s View’ (SSt 31/32[2018] 495–510), argues that John Hooker’s translations of works by Gerald of Wales and Hooker’s own History of Ireland 1546–86—which accompanied Richard Stanyhurst’s translations of Gerald in his Plain and Perfect Description of Ireland in the 1587 edition of Holinshed’s Chronicle—should be considered as more significant influences on Spenser’s View than Stanyhurst’s translations, which have hitherto attracted greater attention. Hooker held, in agreement with Spenser’s case in the View, that ‘the descendants of the original English conquerors of Ireland were more formidable opponents of civility, and of the interest of the English crown in Ireland, than were the people of Gaelic Ireland who were considered by all parties to the discussion on the reform of Ireland to be no less barbaric than their ancestors whose mores had been described by Gerald of Wales’ (p. 501). Clare O’Halloran’s contribution, ‘From Antiquarian Text to Fiction’s Subtext: The Extended Afterlife of Spenser’s View of the Present State of Ireland’ (SSt 31/32[2018] 511–30), examines traces of the View of the Present State of Ireland in Irish novels written by Protestants and published in the aftermath of the Act of Union of 1800. O’Halloran highlights the significance of Spenser’s View, and his complicity in the colonial project in Ireland, to those attempting to explain the ‘problem of Ireland’ to an early nineteenth-century English metropolitan audience. As well as the traces of Spenser’s influence in novels, as O’Halloran observes, ‘[t]he growth of folklore studies as an offshoot of antiquarianism in the 1820s provides further evidence of the centrality of Spenserian ethnography to all Anglophone attempts to understand the culture of the still largely Gaelic-speaking peasantry’ (pp. 525–6). Nonetheless, the novelists’ borrowings from Spenser’s ethnographic descriptions to add exoticism to their representations of Gaelic Ireland are testament to a persistent ambivalence toward the Gaelic Irish on the part of the Irish Protestant community. Stewart Mottram, in ‘“With guiltles blood oft stained”: Spenser’s Ruines of Time and the Saints of St. Albans’ (SSt 31/32[2018] 533–56), argues that the silence of Spenser’s Verlame on Alban, and Spenser’s departure from Camden in claiming Verulamium had been built on the Thames, can be explained by the poet’s ‘borrowings from Gildas and other medieval lives’ (p. 533; Mottram’s emphasis). Mottram suggests that ‘Alban is not, in fact, omitted from the poem at all, but retains a shadowy presence in Verlame’s reference to the “guiltles blood” of the Thames’. Indeed, as Mottram highlights, the ‘rationale for Spenser’s inclusion of the Thames in his poem is … revealed by … the river’s historical association with the bloody deaths of Alban and Amphibalus’; and this association allows Spenser ‘to reinforce Foxe’s account of protestant England and its pre-Saxon roots in Alban’s martyrdom at Verulamium’ (p. 536). Stuart Kinsella, in ‘Two Memorials to Arthur Grey de Wilton, Lord Deputy of Ireland (1580–2), in Christ Church Cathedral, Dublin’ (SSt 31/32[2018] 557–90), gives overdue attention to these memorials to Spenser’s employer. As well as providing a thorough examination of their contents, manufacture, and significance, Kinsella offers fresh insights into the lives and interests of a ‘tightly-knit, continuous, and intermarried … group of New English elite soldiers’ (p. 561). We are presented with a window on ‘the highest echelons of the New English in a foreign land’; ‘[t]hese soldiers, administrators, and colonists physically represented themselves through monuments of the latest European fashion in a cathedral of the new reformed religion in the heart of the medieval walled city of Dublin’ (p. 580). Maria Fahey’s article, ‘Transporting Florimell: The Place of Simile in Book III of The Faerie Queene’ (SSt 31/32[2018] 593–612), focuses on the third book, ‘Of Chastity’, and a series of epic similes that reveal Florimell’s inward life. In Fahey’s reading, the revelation of Florimell’s inner world is ‘complicated by her travel between two sets of outward stories—those of the main narrative that portray her chaste flight as sometimes groundless and those of the similes that ground her terror by revealing the logic of her motivation to flee from men indiscriminately’ (p. 595). Fahey also complicates our understanding of metaphor and simile as figures in Spenser’s poem generally. Here, ‘[t]he similes not only prompt the narrator to tell a fuller story of knights and maidens, but they also provide for the poem’s readers an intermediate area [as defined by D.W. Winnicott in Playing and Reality, 1971], a playing space that facilitates noncompliance with the narrator’s narrow judgments of chaste Florimell’s flight’ (p. 607). James Nohrnberg’s article, ‘Three Phases of Metaphor, and the Mythos of the Christian Religion: Dante, Spenser, Milton’ (SSt 31/32[2018] 613–49), concludes this double issue. Nohrnberg introduces a ‘three-phase metaphorics of the Christian mythos in late medieval and early modern literature’ based on three phases of language in Vico’s New Science (p. 613). The first phase—participative, mythic, ‘tautegorical’ and ‘hieroglyphic’—is represented by Dante’s Commedia, in which the ‘participation metaphor for the body of [Christ’s death and resurrection] involves Dante’s pilgrim reexperiencing it, not as a recollection, but a Kierkegaardian (or proleptic) repetition of a hopeful future’ (p. 621). The second phase—analogical, typological, and figurative—is represented by Book I of The Faerie Queene, in which Christ’s death and resurrection are represented by the strength or weakness of Redcrosse’s faith. The third phase—allusive, ironic, antiphrastic, and prosaic-discursive—is represented by Paradise Lost, in which Christ’s death and resurrection ‘are referred to allusively and ironically in Adam’s coming to consciousness and revival to the presence of Eve’ (p. 613). Nohrnberg suggests that the reader ‘may not think this allusive metaphor is a strong one, or even present at all, but then that is what makes it allusive, rather than allegorical or strictly typological, even if Eve is taken from the purple wardrobe of Adam’s side’ (pp. 627–8). If we do not think this metaphor a strong one, there are many others to choose from in this extraordinarily allusive article. Abigail Shinn, writing in the online journal Spenser Review, ‘Searching for Spenser’s Popular Voice’ (SpR 48:i[2018]), suggests ‘some ideas … which may serve as a nascent argument for Spenser’s popular voice’. Shinn offers Spenser’s ‘cultural eclecticism’, arguably important for his ‘earliest attempts to shape an image of himself as an English poet’, and ‘the correspondences between the beast fable and Mother Hubberds Tale (1591)’—‘an illustrative example of one of the ways in which Spenser plays with popular forms for serious ends’—as possible instances of this common touch. Thinking more broadly, Shinn argues that Mother Hubberds Tale’s use of the beast fable is ‘evidence for Spenser’s interest in modes of popular storytelling and characterisation which afford his work a greater capacity to “garnish” English poetry and bolster his claim in the Calender to be England’s “new Poete”’. Matthew Woodcock, writing in the same issue, ‘The New Poet and the Old: Edmund Spenser and Thomas Churchyard’ (SpR 48:i[2018]), attempts to persuade Spenserians to ‘tarry a little longer with Thomas Churchyard’. He argues that ‘greater critical attention to Churchyard provides insight into the kinds of strategies Spenser himself used to articulate his literary identity, and into how the older figure responded to, and positioned himself in relation to, the younger poet’. Churchyard deserves to be studied ‘for anticipating many of the self-promotional techniques and gestures found in the works of his younger fellow author, including … his use of the Ovidian authorial model from the Tristia’. For Woodcock, the author of the recent magisterial biography of Churchyard (Thomas Churchyard: Pen, Sword, and Ego [2016]), the older poet offers ‘valuable illustrations of Spenser’s early critical reception amongst his literary contemporaries’, not least in ‘the way in which he seizes the opportunity to position himself in relation to the new poet … for self-promotional purposes’. Rachel Eisendrath also has an article in the 2018 Spenser Review, in the second issue. In ‘They See and Keep Silent: On Interpreting a Queen or a Poem that Looks Back at You’ (SpR 48:ii[2018]), Eisendrath likens the imaginative experience of seeing a painting of Elizabeth I—with eyes that ‘seem to reject reciprocity as weakness’—to ‘aesthetic experience more generally’. The article wonders whether, if ‘aesthetic objects could speak, at least complex ones that elicit our imaginations and demand our interpretive efforts, they too might make the claim, as [Elizabeth] does, that “I see and keep silent”’. Considering ‘the sonnets in the first half of Edmund Spenser’s 1595 Amoretti in light of this motto of Elizabeth’s’, Eisendrath explores ‘the status of imaginative projection in the effort of interpretation’, finding that interpretation ‘positions itself in the gap between the lover (the critic) and the text (the beloved). Interpretation does not erase this distance but builds itself out of the “crisis” of meaning that this distance creates.’ In the early sonnets, the ‘beloved engages with the lover’s gaze in a manner that activates the space between them. By looking back, she energises and draws attention to the gap between her and him and generates his (and our) interpretive efforts.’ The same issue of Spenser Review contains the text of the MacLean Lecture delivered in New York by Stephen Guy-Bray, as the author, Andrew Hadfield, was prevented from leaving London by the ‘bomb cyclone’. In ‘The Hugh MacLean Lecture 2018: Spenser and the Limits of Neo-Platonic Poetry’ (SpR 48:ii[2018]), Hadfield returns to the subject of Spenser and Platonism, raising a lot of points for future debate, particularly with respect to Spenser’s Fowre Hymnes and whether they can be considered a philosophical work. After reading the epistle prefacing the Hymnes ‘carefully’, he argues that, contrary to the conclusions of other notable critics, as ‘a key to Spenser’s writing and his career’, the Hymnes prove ‘remarkably elusive’. In concluding, Hadfield makes the case for caution, criticizing critics who ‘seem to imagine that you are either for Platonism or against it’. What can be said is that ‘Spenser was clearly interested in Platonic ideas and images, and, perhaps, thought, even though the Letter to Raleigh following The Faerie Queene seems to argue that Xenophon was the more important ancient Greek thinker’. In ‘Home Truths about Raleigh and Spenser: Sir Thomas Norris and the Rebuilding of Mallow Castle’ (SpR 48:iii[2018]), Tadhg O’Keeffe wishes ‘to bring Spenserians back, in their imaginations, across the fields and into the Kilcolman house’, leading ‘a tour from Sir Thomas Norris’s house in Mallow, allowing that vice-presidential residence [to] inform how Kilcolman is “read”, and ultimately to lead the tour from Youghal, Co. Cork, from a table at which I invite readers to imagine Raleigh and Norris sitting together with paperwork about the plantation laid out in front of them’. Parts of Youghal were included in Raleigh’s ‘great seignory’, and Raleigh’s influence enabled ‘a 60-year lease of [Youghal] college with its spiritualities and temporalities’ to go to Sir Thomas Norris, ‘vice-president of Munster from December 1585 and president of the province from 1597 until his death in 1599’. The ‘Mallow escheat’ was awarded to Norris in the year he was knighted, 1588. The ‘castle’ was ‘almost certainly built around 1590’. O’Keeffe suggests that ‘Spenser surely saw the Norris house being erected, and probably also saw its medieval predecessor being demolished in preparation’. Spenser, ‘by contrast, continued to live in a medieval castle, similar to but smaller than medieval Mallow Castle. And the alterations which he made to his castle—in order to give it an Elizabethan social topography … —were modest’. O’Keeffe wonders whether ‘Spenser’s relative success, and indeed his survival for so long at Kilcolman, might have depended as much on his possessing a residence in visual rhythm with the architecture of native gentry culture as it did on his lawyers’ ability to challenge native landowners like Maurice Roche [Viscount of Fermoy]’. Elisabeth Chaghafi, writing in the same issue, ‘Visual Readers: The Shepheardes Calender through the Eyes of Its Compositors’ (SpR 48:iii[2018]), considers the mise-en-page of the four quarto reprints of The Shepheardes Calender printed during Spenser’s lifetime, offering a reading of the visual as well as the verbal text. Chaghafi, in an original and highly insightful article, argues that ‘at least some of [the] changes made to the layout and typography in early modern quarto reprints of the Calender are neither accidental nor motivated purely through practical concerns’. Interestingly, as Chaghafi attests, ‘they indicate that printers and compositors involved in the reprinting actually “read” and interpreted the text—not in terms of its contents, but in terms of its appearance’; this suggests that the reprints are ‘effectively reader’s responses from people who probably never read The Shepheardes Calender’. Camilla Temple’s article from Studies in Philology, ‘The Greek Anthology in the Renaissance: Epigrammatic Scenes of Reading in Spenser’s Faerie Queene’ (SP 115[2018] 48–72), considers the reception of the ancient Greek ekphrastic epigram in the work of Andrea Alciato and Edmund Spenser. A particular form of epigram, ‘a dialogue wherein the passerby questions an allegorical statue about its significance, and the statue responds with a form of self-commentary’, is examined (p. 48). Temple argues that this form, examples of which include Guyon’s encounter with Occasion in Book II of The Faerie Queene and a statue of Cupid in Busirane’s Castle in Book III, enables Spenser to present ‘scenes of viewing, along with their ill-equipped observers, [that] make some of the most insistent demands on the interpretive strategies of Spenser’s own readers when responding to his complex and allegorical body of poetry’. The dialogic epigram is key to Spenser’s model of reading, particularly because of ‘the way in which it foregrounds an experience of learning, partly through making mistakes but also through retrospective reflection’. This understanding is apparently taken up by Milton in his ‘comments about the significance of trial and error to the process of reading’ in Areopagitica (p. 71). Also in Studies in Philology, Danila Sokolov’s article, ‘Mirabella’s Crime and the Laws of Love in The Faerie Queene 6.7–8’ (SP 115[2018] 73–98), examines the meaning (historical and poetic) of the law that determines the judgement of Mirabella in Book VI of The Faerie Queene. Sokolov reveals Spenser’s ‘commitment to the [medieval poetic] tradition of amorous jurisprudence’ (p. 84). The text also suggests that Mirabella could be considered a murderer, which would bring her transgression into the domain of the common law. In Sokolov’s view, ‘The Faerie Queene creates a powerful legal resonance that both curbs the oppressive ambitions of the common law and reshapes the medieval erotic law to answer the demands of legal modernity’. A project of juridical integration such as this is ‘consonant with the movement of negotiating and reforming the status of the English jurisdictions that occupied the legal profession during the last decade of Elizabeth’s reign’ (p. 93). Consequently, this episode of The Faerie Queene represents ‘a heterogeneous and more successful form of legality that reconciles the past and the present and the juridical and the poetic, asserting the unrivaled power of poetry to articulate a vision of justice’ (p. 77). Lucy Underwood, in ‘Sion and Elizium: National Identity, Religion, and Allegiance in Anthony Copley’s A Fig for Fortune’ (Ren&R 41:ii[2018] 65–96), uses Copley’s poem to examine Elizabethan constructions of national identity. In Underwood’s comprehensive and insightful reading, Copley’s A Fig for Fortune, a Catholic riposte to the Protestant myth in Book I of Spenser’s Faerie Queene, ‘does not succeed in showing how to be loyally English despite being Catholic; instead, it proposes that one is truly English because of Catholicism’. Copley’s ‘radical re-imagining’, for Underwood, is key to the appreciation of ‘the inter-dependency of Protestant and Catholic narratives of nationhood’ (p. 95; Underwood’s emphasis). Kasey Evans’s article, ‘Prosopopoeia and Maternity in Edmund Spenser and Thomas Lodge’ (ELH 85[2018] 393–413), examines prosopopoeia (the trope of face-making)—‘the rhetorical granting of a life, a face, and a voice to the dead, the mute, or the dumb’—in Spenser’s Prosopopoia. Or, Mother Hubberds Tale and Thomas Lodge’s Prosopopeia: Containing the Teares of the Holy, Blessed, and Sanctified Marie, the Mother of God (p. 393). Linking prosopopoeia with maternity, for Evans, ‘both texts insist on the failure of their female narrators’ attempts to reanimate through prosopopoeia’, reserving this ‘privilege for male figures: the masculine author-narrator and the masculine characters in Mother Hubberds Tale, and, in Lodge’s case, the Father-God of the Christian tradition’ (p. 395). Andrew Gordon’s article in Renaissance Quarterly, ‘The Renaissance Footprint: The Material Trace in Print Culture from Dürer to Spenser’ (RenQ 71[2018] 478–529), introduces the ‘potent analogy between the printing press and printing foot’ that informed Reformation debates over ‘Christ’s footprints as objects of devotion and subjects of representation’ (p. 478). In Gordon’s detailed and thoroughly illustrated argument, Spenser’s Amoretti are ‘indicative of the rich metaphorics attaching to the imprint of the foot in the early modern period’, and his ‘exploration of the material environment of the page is founded on the [aforementioned] equation of the printing foot with printing press’. Building on the work of Anne Lake Prescott (‘The Thirsty Deer and the Lord of Life: Some Contexts for Amoretti 67–70’, SSt 6[1985] 33–76), Gordon finds Spenser using this analogy ‘applied to the departed presence of the deer as lover/Christ, which ‘builds upon the printed imagery of the Ascension and the contested status of Christ’s footprints as object of devotion’ (p. 522). Xiaoming Cong has a note in Notes and Queries on ‘Spenser’s Welsh Kings’ (N&Q 65[2018] 35–7). Spenser’s use of his source (The History of Wales by Caradoc of Llancarvan) for the three Welsh kings of Merlin’s prophecy to Britomart in The Faerie Queene, Rhodoricke the Great, Howell Dha, and Griffyth Conan, is reappraised. In Xiaoming Cong’s reading, ‘Spenser deploys the details about the three Welsh Kings to correspond to three themes which are significant to the British past and his Elizabethan present: defence of Britain, lawmaking, and continuation of the Trojan bloodline’ (p. 37). Joe Moshenska, in ‘Spenser at Play’ (PMLA 133[2018] 19–35), uses three aspects of ‘play’—the unstable relationship between player and plaything; the tendency for this interaction ‘to gain significance but also to verge on animation and agency’; and its tendency ‘to be opaque, its precise meaning ungraspable by those who are not involved in it’ (pp. 19–20)—to describe the experience of reading The Faerie Queene. In an original and provocative discussion, Moshenska finds that reading Spenser’s poem is ‘like playing not because it provides pure pleasure but because it can prompt a dazzlingly unstable oscillation between moods and modes—all of which we can understand as moments of play, the way a child experiences playing with a toy; the way Spenser might at different moments have laughed and labored as he wrote; the way readers might want at times to tear the book asunder (whether to destroy it or to locate its soul) and at times never to let it go’ (p. 30). William E. Engel’s article, ‘Tracing the Memory Arts in The Table of Cebes and Spenser’s Faerie Queene’ (SoAR 83:iv[2018] 9–29), begins by noting that ‘Edmund Spenser … was steeped in the memory training typical of Renaissance humanist pedagogy’, including the use of place-system mnemonics as exemplified in the structure of primers such as The Table of Cebes (p. 11). Engel proceeds to delineate ‘some of the main affinities between Spenser’s use of visually evocative mnemonic places and The Table of Cebes’, looking in particular at ‘the image and theme of the threshold, where and by means of which viewers enter a parallel world of allegorical encounters’ (p. 17). The result is an insightful journey through ‘a range of memorable episodes in The Faerie Queene that recount the strolling and wandering and pricking through an interior landscape conducing to personal trial and self-revelation concerning the highest good’; the episodes ‘collectively weave together humoral faculty psychology, mnemonic architecture, and itineraries of image and place’ (p. 25). Jesse Russell, in ‘Edmund Spenser’s Ancient Hope: The Rise and Fall of the Dream of the Golden Age in The Faerie Queene’ (EIRC 44[2018] 73–103), uncovers elements of magic (derived from Neoplatonism) in The Faerie Queene, and suggests that Spenser was attracted to the ‘ancient hope in the restoration of a Golden Age that would be inaugurated by a great monarch’ (p. 73). This faith wanes towards the end of the poem, however, and in the Cantos of Mutabilitie Spenser ‘has shifted his hope from Gloriana and her world-transformative empire to personal salvation and rest in God’ (p. 97). Sheldon Brammall’s article, ‘Laurence Humphrey, Gabriel Harvey, and the Place of Personality in Renaissance Translation Theory’ (RES 69[2018] 56–75), reads Humphrey’s Interpretatio linguarum in its context of ‘a mid-sixteenth-century debate that saw the Ciceronian controversy [in imitation theory] spread into translation theory’ (p. 56). Humphrey developed a theory of translation based on the ‘interpersonal bonds that translators must establish with their source authors’, becoming ‘the most eloquent theorist of this type of personalized translation theory for his time, and perhaps even a forerunner of later English theorists’ (p. 69). For Brammall, Gabriel Harvey’s annotated copy of the Interpretatio indicates how seriously it was taken, and a closing section of the article assesses its applicability to the case of Spenser. Here, Spenser’s translations of Du Bellay ‘were enabled by the two poets having similar naturae. One can even use Humphrey’s theory to substantiate reading “Sonets”, The Visions of Bellay, and Ruines of Rome as parts of Spenser’s lifelong attempt at self-expression’ (pp. 74–5). Jane Grogan, in ‘“Saluage soyl, far from Parnasso Mount”: Spenser and Shakespeare in Contemporary Irish writing’ (LitComp 15:xi[2018]), examines ‘the literary politics of the reception of Spenser and Shakespeare in contemporary Irish writing, theatre, and public culture’. With key points of reference in the twentieth century (such as W.B. Yeats’s essay ‘At Stratford‐upon‐Avon’ [1901] and Frank McGuinness’s play Mutabilitie [1997]), Grogan mainly focuses on the current century. Grogan finds an anticipated distinction between ‘the hero’ (Shakespeare) and ‘the whipping boy’ (Spenser), but concludes that by confronting Spenser there is the potential to access ‘a richer and more radical politics’. Contemporary Irish writers, in engaging with what Grogan terms ‘Spenser’s embodied life in Ireland as a Tudor English poet’, have ‘found political and poetic freedoms to explore alternative models of Irish political identity and new models for the Irish literary tradition’. Christopher Ivic, in ‘Bitter Memories: Spenser’s A View of the Present State of Ireland’ (Éire 53:iii–iv[2018] 9–35), observes that Spenser’s View ‘creates and transmits shared memories for the knowledge community that formed its original audience, and in doing so it participates in forging that community’s sense of self and legitimating its radical political ideas’. Wishing to steer the reader away from what he calls ‘the politics of forgetting in Spenser’s prose dialogue’, Ivic emphasizes ‘what the View recalls and recollects as well as the textual strategies it employs to oblige its readers to remember’ (p. 13). In a reading that offers new insights for scholars working on models of collective memory and collective identity formation, Ivic discovers a View that ‘mobilizes language to create vivid memories’, resulting in ‘an imagined New English community conceived in bloodshed’. Highlighting Irenius’s observation that Ireland is ‘somewhat stored with English already and more to be’ (A View of the Present State of Ireland, edited by W.L. Renwick [1970], p. 153), Ivic submits that ‘Spenser’s interlocutors etch bitter memories into the minds of readers to incite them to act’ (p. 31). Richard A. McCabe’s article, ‘Patronage, Gentility, and “Base Degree”: Edmund Spenser and Lord Burghley’ (SC 33:i[2018] 5–21), illuminates the ‘social asymmetry’ of early modern patronage by examining Edmund Spenser’s relationship with William Cecil, Lord Burghley. Predictably, Cecil’s interest is evident in his wish to obviate criticism of his status as a ‘new man’ by forging a reputation as a public servant and exploiting his Welsh antecedents to link himself to ‘a fabulous Arthurian past’ (p. 7). As McCabe notes, ‘scores of dedicators obliged’. Spenser was similarly anxious to validate his social credentials, ‘to claim the status of gentleman through talent despite his obscure origins’ (p. 5). The first edition of The Faerie Queene, which appeared in 1590, contained ‘a handsome compliment to Cecil’ (p. 8), but ‘all available copies’ of Spenser’s Complaints of 1591 ‘were confiscated owing to perceived attacks on Cecil in Mother Hubberds Tale’ (p. 10). As McCabe delineates, Spenser’s animus appears to have been motivated by loyalty to the recently deceased earl of Leicester, whose party (the Sidney–Dudley–Devereux axis) had a well-established rivalry with Cecil, and his own disappointment. Having praised Cecil’s learning for the 1590 Faerie Queene, in the second instalment, which appeared in 1596, ‘Spenser portrays Cecil as incapable of reading the poem in the allegorical manner suggested in the dedicatory sonnet of 1590’ (p. 16). Spenser’s own ‘claim to a “place” among the Spencers of Althorp’ reverses the social hierarchy, but, as McCabe argues, ‘problematiz[es] his own criteria for gentility’ (pp. 18, 5). Cynthia Nazarian, in ‘The Outlaw-Knight: Law’s Violence in The Faerie Queene, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, and The Dark Knight Rises’ (CulC 98[2018] 204–33), explores a figure she terms the ‘outlaw-knight’, ‘a curious hybrid who reappears from the early days of modern statehood to uncover a fundamental indeterminacy at the heart of state-sanctioned law and violence’, a ‘figure [who] marks periods of political change with a backward-looking critique of modern statehood through the figure of the individual aristocratic hero’. In The Faerie Queene [1596], Nazarian focuses on the Knight of Justice, ‘written at a pivotal point of nostalgia for a feudal aristocratic past amid the centralization of the sixteenth-century Tudor monarchy’ (p. 204). Nazarian reads The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance and The Dark Knight Rises as allegorical like The Faerie Queene, and the allegorical mode is central to what the three works say about law, violence, and justice. In The Faerie Queene, ‘the centralized Tudor state is [revealed to be] just one possibility among many, which only triumphs by violently extinguishing and then delegitimizing rival laws’; in overthrowing rival rulers, the Knight of Justice, the outlaw-knight, ‘serves the state but also reifies a critique of it through the nostalgic idealization of feudal aristocratic individualism’ (p. 227). William A. Oram, in ‘Looking Backward: The Evolving Genre of The Faerie Queene’ (MP 115[2018] 327–47), considers The Faerie Queene [1590–6] ‘from the viewpoint of its ending in Two Cantos of Mutabilitie (1609)’, arguing that the differences between the Mutabilitie Cantos and the rest of The Faerie Queene—there is no plot connection between them, they share no characters (apart from the goddess Cynthia), the Cantos have no human actors, and their action is purely mythic—‘are significant and that they embody Spenser’s retrospective comment on his major work—a comment on the generic evolution of the poem’ (p. 327). For Oram, Spenser’s purpose in the Cantos is to look back to his earlier career and ‘to bid a playful farewell to Virgilian epic’; ‘most obviously the seventh canto reworks images and ideas in The Shepheardes Calendar (1579)’; the Cantos ‘constitute as well a retrospective look at the genres of his romance epic and a final acknowledgment of a shift in direction’ (p. 332). The last stanzas of the Cantos hint at ‘a final generic shift in Spenser’s poetry, away from narrative and toward lyric’; Spenser’s last poems—Prothalamion and Fowre Hymnes—‘share with the Cantos this movement toward meditative lyric, and each participates to some degree in the complaint mode’. On this basis, Oram speculates that, though ‘we do not know what Spenser would have written had he lived beyond 1599’, the Cantos suggest he might have written a ‘combination of cosmology and philosophy in lyric form, with its characteristically open-ended conclusion’ (p. 347). Lauren Shufran, in ‘“Till I in hand her yet halfe trembling tooke”: Doctrines of Justification in Edmund Spenser’s Amoretti’ (Ren&R 41:i[2018] 89–130), argues that ‘there is an underlying soteriological conceit in Spenser’s Amoretti’. In particular, the conceit centres on ‘the roles that “works” and “grace” play in the beloved’s requital: roles with theological analogues in justification’ (p. 89). In the end, Shufran concedes that ‘there is no hard and fast theological doctrine opposed to works-righteousness in the Amoretti, beyond the conviction that grace must precede good works’. Nevertheless, Spenser’s sonnet sequence ‘demonstrates the ways a Petrarchan lover might use the lyric sequence to negotiate the most fundamental theological issues of his day’ (p. 130). In Adam Spellmire’s article, ‘The Blatant Beast and the “Endlesse Trace” of Spenserian Romance’ (UTQ 87:i[2018] 25–41), the Blatant Beast both threatens and generates the poem The Faerie Queene. For Spellmire, the ambivalence embodied by the beast unsettles the poetic project as a whole: the possibility of fashioning a gentleman. By the end of Book VI, Spenser’s verses ‘now must merely “seeke to please”’, and ‘[t]he Beast’s victory suggests that the poet must now abandon usefulness for delight and confine himself to “base flattery,” a corrupted form of courtesy’ (p. 38; FQ VI.xii.xli, VI.i.iii). Amanda Taylor, in ‘The Compounded Body: Bodily Knowledge Production in the Works of Andreas Vesalius and Edmund Spenser’ (JMEMS 48[2018] 153–82), compares Book II of The Faerie Queene, in which Spenser allegorizes the body in relation to the question of temperance, with De humani corporis fabrica or On the Fabric of the Human Body by Andreas Vesalius, which was published in 1543. Taylor suggests that these works share an epistemological model that ‘positions knowledge production in the bodies of all, including women and lower-status men’, resisting ‘the erasure of the abject from the ideal’ (pp. 154, 176). As Taylor notes, in Book II of The Faerie Queene, ‘Spenser portrays the body as an embattled fortress protecting the virtue of temperance. The questing knights Guyon and Arthur come to the House of Alma, which is described as the human body: “Of all Gods workes, which do this world adorne / There is no one more faire and excellent, / Then is mans body both for powre and forme, / Whiles it is kept in sober gouernment”’ (p. 168; FQ II.ix.i.1–4). In this episode, the ‘fine line between the natural and the monstrous’ in Spenser’s allegory is illustrated in Arthur’s battle with Maleger, ‘captain of the assault on the body-castle’ (pp. 172–3). Spenser follows, but also appears to critique, Galenic theory, sharing its ‘concern with the link between bodily compounding, porosity, and affections’, but departing from it as regards bodily reconstitution, as his representation of Maleger suggests. For Taylor, ‘[t]his disagreement results from a bodily epistemology that identifies the body as a source of knowledge production, but, as a consequence, must confront the porosity, variety, and possibility of continually reconstituting bodies. That reconstitution can both provide access to positions of power and threaten idealized temperament’ (pp. 175–6). As well as his article in PMLA, Joe Moshenska has an essay, ‘Screaming Bleeding Trees: Textual Wounding and the Epic Tradition’ (in Johnson and Decamp, eds., Blood Matters: Studies in European Literature and Thought, 1400–1700, pp. 92–108). Moshenska considers the origins of the screaming bleeding tree topos in the Aeneid and its last realization in The Faerie Queene, arguing that, in order to properly account for its recurrence, ‘the nature of the bleeding wound itself that is opened up in the tree’s surface’ must be re-examined (p. 93). In this reading, ‘the screaming bleeding tree might not only reflect literature’s ability to grant otherwise mute suffering a voice, but reveal deep anxieties that this revelation of hidden suffering might only occur at the cost of a further wrenching and a wounding in which the poet is complicit’ (p. 94). In the second canto of Book I of The Faerie Queene, the Redcrosse Knight plucks a bough from a tree that then yells, bleeds, and identifies itself as Fradubio. In Moshenska’s view, the figure of Fradubio allows Spenser ‘to conduct a self-reflexive interrogation of his own allegorical mode, in which all significant figures hover between fleshly personhood and mute thingliness’; ‘[t]he blood that trickles down the bark of the wounded Fradubio traces a line between the living and the dead, and the significant and the insignificant, that Spenser’s own poetics will obsessively traverse and complicate’ (p. 95). For Moshenska, ‘Spenser can create life only if it verges on death: all of his allegorical figures are, in a sense, like blood, that emerges resplendent with life only to begin clotting immediately into gore’ (p. 106). Robert Lanier Reid’s book Renaissance Psychologies: Spenser and Shakespeare, published by Manchester University Press (as part of the Manchester Spenser series) in 2017, chooses Spenser and Shakespeare for their ‘holistic and consistent’ forms of ‘Renaissance psychology’, authors capable of giving us ‘a comprehensive view of human nature, yet [also with] characters and plots [that] spring from radically distinct psychologies’. In seven chapters divided between two sections (Part I: ‘Anatomy of Human Nature’ and Part II: ‘Holistic Design’), Reid’s focus with respect to Spenser is largely on The Faerie Queene. Part I elucidates the differences between the two authors’ forms of psychology: Spenser in his ‘Christianized Platonism prioritizes the soul, his art striving to mirror divine Creation, dogmatically conceived’; and Shakespeare’s ‘sophisticated Aristotelianism prioritizes the body, highlighting physical processes and dynamic feelings of immediate experience, and subjecting them to intense, skeptical consciousness’ (p. 2; Reid’s emphasis). The chapters of Part II ‘explain how Spenserian psychology shapes the holistic design of his epic, and how Shakespearean psychology shapes the mature dramaturgical form of Macbeth and King Lear’ (p. 4). Chapter 5, ‘Hierarchic Architecture in The Faerie Queene’ (pp. 179–238), examines what Reid terms Spenser’s ‘radical revision’ of the patriarchal allegory of Adam and Eve’s fall (p. 4). For Reid, ‘Books 1–6 of The Faerie Queene form an ontological and metaphoric descent: each legend’s allegorical range narrows as Gloriana and Arthur, their subtypes and evil antagonists, methodically descend into the shadows of material reality.’ Nonetheless, Spenser’s allegory never strays too far from universal truth ‘by means of a hierarchic pattern of metaphoric change—a reversible sequence that Spenser calls “dilation” and “return”. The pattern is evident in the poem’s schematically descending portrayal of key figures’ (p. 222). Chapter 7, ‘End-Songs: Final Vistas of Spenser and Shakespeare’ (pp. 282–338), considers the Mutabilitie Cantos, and Reid sees them as ‘not conclusive but transitional’ (p. 282), positing a ‘concluding setting for Spenser’s Christian-Platonic epic’: the holy eidetic city, drawing from Plato’s Timaeus … and from Augustine’s City of God, which combines the mystic geometry of Plato’s anthropomorphic city with the Biblical templar city of Isaiah, Ezekiel, Psalms, and Revelation’; ‘Spenser is always building toward this compelling civitas or arche, whose channelling of passional flux into perfect love is the true end of his epic’ (pp. 294–5). Judith H. Anderson’s monograph Spenser’s Narrative Figuration of Women in The Faerie Queene, as its title suggests, focuses on the figuration of women in Spenser’s narratives, particularly contributing to the significance of the terms ‘woman’ and ‘figure’ in ‘Spenser’s culturally encyclopedic text’ (p. 1). Reflecting the variety of the characters in The Faerie Queene, each of the chapters views the narrative figures in it ‘using a different lens and sometimes more than a single lens’. Chapter 1 (pp. 13–47) approaches Una through the history of Spenserian parody, consciously effecting a profound shift in perspective: the word ‘blubbered’ links the sexual assaults on Una, Florimell, and Duessa, and allows Anderson to offer a reading of Una’s ‘figural being’ unseen in other recent critical responses to the poem (pp. 6–7). Chapter 2 (pp. 49–73) is devoted to Belphoebe, and the point at which the ‘poem becomes openly subject to history’ in Anderson’s view (p. 8). Nonetheless, Timias and Belphoebe’s reconciliation in Book IV, with its unreality in terms of its historical analogue (Raleigh’s continuing estrangement from Queen Elizabeth), ‘threatens the more comic, constructive stories of Una in Book I and Britomart in Books III and IV’; history ‘openly compromises the Faerie vision’ (p. 66). Chapter 3 (pp. 75–120) on Britomart uses a series of lenses: Alan Sinfield’s discussion of Shakespearean character in Faultlines: Cultural Materialism and the Politics of Dissident Reading [1992]; a rhetorical lens in keeping with Book III’s House of Busirane; and a primarily mythic, iconological, and thereby gendered, one, focusing on the character’s arming and armour (p. 9). A final chapter (pp. 121–48) considers the remaining narrative figures of women in The Faerie Queene, elevating some minor stories to the same parodic and mythic levels as the major ones of the earlier chapters. Patrick Cheney’s monograph English Authorship and the Early Modern Sublime: Spenser, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Jonson has two chapters that focus on Spenser: chapter 2, ‘Spenser’s Sublime Career’ (pp. 58–87), and chapter 3, ‘Fictions of Transport: Spenser’s Heroic Sublime’ (pp. 88–128). Cheney makes the case for an ‘early modern sublime’ that signals the ‘advent of modern English authorship in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries’ (p. 1). Taking his cue from Longinus, ‘whose On Sublimity (first century AD) focuses on the representation of the author in the work’, Cheney rethinks the sublime in terms of the author, ‘break[ing] theoretical ground, shifting from reception to literary production and placing Renaissance authorship at the centre of Pre-Enlightenment accounts of the sublime’ (p. 3; Cheney’s emphasis). Philip Sidney in Astrophil and Stella uses ‘sublime’ as a verb in an alchemical sense, meaning ‘extract’, but also, as Cheney notes, with a ‘potential Longinian trace’. In context, the word is also ‘artistic and authorial’; ‘Stella’s linguistic sublimity has a (pre-)Kantian edge, for it “Makes me in my best thoughts and quietst judgment see”’ (pp. 6–7; Sonnet 77, l. 12). In Cheney’s assessment, Spenser’s Faerie Queene ‘inaugurates for modern English authorship an equation between sublime poetics and vast generic form’ (p. 51); and ‘we might say that what makes Spenser’s authorship sublime is his literary career itself’ (p. 58). In chapter 2, Cheney builds on Angus Fletcher’s Allegory: The Theory of a Symbolic Mode [1964]. Having set the parameters of his discussion in the previous chapter—‘does the sublime author promote citizenship or godhood, nationhood or salvation, service to the monarch or the deity, the political state or the eternizing state?’ (p. 24)—Cheney proposes that Spenser ‘routinely scripts the sublime neither to deliver us into a final state of divinity or godhood (treasured by the sublime Plato) nor free us from mental strangulation through imaginative ambivalence (valued by Fletcher). Rather, the sublime for Spenser is an “Allegoricall devise” … of free authorship, one that inspires the cultural utility of a paradoxical construction: a transcendent human, a literary figure who dares to take on a demonic sublime for the liberating purpose of heroic instrumentality in the world’; ‘sublimity is the heroic energy driving the epic romance, for better or for worse’ (p. 63; Cheney’s emphasis). In chapter 3, Cheney focuses on the Longinian concept of ‘transport’, which contrasts with Plato’s world of abstract forms. For Longinus, ‘the process of transcendence is precisely not rational and ordered but irrational and disordered’; ‘the sublime leads to astonishment, unsettlement, and a pleasure born of pain’ (p. 31). In Spenser, Cheney sees a ‘process of heroic transport’, turning, in a series of subsections of the chapter, from the ‘theological sublime’ to: the ‘political sublime’, in relation to Elisa from the ‘Aprill’ eclogue and Mercilla in Book V of The Faerie Queene (‘counterpoised by Lucifera in Book I’); the ‘erotic sublime’, illustrated in the story of Britomart, among others; the ‘artistic sublime’; and the ‘primary exemplar’ who unifies them all, Arthur (p. 91). Virginia Lee Strain’s monograph Legal Reform in English Renaissance Literature has a chapter, ‘“Perpetuall Reformation” in Book V of Spenser’s Faerie Queene’ (pp. 32–61), in which Spenser’s poem is read as part of an investigation into the ‘rhetorical and representational practices that were used to monitor English law at the turn of the seventeenth century’, employing close readings that reveal that ‘Spenser’s Faerie Queene, the Gray’s Inn Christmas revels of 1594–5, Donne’s ‘Satyre V’, and Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure and The Winter’s Tale all examine the potential, as well as the ethical and practical limitations, of legal reform’s contribution to local and national governance’ (p. 1). Strain reads Book V of The Faerie Queene as a representation the reformation of law ‘in terms of both its equitable correction and its administration’. Artegall, the Knight of Justice, is seen as acting in ways that allude to the English colonization of Ireland, his methods and success ‘called into question not only through his defeat in combat by Radigund, but also through his rescue that is accomplished by his fiancé’ (p. 20). Britomart ‘retraces the knight’s route through Faerieland to the city of Radigone’, where ‘we discover that the countryside has not been subdued in the wake of Artegall’s reformation of justice’. Britomart’s ‘re-enactments of the knight’s battles’ characterize ‘the activities of legal reform and governance as ongoing tasks’. In doing so, she both ‘reforms and exemplifies the other part of the popular definition of justice, the “perpetual and … constant will” to do justice’ (p. 34; Thomas Floyd, The Picture of a Perfit Common wealth [1600], p. 174). She illustrates the limits of the knight errant as a means of legal administration, and ‘[t]he perpetual departure of the knight errant, “pricking” on yet another “plaine”, is finally superseded by the image of continual magisterial presence and the continual monitoring and improvement of the judge’s knowledge and performance of his office through re-education’ (p. 54). Cyril L. Caspar’s book The Last Pilgrimage to Eternity: Protestant Paths to the Afterlife in Early Modern English Poetry has a chapter on Spenser: ‘“Streight way on that last long voiage”: Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene and the Trajectory of the Last Pilgrimage’ (pp. 73–135). Caspar undertakes an Augustinian reading of Book I in which Spenser is ‘not so much concerned with the metaphorical representation of a last pilgrimage to eternity but … with how the prospect of such an ultimate journey sparks in Redcrosse and the Protestant reader the spiritual desire to ameliorate their own this-worldly ways’ (p. 18). For Caspar, the Mutabilitie Cantos ‘mark both an ending, in that they invoke eternal rest, and a continuation, in that this divine rest has not been consummated yet’ (p. 135). In this reading, though ‘the final lines of The Faerie Queene seem to achieve closure, the variant spellings of “Sabbaoth God” and “Sabaoth’s sight” are indicative of a more ambiguous ending’; at the conclusion, ‘a fallen world lets change even occur in the spelling of a single word’ (pp. 131–2, 134). Christine Barrett also looks at The Faerie Queene in chapter 1 of her book Early Modern English Literature and the Poetics of Cartographic Anxiety: ‘The Dream of an Unmappable Nation Allegory, Cartography, and Spenser’s Faerie Queene’ (pp. 47–88). Barrett describes ‘cartographic anxiety’ as ‘worries about the tendency of cartographic-related or -inspired materials to instantiate strategic programs of (especially political) power’, and contends that ‘there is something in the expressive mode of allegory in particular that allows [The Faerie Queene] to stage cartographic anxiety as not just troubling but generative, too, of an ethical poetry’ (p. 47). Barrett is especially interested in the interaction of the literal and literary in the making of poetry. In this reading, Spenser’s Faerie Queene is ‘an allegorical poem in which space can be imagined and described, usually as a function of its inhabitants’ wanderings, but within which the process of representation itself must be critiqued and undercut’; by joining ‘its aesthetic and ethical objections to the compression imposed by the map—on travel, on narrative, on bodies—the poem imagines a country that is at once a geographic dream and a poetics. The national dream of The Faerie Queene turns out to be not an empire that stretches across the map, but rather an unmappable Britain, full of material bodies that matter, and for whom the map is but a poor vehicle of possibility’ (p. 88). As well as the article in Spenser Review discussed above, Rachel Eisendrath has a chapter, ‘Here Comes Objectivity: Spenser’s 1590 The Faerie Queene, Book 3’ (pp. 49–81), in her book Poetry in a World of Things: Aesthetics and Empiricism in Renaissance Ekphrasis. Here Eisendrath focuses on a facet of objectivity, the problem of detachment. Considering a sequence of ekphrases of art objects at the end of the 1590 edition of The Faerie Queene, Eisendrath suggests that these ekphrases ‘offer insight into the historical process by which artworks began to be viewed as mere objects in the sixteenth century’ (p. 52). In the second room of the House of Busirane, Spenser ‘distances his readers from what he perceives as the imagination’s dangers by presenting the art as antiquarian refuse from a dead past. In so doing, he draws on concrete aspects of the material culture of the period, as well as on the larger paradigmatic shift toward scientific objective detachment with which material culture can be associated’ (p. 53). Spenser’s poetics also resists this shift, resulting in a ‘kind of pulsing effect … as the poem repeatedly tears down one show and puts up another’; ‘it strives toward a completion of meaning at which it can never fully arrive’ (p. 80). Books Reviewed Anderson Judith H. Spenser’s Narrative Figuration of Women in The Faerie Queene . MIP . [ 2018 ] pp. 210. £70 ISBN 9 7815 8044 3173. Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS Google Scholar Google Preview WorldCat COPAC Barrett Christine. Early Modern English Literature and the Poetics of Cartographic Anxiety . OUP . 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The Value of Time in Early Modern English Literature . Routledge . [ 2018 ] pp. xv + 234. £110 ISBN 9 7814 7248 8053. Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC Strain Virginia Lee. Legal Reform in English Renaissance Literature . EdinUP . [ 2018 ] pp. ix + 229. £75 ISBN 9 7814 7441 6290. Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS Google Scholar Google Preview WorldCat COPAC Totaro Rebecca. Meteorology and Physiology in Early Modern Culture: Earthquakes, Human Identity, and Textual Representation . Routledge . [ 2018 ] pp. ix + 172. £110 ISBN 9 7811 3809 2167. Google Scholar Google Preview OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat COPAC © The Author(s) 2020. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the English Association. All rights reserved. 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TI - VIThe Sixteenth Century: Excluding Drama after 1550
JF - The Year's Work in English Studies
DO - 10.1093/ywes/maaa006
DA - 0030-12-11
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/vithe-sixteenth-century-excluding-drama-after-1550-6JARhmUNYU
DP - DeepDyve
ER -