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 Scepticism, dishonesty, and distrust were keynotes of this year’s output on late Tudor non-dramatic literature, as the contemporary prevalence of fake news and alternative facts continues to resonate with Renaissance preoccupations and textual practice. Andrew Hadfield’s Lying in Early Modern English Culture: From the Oath of Supremacy to the Oath of Allegiance shows how lying went hand in hand with the concept of truth in early modern discourse. Choosing the 1535 Oath of Supremacy as his starting point, Hadfield sets lying and its epistemological significance squarely in the context of the Reformation, and the contortions of truth with respect to policy, faith, loyalty, and dissent which its sixteenth-century aftershocks demanded. However, the study stems from even more fundamental questions, about the language of lying, and ‘a very specific fear about trust and evidence … what if much of the information we use when constructing any history is not actually true?’ (p. 3). Following on from Natalie Zemon Davis’s encounter with ‘fiction in the archives’, the work stresses that the texts used to construct literary—or other—histories ‘should not be read as unmediated modes of truth-telling, but in terms of widely understood forms of story-telling’ (p. 4). Meanwhile, however, ‘There is surely a difference between telling a crafted tale … and an outright lie’ (p. 5), one which the monograph sets out to pin down. What results is a wide-ranging cultural study, organized around ‘Modes of Lying in Early Modern England’, including rhetoric, courtesy, and testimony, and the literary landscapes surrounding the two oaths of the title. While the final chapter focuses on ‘Othello and the Culture of Lies between Conscience and Reputation’, the rest of the book groups its evidence thematically: ‘The Religious Culture of Lying’ begins with William Tyndale and Thomas More, and their reception of the Church Fathers, before considering William Baldwin’s Beware the Cat [c.1552] (which, Hadfield suggests, ‘shows us a nation of Catholics, a not-so-secret state that is, in fact, easy to uncover’, p. 134), and John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments [1563]—a text which also ‘illustrates the dangers of living in a superstitious time when so few people were really Christians’ and ‘Duplicity, falsehood and lying inevitably flourish’ because ‘true faith is hidden’ (p. 138). ‘Rhetoric, Commonplacing, and Poetics’ notes that ‘the tools of the orator support the proliferation of falsehood rather than spread of truth’ if misused (p. 158); the chapter takes stock of the treatment of truth and lies in Quintilian and Aristotle, and then considers the manifestation of humanist unease around their rhetorical proximity in Erasmus’s Colloquies, John Heywood’s The Spider and the Fly [1556], and Baldwin’s Treatise of Moral Philosophy [1547], and the pertinence of this intellectual backdrop to his Mirror for Magistrates [1563 edition], in which Lord Rivers ‘complains that truth is not something that princes can endure’ (p. 174). Rivers’s dilemma, and Baldwin’s too, lies at the heart of the book’s investigation of Tudor literature’s exercise of religious and political tact: ‘Were not most people forced to lie in times of crisis, even if they were principled enough to avoid dissembling at other times? Furthermore, what was the truth?’ (p. 176). As stipulated by Augustine, jokes offered the means to deflect blame for lying, and the wry humour of Erasmus, Baldwin, and Montaigne shows them all engaging with falsehood’s tricksy parameters. Montaigne’s essay ‘Of Lyers’ ‘discusses the corrosive effects of sustaining an elaborate and difficult lie’ (p. 180) to demonstrate its corruption of the laudable quality of a good memory. Yet Montaigne’s political anecdotes reframe his analysis, to suggest that ‘separating truth and lies is easy enough in theory but virtually impossible in practice’ (p. 183). ‘Testimony’ turns to Thomas Nashe’s Unfortunate Traveller [1594], where ‘the battle between truth and lies serves as a structural principle’ (p. 245). ‘As the Renaissance went global … individuals had to assimilate diverse knowledge, information, and testimony’ (p. 252) while weighing up its truth claims. Closer to home, William Cecil, Lord Burghley was at work manipulating public opinion through print publication. Hadfield narrates Burghley’s part in the incrimination of Mary, Queen of Scots, arranging that ‘a supposedly authentic “Scottified” version’ of George Buchanan’s Detectio Mariae Reginae Scotorum [1571] ‘should appear with the false imprint of St Andrews … disguising any connection to Elizabeth’s government’ (p. 264). More humdrum Elizabethan crime pamphlets were no more reliable: ‘the authors may have believed the story they told’, but ‘more likely they believed that such accounts provided a valuable service in times of peril … in order to proclaim a higher truth’ (p. 284). Hadfield concludes that, between 1535 and 1606, ‘Lying … had become more central to the imagination’ (p. 309), although ‘to argue that conceptions of lying had altered fundamentally’ would, he suggests, be misleading (p. 308). Berta Cano-Echevarría investigates the dubious origin-myth of a verse form in ‘Puttenham’s Failed Design: The Fake Genealogy of English Pattern Poetry’ (CahiersE 94[2017] 57–73). While George Puttenham’s Arte of English Poesie [1589] promoted the genre, in which a poem is arranged on the page to resemble a particular shape, criticism has paid little attention to its origins and contemporary popularity. It had been introduced as an innovative, concise mode of expression in Puttenham’s Arte, which advertised the practice as ‘fittest for pretie amourets in Court’ (p. 59), on account of its heightened artfulness and subtlety. Cano-Echevarría attributes no small degree of artfulness to Puttenham himself, though, whose anonymous account of the pattern poem’s ‘oriental’ origins turns out to be thoroughly misleading, to say nothing of his autobiographical claims. ‘It seems’, she suggests, ‘that his frequent self-fashioning anecdotes are a way of playing a game with the reader’ (p. 62), which leaves even Puttenham’s identity as the Arte’s author in doubt. Did Puttenham suppress his awareness of the former Jesuit Richard Willes’s pattern poems in Willes’s Poematum Liber [1573]? Or is his description of the eastern geometrical basis for the poems’ shapes genuine? As a third possibility, Cano-Echevarría suggests that the ‘oriental traveller’ persona from whom Puttenham apparently received word of the genre might have been a fictional figure inspired by Willes’s own travel narratives, and concludes that ‘By providing shaped poems with a new, faked genealogy, Puttenham … winks at Willes’s contribution to the knowledge of the Far East by inventing a fantastical tale in a setting where the geographical landscape is more imaginative than accurate’ (p. 69). David Scott-Macnab shines a light on George Turbervile’s misleading language in ‘Of Hawks, Tabors, and Tabards’ (N&Q 64[2017] 381–5). Scott-Macnab notes the difference, elided in the Middle English Dictionary’s definitions, between neutral references to hawking with a tabor, the drum used to scare waterfowl into flight, and ironic allusions to hunting hares using the same method which would be, of course, absurd, as in John Lyly’s Euphues: ‘you shall as soon catch a hare with a tabor as you shall persuade youth with your aged and overworn eloquence’ (p. 383). The MED further confuses John Howard, duke of Norfolk’s reference to a ‘tabere’ as an error for ‘tabart’, or tabard (a sleeveless garment), subsequently assumed to refer to a hawk’s hood. The ‘confusion is noteworthy’, Scott-Macnab suggests, because the terms are also found to have been mixed up in George Turbervile’s Booke of Faulconrie or Hauking [1575], where Turbervile uses ‘tabard’ for ‘tabor’; a substitution which was not corrected in the reissued second edition of 1611, and might therefore point to a supplementary local usage. Another monograph to take uncertainty as a central theme was the present reviewer’s Unperfect Histories: The Mirror for Magistrates, 1559–1610, which traces engagements with textual instability through the Mirror’s complicated production history. Scholarship has moved on from its centuries-old inurement against the Mirror’s literary value. Yet recent recognition of the wit, urgency, and humour of William Baldwin’s original versions of the medieval complaint collection, printed between 1554 and 1578, has often thrown these qualities into greater relief by a corresponding emphasis on the tediousness and irrelevance of the work’s later supplements [1574, 1575, 1578, 1587, 1610]. This book demonstrates how subsequent contributions to (and appropriations of) the de casibus corpus reframe Baldwin’s mistrust of chronicle history in their own vibrant, divergent terms, to encompass anxieties around national identity, poetic invention, and literary-political ethics. These include John Higgins’s much-maligned British prequel, The First Part of the Mirror for Magistrates [1574–5], which voiced contemporary concerns about the unavailability of historical records with which to ground a narrative of Britain’s ancient origins. Higgins used a variety of aesthetic strategies to evoke the past’s unknowable nature, including applying a Henrysonian dream frame to Baldwin’s Mirror model, and amplifying the tentative orality of his tragedies’ transmission. In 1578 Thomas Blenerhasset reframed the Mirror again for The Second Part of the Mirror for Magistrates, using the sub-Aristotelian personifications Memory and Inquisition to marshal his tragedies, drawn from pre-Conquest history and legend. Blenerhasset reworked Baldwin’s irreverent approach to textual authorities by muddling Memory and Inquisition’s roles, and foregrounding the contingency of historiographical composition and interpretation. John Higgins seems to have tried to suppress Blenerhasset’s interpolation when, in 1587, he produced a compilation of Mirror complaints which included his own and Baldwin’s 1563 and 1574–5 collections, with some further additions, but omitted Blenerhasset’s Second Part. I suggest that, in this compilation, Higgins shores up his material against the anxieties his First Part had articulated, but also that his faith in the educative promise of the Mirror project begins to ebb, such that the collection becomes a disavowal of humanist exemplary history. The final chapter rereads Richard Niccols’s 1610 edition of the Mirror as an oppositional critique of Jacobean court culture. It argues that Niccols deployed the Mirror itself as an icon of Elizabethan achievement in order to question his contemporaries’ decadent mores. The editorial work Niccols inflicted upon the Mirror texts has regularly been derided by subsequent critics, but one of the most striking features of Niccols’s practice is his systematic erasure of references to historiographical instability. His edition, then, sees him at once denying and exploiting what is, I contend, a fundamental attribute of this mercurial poetic tradition. Two landmark Oxford Handbooks contain relevant chapters this year. First, staying with suspicion, Lorna Hutson’s magisterial Oxford Handbook of English Law and Literature, 1500–1700 seeks to interrogate the ‘ménage a trois’ between law, literature, and history (p. 2), and comes in eight parts: ‘Textual and Interpretative Culture’; ‘Literature and the Legal Profession, 1500–1700’; ‘Administering the Law’; ‘Temporal and Spiritual, Law and Conscience’; ‘Legal and Literary Imagining’; ‘Libel, Publication, and the Press’; ‘Liberties, Slaveries, and English Law’; and ‘The Extra-English Legal World: Between Colony, Nation, and Empire’. This review’s remit sadly does not permit ‘contemplation’ of the Handbook ‘as a holistic object’; many of the literature-focused chapters engage with Elizabethan and Jacobean plays and masques, for example, such as Paul Raffield’s chapter, which examines ‘The Monarchical Republic, Constitutionality, and the Legal Profession’ in relation to Thomas Norton and Thomas Sackville’s Gorboduc [1561/2]. Instead, as Hutson predicts in the introduction, we must consider a selection of individual chapters (p. 1). Nonetheless, Hutson’s introductory parsing of the volume’s title—from the origins of the handbook as a conceptual and material construct, to the work done by that ‘extremely permissive conjunction’, ‘and’ (p. 1)—offers a framework within which to situate this sample. Hutson emphasizes the collection’s interdisciplinarity, and historicizes the interdisciplinary conversations which emerged from 1980s ‘New Historicism’ alongside the ‘Law and Society’ movement, united by a shared interest in ‘the hermeneutic complexity of social processes’ (p. 6). Hutson counters New Historicism’s ‘re-mystifying’ portrayal of early modern literature’s complicity in reinforcing ‘subjection to charismatic, monarchically embodied political sovereignty’, though the subsequent legal turn has ‘register[ed] a more diversely creative literary consciousness of the polity and political agency’ (p. 8). The sections of the volume deliberately juxtapose chapters by authors from different disciplines to generate further cross-pollination. In Part I, Kathy Eden’s ‘Forensic Rhetoric and Humanist Education’ lays the groundwork for the ubiquity of legal thought in early modern discourse by demonstrating its centrality to humanist education: later sixteenth-century theorists and educators such as Thomas Wilson, Roger Ascham, and Abraham Fraunce inherited the high humanist teaching of Erasmus, Colet, and Elyot, who had reinstated the rhetorical training of Cicero and Quintilian, emphasizing as they did so the ‘deep ties’ between literature and the law (p. 23). Even ‘Erasmus’ disdain for legal training should not obscure the profound impact of legal principles and practices on his wildly popular textbooks’, which set ‘the course for English literary education for generations’ (p. 24). Ian Williams’s chapter, ‘Common Law Scholarship and the Written Word’, highlights the intersecting roles of orality, manuscript, and print in early modern legal culture. While the sixteenth century did see a shift towards the material text, whether written or printed, Williams suggests that scholarship has overlooked the persistence of oral readings in the Inns of Court into the 1640s. Law students themselves ‘freely mix[ed]’ printed and oral sources in late sixteenth-century compendia (p. 62). Readings might be transcribed, written texts could be read aloud, and records of oral presentations suggested that they were intended for both reading and listening audiences, while oral readings might take written and printed sources (or their inadequacy) as their subjects. Williams usefully nuances the relationship between the legal and literary when he notes, though, that ‘Non-lawyers may have known little of legal developments not covered in print’ (p. 67); while a wider reading public had access to these records, further legal scholarship was circulated orally and in manuscript primarily privately, within the legal profession. Thus, Williams concludes, we should take greater account of the precise circumstances of (closed) readings and their—perhaps limited—subsequent circulation, making reference to the scholarship of a specific Inn of Court rather than the Inns’ intellectual culture, for example. Yet all such scholarship serves ‘to show what was thinkable’ (p. 76) in the period, and what was available to be shared beyond exclusive legal circles. Jessica Winston, whose monograph Lawyers at Play featured in last year’s review, discusses ‘Legal Satire and the Legal Profession in the 1590s: John Davies’s Epigrammes and Professional Decorum’, in Part II. Winston observes that satire functioned as a means to keep lawyers’ behaviour in check, specifically from within the profession, in addition to the general opprobrium with which it was often met by outsiders. But John Davies, who had been admitted to the Middle Temple in 1587, transcended this practice, offering in the Epigrammes ‘a positive ethos for legal men, based on the … seemingly outmoded model of the gentleman lawyer’ (p. 122). Far from an idle leisure activity, the literary production of the Inns is framed as a proactive intervention in the culture of the legal profession, while Davies’s output is reassessed to show the ways in which his work was distinctive within this pattern. Winston notes that, as the Inns of Court expanded to meet the demands of a newly litigious age, lawyers became a conspicuous professional group in 1590s London; public suspicion kept pace with this growing visibility. Meanwhile, the evolution of ‘upper’ and ‘lower’ tiers of barristers and solicitors led to an internal identity crisis within the profession, and Inns men who went on to literary rather than legal careers endorsed and perpetuated negative stereotypes. By contrast, Davies’s Epigrammes, probably composed as part of ‘a project of professional and social rehabilitation’ (p. 135) after his misdemeanours at the Middle Temple saw him briefly imprisoned, deploy the genre to ‘reform by example’ (p. 136). Also focused on a product of the 1590s, Ethan Shagan’s lively chapter in Part IV explores Richard Hooker’s failure to clarify post-Reformation religious law in Of the Lawes of Ecclesiastical Politie [1593–1662]. Hooker’s Lawes ‘is among the most cited and least read works in the canon’ (p. 337), ‘England’s most transcendently important work on law’, and ‘a truly bizarre and anomalous result’ of the Reformation, in that it ‘was actually a book about the Church’ (p. 338). The work tried to resolve the knotty interrelation of English law and God’s law after the Church had come under royal jurisdiction, and, for example, ‘the prayer book, written in the idiom of religious devotion, acquir[ed] statutory authority’ (p. 339). But the requisite theological compromises proved elusive, as the tangle of religious law remained impervious to modernization. Shagan suggests that the residing problem of ecclesiastical polity, ‘the capacity of public law to regulate private lives’, is central to ‘countless’ early modern literary texts, and thence to our understanding of the literature of the period (p. 338). Turning to Part V, Carolyn Sale addresses ‘The Literary Thing: The Imaginary Holding of Isabella Whitney’s “Wyll” to London (1573)’. Whitney’s ‘Wyll’ is included as part of her Sweet Nosgay or Pleasant Posye Contayning a Hundred and Ten Phylosphicall Flowers, and gives a fictive, satirical account of ‘what she left to London: and to all those in it: at her departing’. Sale contextualizes Whitney’s poem within the historical practices of her time, to show how ‘Whitney’s literary will both playfully acknowledges and breaks from these constraints’ (p. 432), before the chapter sets out to reconsider the text in relation to the sixteenth century’s ‘emergent culture of ownership and an existing but diminishing culture of holding things in common’ (p. 434). Sale shows Whitney engaging with live legal concerns, such as those embodied in the case Paramour v. Yardley, reproduced in Edmund Plowden’s Commentaries [1571]. Whitney’s ‘ “Wyll” is not disposing of properties to be owned, or properties to be subject to the exclusive dominion of any sole proprietor. It is disposing of properties to be occupied—to be enjoyed and put to use’ (p. 441), just as Yardley’s case argued. This applies to the literary work itself; Sale concludes that Whitney’s Nosgay ‘imagines the literary thing’s capacity to possess everyone without itself being the exclusive possession of anyone’ (p. 447). Turning to a different kind of possession, Frances E. Dolan investigates the legal standing of ‘Witch Wives’, an identity often obscured by accounts of early modern witchcraft that portray witches as usually unmarried. ‘Lurking behind the extraordinary stories of demon lovers and efficacious maleficia lie very ordinary concerns about the inscrutable yet industrious interiority of women, especially wives’, suggests Dolan (p. 451). The chapter draws on The Most Strange and Admirable Discoverie of the Three Witches of Warboys Arraigned, Convicted and Executed at the Last Assises at Huntington [1593], as well as later sources. Its analysis depends on the intersection of law and literature at multiple points. For one thing, ‘positioning the witch as the devil’s partner makes witchcraft prosecutions and the stories they churn up a kind of testing ground for the idea of marriage as a contract, an idea that, arguably, is not yet fully realized’ (p. 453). On the other hand, narratives of witch trials were mediated through the fictionalizing lens of news pamphlets, as well as through adaptations in more explicitly imaginative literary forms. In the witch wife, Dolan concludes, ‘we find a figure whose wilfulness is at once central to her alleged witchcraft, integral to her ability to function as a wife and a subject under the law, and distressingly inscrutable’ (pp. 464–5). Secondly, Andrew Hiscock and Helen Wilcox edited the similarly impressive and wide-ranging Oxford Handbook of Early Modern English Literature and Religion. The volume is divided into five sections—‘The Religious History of Early Modern Britain: Forms, Practices, Beliefs’; ‘Literary Genres for the Expression of Faith’; ‘Religion and the Early Modern Writer’; ‘Interpretative Communities’; and ‘Early Modern Religious Life: Debates and Issues’—which approach the topic in a variety of ways, from chronological slices to thematic surveys. This review will focus on the relevant chapters within the first and third of these sections. John N. King’s piece in Part I explores the impact on book publication of ‘Religious Change in the Mid-Tudor Period’. Examples such as the Examinations of Anne Askew [1547], the English translation of Erasmus’s Paraphrases [1548], and the first Book of Common Prayer [1549] demonstrate the radical impact of Edward VI’s accession on the print publication scene, when ‘The removal of restraints enabled Protestant propaganda to flood London bookstalls and provincial markets’ (p. 44). In addition to Edward’s impact on the book trade, and the significance of individual printers such as John Day to the spread of reformist verse by Luke Shepherd, Robert Crowley and—tangentially—William Baldwin, the chapter foregrounds the delivery of sermons by the likes of Hugh Latimer at St Paul’s Cross, before these works also made it into print. King characterizes the changes which followed as swings of a pendulum (also marked by John Bale’s periods of exile and return), as ‘Book publication underwent a general contraction under Mary I, and the number of active stationers decreased dramatically’ (p. 49). While ‘It may be an overstatement to say that literary creativity dried up … Marian publication did lack the inventiveness and stridency of the flood of satires and polemics under Edward VI’, and ‘Literary publication took on a retrospective character’ (p. 50). Protestant dissidence nevertheless flourished in print, with strategies such as false imprints, secret presses, and anonymous or pseudonymous publication deployed to evade censorship and punishment. King delineates the impact Marian suppression had on the production of Baldwin’s Mirror for Magistrates, successfully issued under Elizabeth I, as well as the evolution of monumental works like Foxe’s Book of Martyrs. John Day returns to the print business with Elizabeth’s accession, which ‘entailed a return to what had gone before, namely the religious settlement under Edward VI, as much as it functioned as a new beginning’ (p. 54). Torrance Kirby takes up the story in ‘The Elizabethan Church of England and the Origins of Anglicanism’. The chapter surveys the phases undergone by the ‘ecclesia anglicana’ before its codification under Elizabeth, and then how this era’s ‘new hermeneutics’ gave rise to ‘what might be called the ontology of modernity’ (p. 59). Kirby sees this new ecclesiology epitomized by John Jewel’s ‘Challenge Sermon’ of 1559, which stresses an alternative hermeneutic method. Also central is the 1571 Articles of Religion, which renegotiated the relationship between spiritual and temporal authority, contributing to the sixteenth century’s standing as ‘an altogether decisive period in the confessional and constitutional formation of the Church of England’ (p. 68). Part II’s chapters on literary genres (translation; prayer and prophecy; lyric poetry; drama; the sermon; autobiographical writings; satire and polemic; and neo-Latin writings) necessarily each range across the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries too extensively to be reviewed here, but Part III returns to specifics, devoting chapters to individual authors or networks. Most germane to this entry is Mike Pincombe and Gavin Schwartz-Leeper’s essay, ‘John Foxe’s Book of Martyrs: Tragedies of Tyrants’. Pincombe and Schwartz-Leeper unpack what is at stake in the text’s official title, Acts and Monuments of These Latter and Perilous Days Touching Matters of the Church, and its unofficial soubriquet: is it an account of ‘the acts of the true Church’s champions and its enemies … as monuments, or enduring witnesses, of godliness and sacrifice’, or ‘The Book of Martyrs … a monument in particular to the Protestant martyrs of the reign of Mary I’? The latter, they suggest, ‘points more directly to the tragic structure of Foxe’s magnum opus’ (p. 279), in which tragedy and tyranny, as the title proposes, are intertwined. Within Foxe’s Christian framework, tragedies must precede the ultimate divine comedy, while the martyrs’ tragedies are brought about by their persecution by tyrants: agents of Antichrist and, more immediately, the Pope. Distinct from de casibus tragedy but sharing significant similarities, such as their recourse to the proliferation of examples, apocalyptic tragedy is presented as a non-dramatic, non-generic kind, which returns to the ultimate culpability of Satan and his minions (by contrast with de casibus tragedy’s cloudy relationship to causality). Martyr and tyrant are thus unambiguously opposed. Having explored competing representations of Cardinal Wolsey’s death to point up the tensions between generic convention and historiographical realism which characterize the text, the authors conclude that, unlike dramatic tragedy’s dominant, generically mandated focus on elites, Foxe’s is a more truly ‘democratic’ mode (p. 293). A third significant edited collection was Cathy Shrank and Alan Bryson’s special issue of the Huntington Library Quarterly, on early modern manuscript poetry. Shrank and Bryson’s introduction (HLQ 80[2017] 193–200) begins by enumerating recent advances in manuscript studies, particularly in the field of women’s writing and on poetic miscellanies, and the ways in which such recent work has shown manuscripts enriching ‘knowledge not simply of canonical authors, but of the production, dissemination, and reception of literature and ideas more generally, and the use of textual exchange to build and consolidate social networks’ (p. 194). The editors note that the focus of the collection’s essays is largely methodological and multidisciplinary. The techniques they detail enable scholars to reconstruct circumstances of production, authorial identities, and ‘an archaeology of use’ (p. 197) which charts manuscripts’ accumulation of user signatures over time, in the form of glossing or other later annotation. By selecting case studies from the period between 1560 and 1660, the collection reveals the interactions between print and manuscript cultures, including the emulation of ‘processes and conceptual structures more usually associated with print’ in manuscript contexts; the essays therefore ‘contribute to the ongoing recovery of the dynamic, two-way relationship between print and manuscript’ (p. 198). Jeremy J. Smith’s ‘From “Secreit” Script to Public Print: Punctuation, News Management, and the Condemnation of the Earl of Bothwell’ (HLQ 80[2017] 223–38) addresses this intersection. Smith explains the use and reuse of three ‘performative declarations’ (p. 224) produced in the context of Mary, Queen of Scots’ abduction in 1567, which proclaimed martial law, the condemnation of Mary’s husband, James Hepburn, earl of Bothwell, and a demand for his capture. These were produced as a printed broadsheet or broadside by Robert Lepreuik, the king’s printer. These broadsheets reproduced texts found in manuscript in the Register of Acta of the Privy Council of Scotland (vol. 5), shifting their function from record-keeping to public propaganda. Smith notes that the 1877 edition of the Register distorts its meaning through modernized punctuation, and shows how unhelpful editorial strategies alter the sense of texts in transition from manuscript to print. Most striking, though, is the way in which the broadsheets can be seen to re-punctuate the proclamations for oral delivery, to heighten their performative qualities. Unlike the manuscript versions, designed for ‘practiced readers of such documents’ (p. 234), which are sparingly presented, the printed texts ‘were public documents designed for much wider consumption’ (p. 235). Jessica Edmondes also explores the role of a readership attuned to formal cues in ‘Poetic Exchanges and Scribal Agency in Early Modern Manuscript Culture’ (HLQ 80[2017] 239–55). Edmondes begins with George Gascoigne’s account of the arduous compilation of print miscellanies from haphazardly gathered manuscript collections in his pseudo-anthology, A Hundreth Sundrie Flowres [1573], and the similarly prominent role of the compiler in The Phoenix Nest [1593]. Scholarship has drawn a false opposition, Edmondes suggests, between the deliberation of compilation for print and the ad hoc assemblage of manuscript poetry. By contrast, placement, headings and attributions, for example, evince the care and judgement with which manuscript volumes were arranged: ‘the attention paid by critics to the rich culture of variance evident in manuscript has meant that less notice has been given to scribal practices that seem to show an interest in the “fixity” of texts and the identity of their authors’ (p. 242). Edmondes draws on BL, Harley MS 7392(2) as a case study. This anthology was compiled by Humphrey Coningsby perhaps in the 1580s, and the transcription shows a marked concern for accuracy, with evidence of careful proof-reading, and small editorial changes based on ‘sustained close attention to points of grammar’ (p. 244). Meanwhile, instead of exploiting the agency afforded to the scribe, the work demonstrates ‘care taken to preserve important aspects of presentation that conveyed meaning’ (p. 249) from its print and manuscript sources. While readers and scribes always generated new meaning through context and arrangement, then, ‘a casual attitude toward texts and authorship was not a prerequisite of manuscript transmission’ (p. 255). Deliberate emendations are the subject of Guillaume Coatalen and Fred Schurink’s contribution, ‘A Tudor Translator at Work: John Osborne’s Manuscript Translations of Demosthenes’s Against Leptines (1582) and Aeschines’s On the Embassy (1583)’ (HLQ 80[2017] 257–75). Using the two extant versions of Against Leptines, Coatalen and Schurink show Osborne engaging in a process of correction which upholds fidelity to ‘not just the sense and meaning of the original but also its rhetorical force and political efficacy’ (p. 258). The translations, directly from the ancient Greek, are set in the context of Osborne’s dealings with the Elizabethan Parliament: he was an MP for Westminster in the 1570s and 1580s. ‘Osborne … seems to have felt that Against Leptines spoke to his own circumstances and those of his dedicatee’ (p. 265), Sir Christopher Hatton, whom he compares to Demosthenes. Reversing the trajectory of the Bothwell proclamations, Osborne is seen through his close editorial work transposing his text from an oratorical mode to prose suitable for private reading, while ‘The language, style, and customs of ancient Athens are updated to fit the circumstances of Elizabethan England’ (p. 268). As in Edmondes’s article, these are manuscripts which testify to a ‘conception of written English’ as ‘a language in which minute semantic nuances and orthographic variants mattered’ (p. 274). Finally, Claire Bryony Williams explores a more uneasy facet of this editorial attention in ‘ “This and the rest Maisters we all may mende”: Reconstructing the Practices and Anxieties of a Manuscript Miscellany’s Reader-Compiler’ (HLQ 80[2017] 277–92). Williams reconfigures transcription as evidence of reading and reading experiences, taking MS Dyce 44, National Art Library (V&A) as her case study. Dyce 44, probably compiled in the early seventeenth century, is known as a source for Henry Constable’s secular sonnets, and Thomas Nashe’s ‘The Choise of Valentines’, as well as a mock-sermon in praise of thieving. The scribe’s confessional identity may arguably be reconstructed from his arrangement of a series of satires, which suggest ‘a mistrust of Puritans and some sympathies for Catholic leanings in the Anglican Communion’, while anti-Scots entries ‘suggest that the compiler also felt a degree of disenchantment with the new king’s reign’ (p. 281). The copyist’s approach to material transcribed from printed books ‘speaks of leisurely reading, re-reading, and selecting’, as well as adaptation to fit available space (p. 286), and of a textual practice embedded in sociable exchange. However, ‘he evidently did not want his more explicitly erotic texts to be immediately accessible’ (p. 288), and used admonitory mottos, codes, and ciphers to displace negative judgement. Texts entered in the manuscript in two additional hands show that the work was certainly available to others, but not, Williams notes, that they read its contents. Much of the year’s work was international in focus. Warren Boutcher’s two-volume study of The School of Montaigne in Early Modern Europe, divided into books on ‘The Patron-Author’ and ‘The Reader-Writer’, situates Montaigne’s reading, writing, and reputation within and as part of extensive spatial and temporal networks, tracking the history of his Essais’ pan-European composition and reception through the sixteenth century and into the twentieth and twenty first. As such, chapters are given to ‘Villey and the Making of the Modern Critical Reader’ (vol. 1, ch. 2), for example, charting the role of Pierre Villey, Montaigne’s early twentieth-century editor who ‘worked to place the Essais in an imaginary museum of canonical French texts’ (pp. 67–8), as well as ‘The Essais Framed for Modern Intellectual Life’ (vol. 2, ch. 6), which incorporates sub-sections such as ‘Montaigne Explains Himself in 1946’, ‘The American Montaigne’, and ‘The Postmodern Montaigne’. In addition, substantial space is allocated to a broader study of Montaigne’s early modern intellectual milieu, including ‘Literature and Agency in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe’ (vol. 1, ch. 1), and ‘The Patron’s Oeuvre’ (vol. 1, ch. 3). Boutcher sums up this approach in his General Preface, which notes that his research ‘was rooted in the historical study of the diversity of ways in which the relations between patrons, authors, producers, models, or objects of representation, and readers, can be described by the makers and users of verbal and literary artefacts’ (vol. 1, p. xv,). He pushes back against the study of text-and-context, suggesting instead that ‘what is now called the “context” of a work or extract centrally included the social relations in which it participated as it was made, remade, and circulated in particular spaces in specific … forms’. So the work takes up the notion of agency, which, Montaigne had insisted, allows us to ‘form, with our own discourse, great miracles of nature and marvellous examples of human actions from everyday experience’ (p. 19) that might be ‘fashioned, stored, and found’ (p. 18); texts themselves index ‘the various types of social agency or practice … for makers and users on specific occasions’ (p. 22). How, then, do the extant texts of Montaigne index the social relations and uses within which his writings are embedded? Boutcher puts this methodology into practice in impressive style, beginning with the intellectual milieux which have produced modern readings. For Villey, situated within an early twentieth-century school of historical criticism, Montaigne’s oeuvre demonstrated the unfolding of a process of intellectual development, as his output progressed towards the status of definitive masterpiece, through a series of evolutionary stages. Even when ‘cashiered as an old-fashioned soldier of literary positivism’, Villey’s reading remained central to Montaigne’s reception and status, having ‘forge[d] the link, so crucial for old-fashioned humanists and literary theorists alike, between modern selfhood and literary-critical agency’ (p. 78). All critics interpret texts ‘in ways quite obviously shaped by their own moments in the modern history of educational and scholarly life’, particularly in the case of Montaigne, who ‘appears to offer such a compellingly natural picture of the place and the value of reading and writing’ (p. 79). But might not attention to Montaigne’s own design for the work, as well as the extent to which this design was ‘acknowledged and fulfilled as the work circulated’ (p. 79), make some more useful headway? Boutcher follows Montaigne and his Essais around Europe, and constructs as he goes an intricate, learned, and very readable reassessment of early modern authorship which scrupulously locates Montaigne’s practice within a mobile portrait of contemporary norms. While most of Boutcher’s case studies derive from beyond 1550–1600 England, including chapters which reframe the English reception of Montaigne during the seventeenth century, the work offers much of interest to scholars of Elizabethan literature and culture, not least as a case study in itself of an alternative mode of literary history. Rachel Ashcroft adds to the emerging body of work connecting two major sixteenth-century voices in ‘(Re)thinking Time: Giordano Bruno and Michel de Montaigne’ (JEMS 6[2017] 157–81). Ashcroft considers the difficulties which may have impeded further comparative study of Bruno and Montaigne despite the compelling case for parallels between their careers, including their radical generic experimentation in different directions. The concept of time, she proposes, may offer a thematic link to bridge the gap. Both Bruno and Montaigne respond to their era’s epistemological upheavals, including the institution of the Gregorian calendar in 1582, and ‘exhibit a freedom to rethink traditional conceptions of time’ (p. 160) between the physically bounded, finite time of the body, and the mind’s contrasting infinitude. The article compares Montaigne’s ‘Que le goust des biens et des maux depend en bonne partie de l’opinion que nous en avons’ (I, XL) and ‘Coustume de l’Isle de Cea’ (II, iii) from the Essais to Bruno’s Eroici furori [1585] and their treatments of this mind–body tension, framed by Marcel Conche’s ‘Temps, temporalité, temporalisation’ [2009]. Both authors, Ashcroft notes, analyse in these examples ‘an extreme example of human behaviour, and [reject] the natural order of time’ (p. 178). Instead, they show that ‘human beings can transform a passive existence within time into something that offers more control over the future’ (p. 180), an observation that Ashcroft hopes will underpin future comparative work. Ayesha Ramachandran revisits the epistemological significance of the Fool’s Cap Map [1590] in ‘How to Theorize the “World”: An Early Modern Manifesto’ (NLH 48[2017] 655–84). Noting that its production and purpose remain a mystery to modern scholarship, Ramachandran observes that the juxtaposition of Abraham Ortelius’s world map with the bust of a jester ‘promise[s] a nascent universalism’ while reminding us that ‘even as we reach beyond the local to encompass the globe, we remain grounded in the particularity of our faces, our bodies, ourselves’ (p. 655). This reading acts as a point of entry into discussion of both the early modern notion of the global, and the twenty-first-century ‘global turn’. Ramachandran situates the re-emergence of the term ‘cosmopolites’ alongside the construction of the Fool’s Cap Map, attributed in an inscription to the pseudonymous ‘Epichthonius Cosmopolites’, to sketch out the period’s incubation of a conceptual turning point, as well as their embodiment of the tensions between global and local, and a trans-European ‘conversation about cosmopolitan aspiration, critical subjectivities, and transnational cultural production’ (p. 662). She proposes that a ‘humanistic, philological reconstruction’ is best suited to the task of understanding the centrality of ‘world’ to this turning point (p. 673), and concludes that ‘literary tropes may be one of our most powerful means for grappling with disparities of scale’ (p. 678). Robert Imes brings together Richard Hakluyt’s ‘Discourse of Western Planting’ with his ‘Analysis’ of Aristotle’s Poetics [both 1584], to suggest that the texts bear a closer relationship to one another than previously thought, in ‘Hakluyt’s Peripatetic Discourse’ (EIRC 43[2017] 140–57). Imes describes how the task of persuading Elizabeth I to fund Walter Raleigh’s colonial expeditions to Virginia fell to Hakluyt in 1584, on the basis of his correspondence with Abraham Ortelius and Gerard Mercator, and his earlier endorsement of Humphrey Gilbert’s explorations in Divers Voyages Touching the Discoverie of America [1582]. What has been largely ignored is the significance of Hakluyt’s role as an instructor in political philosophy at the University of Oxford, alongside his expertise in geography. Imes argues that ‘Hakluyt’s colonialist recommendations are fundamentally informed by the apex of Aristotle’s political teleology’ (p. 141). Specifically, he ‘advances Aristotle’s ideal of a self-sufficient polis, the best possible form of a state, by describing colonization as a panacea to England’s contemporary economic and religious problems’ (p. 146). Self-sufficiency was a central plank in his persuasive case given ‘unstable export markets and the excessive cost of imports’ (p. 149) in the early 1580s, lent authority by his classical source. While Hakluyt’s bid for public funding was not officially successful, Imes concludes that Elizabeth I’s circumstantial support of Raleigh evinced the tracts’ impact, and the humanist grounding of the nascent colonial programme. Bernadette Andrea’s The Lives of Girls and Women from the Islamic World in Early Modern British Literature and Culture ‘presents a series of investigations that cohere around the problem of the gendered subaltern’s agency in what has been defined as England’s “proto-imperialist” and “proto-orientalist” era’ (p. 3). While the available evidence for these women’s experiences is slight and fragmentary, it nonetheless impacts on the textual record and implicates central figures like Elizabeth I and Mary Wroth in the construction of marginal identities. Even as English and Scottish attention turned outwards in the late sixteenth century, ‘the expansion of the world system … resulted in the displacement of gendered and racialized subalterns to British shores’ (p. 4), and Andrea’s book traces their stories of affiliation and assimilation. The first two chapters fall within the purview of this entry. In ‘The “Presences of Women” from the Islamic World in Late Medieval Scotland and Early Modern England’, Andrea suggests that misogynist axioms inherited from classical authorities proved foundational to both William Caxton’s first printed work, The Dictes and Sayings of the Philosophers [1477] and its eleventh-century Arabic analogue, Mukhtar al-hikam wa mahasin al-kalim (‘The Choicest Maxims and Best Sayings’). Following A.E.B. Coldiron, the ‘presences of women’ in this text serve as a point of departure for Andrea’s investigation of ‘the incorporation and subsequent erasure of the lives of women from Dar al-Islam in early modern Scottish and English literature and culture’ (p. 21). These women include Elen More, so-called ‘Black Queen of Beauty’, an African captive who worked as a maidservant for Margaret Tudor, James IV’s wife, and featured as part of a series of early sixteenth-century Scottish pageants; Lucy Negro, a brothel-keeper in late Elizabethan London; and the ‘Tartar girl’ acquired for Elizabeth I by the Muscovy Company. As captive women were converted to Christianity, Andrea suggests, their Islamic provenance was at once sidelined and encoded, as in More’s given surname, although the ‘Tartar girl’, renamed Ipolita (whose story resonates with Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Wroth’s Urania), ‘constitutes a more explicit exchange of female chattel from the Islamic world than that suggested by Elen More’s obscured origins’ (p. 26). (Andrea notes that it was common to name captives after Western imperial legends, hence ‘Helen’ and ‘Hippolyta’.) Both women seem to have lived in relative material comfort in their roles as court ornaments, lives which ‘came at the cost of their full humanity’ (p. 28). Andrea explores the case of Ipolita in more depth, in ‘The Islamic World and the Construction of Early Modern Englishwomen’s Authorship: Queen Elizabeth I, the Tartar Girl, and the Tartar-Indian Woman’. Here, she argues that ‘girls and women brought to England from the Islamic world during the late sixteenth century … informed the negotiation of authorship and authority’ (p. 38), as well as visual aesthetics, reasserting the gendered subaltern as one of English women’s authorship’s ‘facilitating conditions’ (p. 39). Informed by Gerald Vizenor’s notion of ‘survivance’, Andrea tracks the minimal yet eloquent evidence of Islamic women’s survival of and resistance to cultural hegemony within the pages of the proto-imperialist archive. Relatedly, a series of books and articles focuses on translation and cultural hybridity in Elizabethan writing. In a brief note, Geoffrey G. Hillier documents ‘Samuel Daniel’s Debt to Stefano Guazzo’ (N&Q 64[2017] 305–8), whose Civile Conversation was translated into English by George Pettie [1581] and Bartholomew Young [1586]. In addition to other notable early modern English writers whose debt to Guazzo has been documented, Hillier shows that Daniel drew on Pettie’s translation in his Musophilus [1599], to help articulate the virtues of learning and literature. Gabriele Stein’s Word Studies in the Renaissance sheds light on the kinds of reference works to which translators might have turned, and presents a series of analyses of Tudor lexicography. As print and international trade fed the proliferation of new texts and new knowledge, the sixteenth century was ‘characterized by an unparalleled expansion of words that needed explanation’ (p. vii). In the volumes produced in the latter half of the century to meet this need, ‘Latin served as the mediating reference language which brought the vernaculars of the European countries into contact’ (p. viii), and bilingual Latin-vernacular dictionaries were expanded and updated to include polyglot entries. Stein notes this monograph’s focus on ‘ “the author at work”, the compiler and his handling of the words selected from his various sources; his efforts to find the best way of structuring their presentation; his struggling to understand the semantic range of words and then to explain and transpose it into another language; his assessment of different linguistic and cultural expressions; and his morphological analyses’ (p. ix). Those authors considered include Claudius Hollyband (chapter 2); Hadrianus Junius (chapter 5); John Palsgrave (chapters 6 and 7); Peter Levins (chapter 8), compiler of Manipulus vocabulorum [1570], the first English rhyming dictionary; and Mirror for Magistrates contributor John Higgins (chapters 3 and 5), whose diverse oeuvre included revised editions of Richard Howlet’s Abecedarium, printed as Huloets Dictionarie in 1572, and Hadrianus Junius’s Nomenclator [1585]. The first chapter contributes a discussion of how these lexicographers and their printers incorporated typographical features to enhance their works’ presentation. Between 1530 and 1570, for example, experimental variation between black-letter, roman, and italic fonts is utilized to mark out the difference between headwords and definitions, as well as manicules, pilcrows, brackets, and other symbols, whereas after 1570 ‘we witness an increasing professionalization in the printing of dictionaries’ (p. 23), including the replacement of black-letter with italic type, in line with greater simplification overall. However, Stein observes that with the professionalization of the form came the potential for ‘commercial espionage’, as in a suspected case of rivalry between John Baret and Higgins, who may have copied the appearance of Baret’s framed columns without a clear understanding of their purpose (p. 28). On the other sources for his Latin–French–English Dictionarie [1572], though, Higgins was more explicit. Stein explores Higgins’s innovative practice of providing attestation through references to other dictionaries, rather than literary texts—an option which had not been available to earlier compilers. Following the arrival of French Huguenots fleeing their native country in large numbers, ‘The educational climate of the time may well have motivated Higgins and Baret, and/or their respective printers, to try to cash in on the linguistic mood of the country’ (p. 80), Stein suggests, prompting the publication of three French–English dictionaries between 1570 and 1593, as well as Higgins’s and Baret’s trilingual offerings. The Nomenclator [1567], revised by Higgins in 1585, was quite a different beast, providing translations in four or five languages of Latin headwords arranged by category, although it too was a ‘new type of dictionary’ (p. 137) which met the needs of its time. While corralling a potentially daunting level of detail for non-specialists, Stein’s volume thus offers a valuable window onto another facet of historically contingent intellectual exchange. The first chapter of Tasso’s Art and Afterlives: The Gerusalemme Liberata in England, by Jason Lawrence, shows how Abraham Fraunce and Samuel Daniel responded to Canto IV of Tasso’s epic poem. In ‘ “A l’apparir de la beltà novella/nasce un bisbiglio e ’l guardo ognun v’intende”: The Arrival of Gerusalemme liberata in Elizabethan England’, Lawrence notes that the poem reached the London book market almost immediately after its Italian publication in 1581. John Wolfe printed Scipio Gentili’s Latin translation of parts of Cantos I, II, and IV in 1584, with dedications to Philip Sidney and Elizabeth I which cemented Tasso’s literary celebrity—Elizabeth was said to have learned portions of the verse by heart. While Spenser is Tasso’s best-known Elizabethan imitator, Abraham Fraunce seems to have been his first, and Lawrence suggests that ‘the Italian poem was almost immediately granted a status comparable to the ancient epics of Greece and Rome’ (p. 19), as Fraunce’s citation of Tasso alongside Homer, Virgil, and Petrarch in The Arcadian Rhetorike [1588] attests. Fraunce’s choice of passages points to his fascination with the character of Armida, and his reading thus ‘foreshadows the earliest literary responses in focusing predominantly on characters involved in the romantic interludes’ (p. 19). One such response was Daniel’s, in his ‘Complaint of Rosamond’, printed in 1592, and influenced by Daniel’s encounters with Tasso’s writing from 1590, perhaps in the anthology of 1579 edited by Cristoforo Zabata. The application of Tasso’s Armida to the Elizabethan female complaint genre—epitomized by Thomas Churchyard’s complaint of Jane Shore in the 1563 Mirror for Magistrates—is arguably incongruous. Yet Lawrence points to their ‘shared emphasis on the persuasive power of female rhetoric on a male audience’ and ‘Daniel’s depiction of Rosamond’s physical beauty and her awareness of its power in the story she goes on to relate’, which shows marked similarities to Armida’s role (p. 23), which Francis Davison and William Drummond’s near-contemporary manuscript marginalia also make plain. Subsequent English adaptations and appropriations of the poem, by Shakespeare, Spenser, and Richard Tofte, all demonstrate the centrality of the enchantress Armida to the work’s English reception, following from these early examples. Joshua Reid’s ‘The Romance of Translation: Tasso’s Gerusalemme Liberata in the Elizabethan Twilight’ (FMLS 53[2017] 235–65) compares two further English renderings of Tasso: Richard Carew’s Godfrey of Bulloigne, or the Recouerie of Hierusalem [1594], and Edward Fairfax’s Godfrey of Bulloigne, or the Recouerie of Jerusalem [1600], the latter of which Jason Lawrence also suggests is in Daniel’s debt. Reid contends that romance epic as a genre ‘spoke to the particular political and historical circumstances of Elizabeth’s “second reign” ’ (p. 236), a period characterized by instability and nationalism, because ‘its hybrid status perfectly embodied the conflicted nation-state’ (p. 237). Fairfax and Carew responded to and amplified this hybridity. This extends, too, to the ostentatious Anglo-Italian interchange manifested in the Carew edition’s mise-en-page, and the errant infidelity of Fairfax’s translation itself. Such waywardness is the ‘romance’ of the article’s title, which Reid uses as a key to the ways in which Fairfax destabilizes the political stance of the original. Despite Carew’s more faithful text, Reid locates in the work’s ‘almost maniacal attempt to follow the Italian a strange form of errancy of its own, a kind of quixotic tilting’ (p. 258). A similar elision of form and metaphor is to be found in Corey McEleney’s discussion of romance tropes in Futile Pleasures: Early Modern Literature and the Limits of Utility. The monograph explores pointlessness in chapters on Shakespeare, Spenser, and Milton, as well as ‘Art for Nothing’s Sake’ in a chapter which brings Roger Ascham’s The Scholemaster [1570] into dialogue with Thomas Nashe’s Unfortunate Traveller [1594]. Here, McEleney begins by suggesting that for its Renaissance critics, ‘poetry’s futilitarian impulses were pushed to the extreme’ by romance, which ‘produced an excess of pleasure over instruction’ (p. 65), and suggests that in contrast to recent historical formalist attempts to rehabilitate romance’s usefulness, we should examine the genre as a site for investigating ‘pleasure and utility’ in ‘extreme conflict’ (p. 67). Likewise, McEleney suggests, scholars of Thomas Nashe have tried to justify his works’ use value, where perhaps he should not be redeemed. By comparing the ostensibly dissimilar Ascham and Nashe, the chapter aims to reveal their parallel enjoyment of the romantic futility they both appear to oppose. Ascham’s framing anecdote in The Scholemaster, for example, echoes the premise of Boccaccio’s Decameron, while his pedagogical approach is founded on the circuitous, Horatian pleasures of ‘profit’. McEleney shows Ascham engaging in the language of travel narratives, including shipwrecks and hazardous wandering, to vilify not only Catholicism but also Italy, experience, and atheism, such that the text itself errs irredeemably from its intended course. This waywardness is understood alongside Nashe’s Unfortunate Traveller (in particular the irrelevance of Nashe’s ostrich simile, his inexplicably anti-Calvinist banqueting house, and the work’s contradictorily open ending) using the framework of Paul de Man’s ‘Concept of Irony’, whereby ‘words have a way of saying things which are not at all what you want them to say’ (p. 82). Like Ascham, Nashe ‘relies on excessive or perverse textual pleasure even as he appears to heap a mass of words against it’ (p. 82). McEleney concludes that apologists for Nashe should follow his lead and resist the moral recuperation of fiction. Nashe is also the subject of a chapter in Deanna Smid’s monograph, The Imagination in Early Modern English Literature. In ‘The Imagination Embodied: Brain, Body, and Thomas Nashe’s The Unfortunate Traveller’, Smid explores the tangible interrelations of the imagination with the physical body. Conceived of as a discoverable organ within the brain, the imagination was thought of as a messenger between sense and reason by early modern anatomists. Theories of the imagination’s location and its powers over the body, particularly in the work of Francis Bacon, Robert Burton, and Thomas Wright, inform Smid’s reading of The Unfortunate Traveller, where the early modern notion of imagination almost as a communicable disease is seen at work in ‘concerns about the merging of identities of different characters in the narrative, and the merging of the identities of the reader and the protagonist’ (p. 59). Whereas in The Terrors of the Night, Smid suggests, Nashe ‘is particularly interested in tracing the impact of the imagination on the body’, this preoccupation takes on greater sophistication in The Unfortunate Traveller ‘in its engagement with imagination, rhetoric, disease, and the nature of reading and self-identity’ (p. 62). The disappearance, dismemberment, and disintegration of the text’s bodies figure the fragmentations of identity effected within and by the work. In Rome, for example, Jack Wilton’s ‘precarious selfhood is especially challenged’, where he ‘is in danger of disappearing into the crowd’. Yet ‘his identity is also bolstered by its link to the real—the reader’ (p. 71). A very different take on the Anglo-Italian, but engaged with congruent cultural anxieties, John Gallagher’s article provides a portrait of ‘The Italian London of John North: Cultural Contact and Linguistic Encounter in Early Modern England’ (RenQ 70[2017] 88–131), based on North’s multilingual diary of 1575–9. The diary recounts North’s travels through the Low Countries, Germany, and Italy, and back to London and Cambridgeshire via Calais. Gallagher emphasizes the significance of ‘return’ to Renaissance travellers, noting that ‘The pedagogies and practices of early modern travel were geared toward cultivating attributes and a personality that would be well received at home’ (p. 89). As such, North’s diary is ‘a document of return’, to a polyglot, hybrid community within a country deeply suspicious of foreign imports, and provides insight into the experience of Anglo-Italian identity beyond the pejorative stereotypes of late Elizabethan culture. Gallagher’s discussion demonstrates how rich a source North’s diary is, and the extent to which his records shed light on his embeddedness in a wider, under-recognized seam of English cultural life: the article devotes sections to music and dancing, dress, fencing, and language, and the metaphorical force of these practices in literary reception. While the survival of North’s diary is unusual, however, Gallagher concludes that North’s experiences were not: to Elizabethans, these manifestations of international hybridity ‘were everyday phenomena’ (p. 124). Andrew Hadfield supplies an example of unedifying anti-Italian invective in his note on the Nashean insult, ‘Italian Porredge Seasoner’ (N&Q 64[2017] 264–5). Directed at Gabriel Harvey (naturally), the slur, from Have With You To Saffron Walden [1596], ‘seems obscure, complicated and confusing at first glance’ (p. 264), but arguably refers to a poisoner. Italians were thought of by Elizabethans as quick to reach for poison as a weapon, and Harvey enthusiastically identified himself with Italian aesthetics. Why porridge? Hadfield suggests that Nashe is alluding to the notorious porridge poisoning case of 1531 in which Richard Rouse ‘tried to poison John Fisher, Bishop of Rochester’ (p. 265), and which had led to the composition of a new treason statute. The insult efficiently implies that ‘in attacking the defenders of the Elizabethan bishops, [Harvey] is the descendant’ of the criminal Rouse, and mocks his cultural pretensions for good measure. Raymond Fagel offers another example of multilingual autobiography in ‘Gascoigne’s The Spoyle of Antwerpe (1576) as an Anglo-Dutch Text’ (Dutch Crossing 41[2017] 101–10). The Sack of Antwerp, which occurred in November 1576, apparently provided George Gascoigne with material for a striking journalistic report printed just days after the event which has become central to his critical reception. Yet it appears that Gascoigne may in fact have ‘made extensive use’ of the Dutch pamphlet, Warachtige beschrijvinghe van het innemen van Antwerpen (‘The True Description of the Capture of Antwerp’), either in the original language or in a French translation (p. 103). Gascoigne’s version leaves out topographical details, and inserts times of day, as well as an account of his own heroism, to adjust to English unfamiliarity with Dutch place names and add verisimilitude. Fagel suggests that, as a result, while ‘Gascoigne’s text clearly loses importance as a reflection of personal experience … it gains worth as an exciting example of cultural transfer between England and the Low Countries’ (p. 103), written not by one eyewitness but by at least two. Fagel concludes by considering ‘the star power of an Early Modern text with a famous name attached’ (p. 109), an idea whose origins are probed by Kate De Rycker’s short article, ‘The Political Function of Elizabethan Literary Celebrity’ (CelebSt 8[2017] 157–61). This piece explores how the Martin Marprelate tracts which proliferated in the 1580s repackaged decades-old and unprepossessing Presbyterian ideas as entertainment to generate a higher profile. What was unusual about their authors, De Rycker suggests, was ‘that they were trying to alter the rules of political engagement … to popularise a serious political message’ (p. 158). It was for this reason that Richard Bancroft seems to have deployed a crack team of satirists, including Nashe, Lyly, Greene, and Munday, to respond in kind. De Rycker characterizes the Marprelate persona’s notoriety as ‘celebrity’ as distinct from ‘fame’, arguing that fame denotes a dimension of social status, while celebrity depends on speed and opportunism, with ‘potentially destabilising consequences’ (p. 158) for both the subject and society at large. This went along, she argues, with the political disruption effected by the authors’ and their audiences’ anonymity through the alternative authority of cheap, ephemeral print publication. Necessarily significant in Renaissance studies, a further thread through this year’s output was trans-temporal influence, including studies on the reception of both classical and medieval ideas in the later sixteenth century, as well as putative Elizabethan resonances in the twentieth. Nancy Bradley Warren investigates the medieval heritage of a neglected Tudor treatise in ‘Chivalric Men and Good(?) Women: Chaucer, Gender, and John Bossewell’s Workes of Armorie’ (ChauR 52[2017] 143–61). Bossewell’s 1572 text, dedicated to William Cecil, and one of the books Thomas Blenerhasset claims to have found unhelpful during his composition of The Second Part of the Mirror for Magistrates [1578], draws on the ‘mirror for princes’ tradition and Continental emblem books as well as the Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale in its elucidation of heraldry. Bradley Warren suggests that Bossewell is unusual, though, in his additional debt to the Book of the Duchess and the Legend of Good Women, which are put to work ‘to examine complex questions about the construction and maintenance of English masculine identity in the Elizabethan period’ (p. 144). Contextualized amid the revelation of the Ridolfi plot to replace Elizabeth I with Mary Stuart, Bossewell’s Workes and its appropriation of Chaucer speaks to the political dissonance attendant on female power and authority in the period. Bossewell is presented here as unable to stabilize the disruptive influence of his source-texts, despite efforts to minimize and suppress the ebullient presence of, for example, Chaucer’s Wife amongst his masculine, militaristic framework, and male textual authorities including Chaucer himself. Finally, Bossewell includes a poem by ‘notorious Catholic activist’ Nicholas Roscarrock (p. 159)—further evidence that the ostensibly conformist Workes of Armorie exceeds its author-compiler’s control. In Jennifer Clement’s special issue of English Studies, ‘Rhetoric, Emotion and the Early Modern English Sermon’ (‘Introduction’, ES 98[2017] 655–60), Daniel Derrin explores an unlikely Latin source. Clement’s introduction begins by framing the sermon as a rhetorical text, ‘designed … to persuade’, ‘where the nature of knowledge itself comes to be interrogated’ (p. 655). As such, the genre relies on textual analysis, both of the Bible by the sermon’s author, and of the sermon itself by listeners; the sermon may be read not only as a form of literature (pace Brian Cummings), but also as a form of literary criticism. It is also embedded within the history of the emotions, with which many of the essays in the collection engage. Derrin focuses on the rhetorical in his article for the issue, ‘Cracking Thraso: The Braggart Soldier Image in Sixteenth-Century Sermons and Religious Polemic’ (ES 98[2017] 704–16). Derrin traces the incongruous use of the ridiculous soldier Thraso, from Terence’s play Eunuchus, in early modern religious writings, as well as polemical treatises by the likes of Thomas Churchyard, which speaks in turn to the educative reappropriation of Roman comedy in the period. Both Melanchthon and Erasmus endorsed the character’s moral usefulness, as well as finding him funny. Usually a figure of scorn for his boastfulness, for some sermons he took on metatextual force, ‘where “Thraso” embodies faults that the writer feels they might easily fall into’ (p. 710). Derrin uses the comic figure to explore the contrasts between sermon and polemic, spoken and printed sermons, and the audiences for these various media, as well as the wider place of profane literary influences in religious discourse. While acknowledging the generic fluidity of terms, Derrin differentiates Thraso’s usage in sermons from his appearance in polemical writing, noting that ‘playful self-reference seems more pronounced [in polemic] than in the self-styled “sermons” ’ (p. 711). He also stresses the importance of taking context into account: Thraso was not merely a classical fragment, but a prompt used to evoke his meaning in situ. John Dee is the subject of two brief interventions in Notes and Queries. Rachel Reid offers ‘An Interpretation of John Dee’s “Delta” from his Letter to William Camden’ (N&Q 64[2017] 247–8). The ancient Greek letter delta ‘serves as Dee’s most prevalent symbolic representation of self, often used in place of his name or signature’ (p. 247), plausibly because of its obvious use as shorthand for his surname. In a letter to William Camden of 1574 (in Dublin, Trinity College Library MS 631) Dee explains, too, that the symbol ‘has astrological meaning and religious significance in its relationship to the Holy Trinity’ (p. 248), such that it stands for the assimilation of Christianity, Neoplatonism, and Dee’s own identity. In the following note Katherine Birkwood asks, ‘Was John Dee “The Original 007”?’ (N&Q 64[2017] 248–9). As well as the delta, Dee is said to have habitually signed letters to Elizabeth I ‘with a special signature or cipher resembling the digits “007” ’ (p. 248). Can we trace the code number of Ian Fleming’s spy back to Dee’s sign-off? Birkwood says no, and in fact, Dee’s ‘007’ signature seems to be a fiction in itself with no material basis—unless sources come to light which suggest otherwise. Finally, Joanna Martin and Emily Wingfield’s edited volume, Premodern Scotland: Literature and Governance, 1420–1587. Essays for Sally Mapstone, features three chapters relevant to this review, in its latter ‘Post-Flodden’ section. Martin’s own chapter, ‘William Lauder: The Speculum Principis in the Sixteenth Century’, resituates the neglected Lauder among his better-known contemporaries, David Lyndsay and Richard Maitland. Lauder’s earliest extant work, Ane Compendious and breve Tractate, Concernyng þe Office and dewtie of Kyngis, Spirituall Pastoris, and temporall Iugis [1556], presents a traditional take on the speculum principis genre. But, Martin argues, this traditionalism responds specifically to the uncertainty of Lauder’s political moment. Despite critical interpretations to the contrary, Martin argues that Lauder was in fact ‘broadly supportive’ (p. 173) of Mary of Guise, while offering generalized critique within the ‘advice to princes’ mode. And although it was formally conservative, Lauder’s complaint poetry ‘also begins to shape the genre in Scotland in new ways’ (p. 175), through its confessionally reformed perspective and ethical focus, drawing on the dynamic example of Lyndsay. Martin then shows how, by the 1560s, ‘Lauder has abandoned the confidence of his speculum principis in the monarch’s ability to safeguard the spiritual education of the faithful’ (p. 178) in Ane Godlie Tractate or Mirrour [1569]; The Lamentatioun of the Pure [1568] doubts even the possibility of action or reform, and has more in common with Maitland’s nostalgic response to contemporary difficulties. As such, though, Lauder is a central and significant figure, ‘spanning and bringing together secular and devotional poetics in exploration of the theme of governance at the time of the Scottish Reformation’ (p. 183). Sarah Couper’s chapter, ‘Informed Choice: The Knowing Morality of John Rolland’s Court of Venus’, also explores the work of a poet operating, self-consciously here, in Lyndsay’s shadow. Rolland’s poem ‘uses sources silently, strategically citing others to construct himself as a man improved by literary study’, to present a model of ‘bookish learning … made more knowing and urbane by alignment with the teachings of experience’ (p. 186). Couper enumerates these sources, which hint at Rolland’s wide reading in Scottish, English, and Continental texts of many kinds. But, she observes, ‘Nearly all of Rolland’s scholarly allusions after the prologue of The Court of Venus might … be explained by his having access to just two popular and complementary dictionaries’: Ambrosius Calepinus’s Dictionarium [1502], and Hermannus Torrentinus’s Elucidarius carminum [1498] (p. 191). Rather than any deep engagement with source material, then, Couper suggests that Rolland ‘used the names chiefly for the studious texture they create’ (p. 192). In some ways this may account for the ‘knowing’ stance of the poem, which promotes the value of worldly experience through its bookish veneer. We end where we began, with the Machiavellian endorsement of Scottish propaganda by Lord Burghley, in Tricia A. McElroy’s chapter, ‘The Uses of Genre and Gender in “The Dialogue of the Twa Wyfeis” ’. The ‘Dialogue’ was a product of the six years of civil unrest between 1567 and 1573, after Mary, Queen of Scots’ deposition. Existing only in manuscript, it responds to the murder of Moray in 1570, who had acted as regent since 1567, and the ensuing political chaos between the rival King’s and Queen’s Parties; the ‘Dialogue’ sided with the King’s. It relates an overheard conversation between two unnamed interlocutors—Wife A and Wife B—who discuss the threat posed by the Queen’s Party, and attend satirically to specific members in turn. In terms of genre, it falls unexpectedly ‘under the heading of the chanson d’aventure’, and more specifically ‘the chanson de mal mariée, in which women complain about their husbands, and the gossips’ meeting’, while drawing more directly on the work of William Dunbar, notably The Tua Mariit Wemen and the Wedo (pp. 204–5). McElroy suggests that the ‘Dialogue’ mobilizes this literary pedigree to pointed effect, as it ‘exploits assumptions about gender and common gossip’ in its attack on the queen’s supporters. In common with Robert Sempill’s works (and Sempill is a candidate for its authorship), the ‘Dialogue’ participated in a concerted propaganda campaign which repeatedly deployed the same gendered literary tropes in anonymous and ephemeral publications, to build up the illusion of mass public opposition to the queen’s cause. By emphasizing Mary’s gender in relation to common figures for female untrustworthiness, such as the tavern gossip, in forms associated with popular discontent, the King’s Party was able to discredit its opponents in generically surprising and consistent terms, as ‘an assembly of unreliable women’ (p. 210). The Breitbart of their day? 2. Sidney There was a special double issue of the Sidney Journal devoted to Fulke Greville in 2017. While the entirety of the volume will be of interest to Sidney scholars, there were only two articles that addressed the figure of Sidney directly and at some length. The editors of the volume, Freya Sierhuis and Brian Cummings, purposely set out ‘to assess Greville in his own right as a brilliantly original writer, and not as Sidney’s shadow’: ‘Introduction: Fulke Greville and the Arts’ (SidJ 35:i–ii[2017] i–iv), and the articles gathered therein do this expertly. Michael Gadaleto’s ‘ “Prince and No-Prince”: William of Orange and the Politics of Friendship in Greville’s Dedication to Sir Philip Sidney’ (SidJ 35:i–ii[2017] 95–118) focuses on the representations of William of Orange and the Dutch Revolt and Republic in Greville’s Dedication to Sir Philip Sidney. For Greville, ‘Orange exemplifies the ideal statesman and man of action, who recognizes in Sidney a similar worth that the prince seeks to cultivate through the practices of magnanimous friendship and active employment’; Sidney is ‘an Orange-in-the-making … who forged a unique bond with the Low Countries and whose brief military exploits there were “but sparks of extraordinary greatness in him” ’ (Gadaleto quotes from A Dedication to Sir Philip Sidney in The Prose Works of Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke, ed. John Gouws [1986] p. 7). In Orange’s ‘hybrid identity in his new republic, one that allows [him] to be at once of the people and above them’, Greville finds ‘a “lively picture” of his own latent, radical humanist and Protestant values’ (pp. 100–1; A Dedication, p. 17). Gerit Quealy, in ‘ “Your affectionate servante till deathe”: The Political Alliance of the Herbert Brothers and Fulke Greville’ (SidJ 35:i–ii[2017] 77–93), examines a letter recently uncovered in the Warwick Castle manuscript archives, ‘a personal, highly political, and rather poignant private correspondence from Philip Herbert [Sidney’s nephew] to Greville’ (p. 82). Quealy finds that the letter ‘expresses certainly respect and deference for Greville as his elder and in a prominent position, but the final addition of “till Death” in the devotional signature invokes … the long-standing familial connection that bonded the Sidney-Herberts and Greville through the decades, perhaps first forged through Greville’s poetic fealty to Philip Sidney, but extended and bonded by religious conviction and political necessity’ (p. 91). This connection appears to have ‘not only shaped and directed the remainder of Greville’s personal and literary endeavors, but also the trajectory of his political and governmental employment’ (p. 77). Rose Sneyd’s article, ‘The Proto-“Desynonymization” of “Fancy” and “Imagination” in Paradise Lost’ (MiltonQ 51[2017] 111–23), though primarily interested in Milton’s epic, also finds ‘early conceptualization’ of the faculties of ‘Fancy’ and ‘Imagination’ in the work of Sir Philip Sidney (p. 111). The two terms were apparently used interchangeably in Milton’s era and before. Nonetheless, Sneyd finds evidence of proto-desynonymization in the works of Milton and Sidney, before Coleridge and others attempted to define the distinctive functions of these faculties. Sneyd suggests that ‘Sidney’s An Apology for Poetry may have informed Milton’s conception of the perceptive and creative processes’ (p. 112). Sidney, perhaps influenced by Tasso, ‘conceive[s] of a distinction between fancy that is associated with sensual understanding and that which is associated with intellectual reason—a distinction that, despite the semantic differences, is highly reminiscent of Coleridge’s differentiation of fancy and imagination’. This, for Sneyd, ‘indicates how Milton may have arrived at the qualitative distinction between fancy and imagination that he presents in Paradise Lost, and that, in turn, seems to have influenced Coleridge’ (p. 116). Romola Nuttall’s ‘From Sidney to Heywood: The Social Status of Commercial Theatre in Early Modern London’ (LitLon 14:i[2017]) considers Thomas Heywood’s Apology for Actors [1612] alongside Sidney’s Defence of Poesy as part of an examination of ‘the changing status of drama in Shakespeare’s lifetime and how attitudes towards commercial theatre developed between the 1570s and 1610s’ (p. 11). Nuttall highlights Heywood’s and Sidney’s appropriations of the classical idea of mimesis and their consequent defences of the social value of literature. Heywood is shown to profit from Sidney’s endeavours, continuing the latter’s project to promote vernacular literature. Though, as a notable anti-theatricalist, Sidney might not have wholly approved, Nuttall suggests that, ‘because of public theatre, the English spoken by London’s actors [could have been] a source of local and national pride’ (p. 24). In A.D. Cousins’s ‘Cupid, Choice, and Rewriting Petrarch in the Early Sonnets of Astrophil and Stella’ (Parergon 34:i[2017] 75–93), Sidney is seen to link ‘the mythology and mythography of Cupid with the issue of choice’ in order to ‘fashion poems that, at the same time as they acknowledge Petrarch and Petrarchan tradition, are [in Sidney’s conception] meta-Petrarchan and hence not primarily replicative of the Rime’ (p. 76). In Cousins’s nuanced and revelatory reading, Sidney distinguishes Astrophil from Petrarch’s speaker by having him ‘relate that falling in love with Stella was a considered decision. Yet Sidney also has Astrophil concede that his free, deliberate commitment has now subjected him to desire. Astrophil thereafter recurrently portrays his condition as a troubled submission to the dominion of the Alexandrian Cupid, depicting what becomes in effect a microcosmic and personal counterpart to Étienne de La Boétie’s description of a people’s voluntary assent to tyrannic rule’. Astrophil’s condition ‘has not driven him from his homeland but it has nonetheless, as he frequently laments, distanced him from his true self—from his normative sense of personal identity and from his public role within the Elizabethan courtly world’ (p. 77). This state of exile—‘I am not I, pity the tale of me’ (Astrophil and Stella, 45.14)—is the key to Sidney’s supplanting Petrarch. For Petrarch’s speaker unrequited love also entails exile. However, ‘because it is not the myth of Apollo and Daphne but another fable of Apollo [Sidney’s rewriting of Petrarch] that most comprehensively illuminates Sidney’s protagonist, we recognize the astuteness with which Sidney displaces Petrarch himself within Astrophil and Stella and thereby fulfils his aspiration to create a meta-Petrarchan sequence of sonnets’ (p. 93). Margaret Simon, in ‘Collaborative Writing and Lyric Interchange in Philip Sidney’s Old Arcadia’ (EMLS 19:ii[2017]), presents ‘a reappraisal of a prosimetric scene from the unrevised Arcadia which is substantially altered in the revised text, and whose depiction of collaborative lyric composition has been undervalued’. The scene in question, in which ‘Musidorus and Pamela, half of the heroic pairs that dominate the plot, escape into the woods together and express their love through inscribed and voiced collaborative poetic productions’, also includes ‘a different capacity for lyric, as Pamela falls asleep and Musidorus, now the sole compositional agent, recites a poem and composes a prose blazon which almost inflames him to the point of raping Pamela’. For Simon, scholars ‘tend to downplay the larger scene’s representation of collaborative compositional practices, subjectivities, and generic emphases that accompany Musidorus’s move from co-creator to sexual aggressor’. This reading of the unrevised scene ‘insists on the social phenomenology of lyric and its ability to constitute intersubjective agents. The scene scrutinizes the monologic lyric through shifts in lyric discourses and modes of poetic production and transmission’ (pp. 3–4). Building on the work of Megan Heffernan (‘Gathered by Invention: Additive Forms and Inference in Gascoigne’s Poesy’, MLQ 76[2015] 413–45), Patricia Pender and Rosalind Smith (‘Introduction: Early Modern Women’s Material Texts: Production, Transmission, Reception’, in Pender and Smith, eds., Material Cultures of Early Modern Women’s Writing [2014] pp. 1–13), Christopher Tilmouth (‘Passions and Intersubjectivity in Early Modern Literature’, in Brian Cummings and Freya Sierhuis, eds., Passions and Subjectivity in Early Modern Culture [2013] pp. 13–32), and Bruce R. Smith (Phenomenal Shakespeare [2010]), Simon offers an original and engaging reading of Sidney’s romance. Ultimately, ‘[i]n juxtaposing Pamela’s lyric agency, conveyed in terms familiar to both manuscript and print circulation, against Musidorus’s hermetic, predatory blazon, Sidney elevates … a social, intersubjective role for lyric contrasted with the moral errancy of the genre’s monologic tendencies’ (p. 16). Kyung Jin Bae’s article, ‘The Concepts of Death Represented in Renaissance Sonnets: Focusing on Astrophil and Stella, The Sonnets, and Caelica’ (MES 25[2017] 55–76), which is in Korean with an English summary, compares the works of Sidney, Greville, and Shakespeare. In this reading, ‘Sidney concentrates on love in the present and triumphs over time not by escaping but by choosing to remain forever in the paradoxical state of sweet sorrow.’ Shakespeare ‘reveals the will to overcome death through his works but eventually admits that death prevails over nature and man’. And Greville ‘follows the lead of his friend Sidney in posing the problem of love as a seemingly impossible choice between virtuous love and individual desire’ (Abstract). Katie Bank, in ‘Dialogues of Byrd and Sidney: Performing Incompleteness’ (RS 31[2017] 407–25), discusses an anomaly within one of Byrd’s settings of Sidney’s work. For Bank, ‘this little curiosity in Byrd’s music echoes many similar challenges Sidney scholars have encountered when analysing the poet and his work in its unmusicalized form’. This anomaly ‘can be read as related to contemporary concern regarding the role of the arts in understanding sense perception, as well as the responsibility of the performer(s) in the creation of musical meaning in late sixteenth-century England’ (pp. 407–8). Bank reads Byrd’s setting of Sidney’s text ‘O you that hear this voice’ (the sixth song from Astrophil and Stella) from Byrd’s Psalms, Sonets, and Songs of Sadness and Piety as an example of ‘how music could play an active role in the questioning that led to change in ways of establishing truth’. While ‘not claiming that this song by Byrd and Sidney is a pre-emptive allegory for Cartesian truth and knowledge’ (p. 425), Bank does suggest that it could be seen as a staging post on the journey ‘from an Aristotelian perception of truth, one established by input from the external senses, to a truth founded on inward intellectual discernment’ (p. 408). There were three Sidney articles in Studies in Philology in 2017. Gavin Alexander, in ‘Loving and Reading in Sidney’ (SP 114[2017] 39–66), highlights the connections between Sidney’s Neoplatonic understanding of love (in Astrophil and Stella and the Arcadia) and his Neoplatonic theory of reading (in The Defence of Poesy). In both understandings ‘the object is the idea that lies behind appearances. A reader must apprehend the “idea or fore-conceit” of the poet in order not only to admire his fictional characters but to understand “why and how” the poet made them, and thus to move from this gnosis to imitative praxis’ (p. 39). With reference to the Arcadia’s representations of Argalus and Parthenia, and of Pyrocles and Philoclea, Alexander develops a persuasive argument that Sidney crafts ‘a richly dynamic model of reading, a model that imagines the communion between text and reader as an intimate, loving engagement, with each idealizing the other, making demands, having designs, and moving from surface appearance to something more significant beneath’ (p. 65). In ‘Spanish in Abraham Fraunce’s Arcadian Rhetorike and the Political Context of the Summer of 1588’ (SP 114[2017] 278–301), Hannah Leah Crummé asks, ‘is Fraunce’s excerption of Sidney driven by more than his search for patronage? Is it instead patriotic?’ (p. 278). Crummé finds that ‘The Arcadian Rhetorike asserts that English accomplishments already rival those of their Spanish opponents. By reminding readers of those already realized assets it asserts a confidence that might be transposed onto England’s navy, if Englishmen are able to fill the poetic and military gap created by the death of Sidney’ (p. 301). It is, in Crummé’s terms, ‘a call to arms advocating for emulation of Spanish verse that, counterintuitively, resists Spain’s martial advancements. Demonstrating the proximity between English and Spanish, Fraunce suggests that England might rival Spain in its rhetoric and, perhaps, its military power’ (p. 279). Sheila J. Nayar’s article, ‘Arms or the Man I: Gunpowder Technology and the Early Modern Romance’ (SP 114[2017] 517–60), the first of a two-part discussion of literature and ordnance (the second part published in 2018), places the early modern romance in the context of ‘Renaissance England’s contemporaneous gunpowder revolution’ (p. 517). More particularly, Nayar attempts to ‘contextualize … the sway and prestige of romance as responding to (or evading, as the case may be) the gunpowder technology of its day’ (p. 520). Sidney’s Arcadia is presented as the product a culture, a ‘lived and acted-out romance of romance’, that was, in turn, ‘the inadvertent byproduct of a battlefield whose rules were being squelched by gunpowder culture, and of an evolving monopolization of the crown over the instruments of war’ (p. 535). Nayar places Sidney in ‘the constructed and increasingly fetishized tournament context, in order to disinter anthropologically the possible etiology of Arcadia’s military themes and battle settings’. Sidney’s Heliodoran romance, like the revival of Heliodorus’s fiction itself, emerges as ‘a response to the actual and problematic powder-ridden canvas of Renaissance warfare. What better way to evade the contemporary world than by way of the colossal canvas these stories proffered—with their “storms, separations and chance encounters”?’ (p. 536; Nayar quotes Nandini Das’s Renaissance Romance: The Transformation of English Prose Fiction, 1570–1620 [2011] p. 22). Susan Harlan’s chapter, ‘Spoiling Sir Philip Sidney: Mourning and Military Violence in the Elegies, Lant’ s Roll, and Greville’s Life of the Renowned Sir Philip Sidney’ (pp. 115–94), in her monograph Memories of War in Early Modern England: Armor and Militant Nostalgia in Marlowe, Sidney, and Shakespeare [2016], focuses on several different elegiac texts, listed in the chapter’s title, that represent Sidney’s wounding and death. The elegies and Lant’s Roll ‘negotiate a relationship among violence, memory, mourning, and objectification; they are forms of textual trophy that claim Sidney himself as a trophy or spoil’ (p. 117). In Greville’s Life, the ‘emphasis is on disarming: Sidney arms himself only to promptly undress. The hero is thus engaged not in an act of self-preservation or self-protection but rather self-exposure. Greville maintains that Sidney takes off a crucial piece of his armor—his “Cuisses” or thigh armor—in a gesture of camaraderie and generosity toward another’ (p. 169). For Harlan, Greville’s obsession with Sidney’s undressing speaks to his concern about his work as a biographer: it is ‘the anxiety of access to one’s subject that preoccupies Greville’. In this respect, ‘[a]rmor is an absent presence: as a hollow shell, it registers the presence of the human body beneath, but it also stands quite literally on its own as a would-be body with a void at its center’ (p. 164). Catherine Bates, in her essay ‘Pamela’s Purse: The Price of Romance in Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia’ (in Stanivukovic, ed., Timely Voices: Romance Writing in English Literature, pp. 281–98), questions the orthodox Protestant reading of both Old and New Arcadias in which they ‘operate within a broadly providential framework’, and suggests that ‘the Arcadia may have been straining to go beyond these retrospectively providentializing designs’. For Bates, the New Arcadia in particular appears to countenance ‘a sceptical if not downright atheistic nature’ (pp. 288–90), and ‘whereas in the Old Arcadia—its world still governed, happily, by the providential conceits of comedy and pastoral—a crisis could be engineered in the knowledge that it would be averted just in time, in the faith that God’s good plan was for the preservation and continuity of his creation … in the New [Arcadia] this never happens’. In Bates’s reading of Pamela’s struggle with her captor Cecropia, with reference to God’s providence and the language of Christian indebtedness, ‘Pamela’s virtuous resistance only makes things worse for everybody, and the paradoxical scenario of the permanently indebted/discharged Protestant subject seems to be parodied in the complicated transaction whereby, in embroidering her purse, Pamela becomes a kind of internal pawnbroker of her own emotions: “she had borrowed her wits of the sorrow that then owed them, and lent them wholly to that exercise” ’ (p. 294; New Arcadia, ed. Victor Skretkowicz [1987] p. 354). Bates also authored a significant work on Sidney’s Defence of Poesy in 2017. Entitled On Not Defending Poetry: Defence and Indefensibility in Sidney’s Defence of Poesy, Bates’s monograph ‘argues that Sidney’s text is feeling its way towards a model of poetry that is de-idealist: that is to say, positively hostile to and critical of “idealist” poetics’. Bates’s ‘economic’ analysis of the Defence ‘shows the idealist model of poetry to be one that essentially promotes profitability: the “profit” that—in terms of intellectual, moral, and spiritual capital—poetry is understood to yield’. In this context, this ‘ “ideal” profitability comes to be seen as complicit with specific ills that the money form effectuated: among them, commodification, fetishism, and the abuse of power’ (p. vii). Bates distinguishes two opposing voices in the Defence: the treatise’s ‘official’ voice, which promotes the aforementioned idealist model of poetry, content-filled and profitable; and an ‘unofficial’ voice, referred to by Bates as that of ‘Sidney’, which is open to doubts about poetry’s value (pp. 10–11). The book is divided into three parts, following Stephen Gosson’s three charges against poetry in his School of Abuse [1579]: that it is profitless; that it lies; and that it abuses. Bates, in part, seeks to address the problem, often cited in Sidney scholarship, that the arguments set out in the Defence of Poesy are not consistent with the poetic practice in Sidney’s literary works. In Bates’s view, Sidney’s theory and his practice share a ‘dark and complex vision of human motivation and desire’ (p. x). On Not Defending Poetry also represents something of a theoretical departure for scholarship on Sidney’s Defence. Bates is not the first scholar to use the ‘tools of economic criticism’ in this context. Nonetheless, by adopting a ‘deconstructionist approach’ akin to that of Fredric Jameson, Bates steers away from the trend set by recent scholars who have adhered to the New Historicist methodologies pioneered by the likes of Stephen Greenblatt (p. xi). Shormishtha Panja’s monograph Sidney, Spenser and the Royal Reader, published by Cambridge Scholars, examines the lives and works of Sidney and Spenser in the context of Elizabeth’s marriage negotiations with the duke of Anjou and the political controversy that those negotiations produced. The book examines Sidney’s Arcadias, The Lady of May, and The Four Foster Children of Desire, and Spenser’s Mother Hubberds Tale, The Faerie Queene, and Colin Clouts Come Home Againe, as well as their other works and correspondence, to draw out a pattern of complex courtly and political relationships—textually mediated—between the authors themselves, and between the individual authors and their monarch. To engage with Elizabeth’s state is, here, to engage with an ‘omnipotent and yet vulnerable’ power (p. 184). Sidney, Spenser and the Royal Reader contains a great deal of close reading of a broad range of early modern texts, together with insightful engagement with modern scholarship. Shormishtha Panja is inspired by New Historicist scholars such as Louis Montrose (The Subject of Elizabeth: Authority, Gender, and Representation [2006]), but chooses a different ‘way of intermingling history with literature’, building on the work of historians such as Wallace T. MacCaffrey, Penry Williams, Simon Adams, and Susan Doran (p. 10). 3. Spenser There was no edition of Spenser Studies in 2017, but February 2018 will see a double volume published by the journal’s new publishers, the University of Chicago Press. Other journals produced a healthy number of articles on Spenser in its absence. James Nohrnberg’s article in Explorations in Renaissance Culture, ‘ “Swords, ropes, poison, fire”: The Dark Materials of Spenser’s Objectification of Despair-Assisted Suicide, with Notes on Skelton and Shakespeare’ (EIRC 43[2017] 158–201), explores the theological context of the means and inducements to self-slaughter in The Faerie Queene, Skelton’s play Magnyfycence, and Shakespeare’s King Lear. In Book I of The Faerie Queene, Spenser ‘doesn’t show us the action of suicide … as opposed to presenting the knight’s suicidal state of mind, and the props—or prompts’; and ‘Book I represents the tragic state’s reality and desperation obliquely, as the brooding upon it—or the discursive thought and faint-heartedness surrounding it’: ‘The subject is located by the play of personified forces zeroing in on [Redcrosse’s] psyche’ (p. 167). The despair of the Christian believer is more dramatically objectified in Magnyfycence. In Skelton’s play, once Despair and Mischief have fled, ‘Good Hope … has in mind … a curative regimen with analogies to Redcrosse’s purgations at the House of Holiness’ (p. 172). For Nohrnberg, unlike Spenser’s Cordila, who hangs herself, ‘Shakespeare’s Cordelia is quite innocent of self-murder’. Rather it is Shakespeare’s title character, ‘bearing the wreck of all his desperate hopes in the form of his daughter’s wretched corpse’, who is ‘loaded down with the emblematic props that objectify him as the picture of Despair’ (p. 196). There were three articles on Spenser in Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900. Jeff Dolven, ‘Besides Good and Evil’ (SEL 57[2017] 1–22), explores the instances in The Faerie Queene ‘when a bad character behaves kindly’, wondering whether ‘such moments open the possibility of conversion, from evil to good’ (p. 1). Dolven notes that kindliness ‘does not discover the true good nature of Duessa and Night, for their nature is evil and the poem gives no indication of an intent to redeem them’; nor are these cases of error attributable to the reader ‘taking an evil character for good, such as the initial misrecognition of Archimago as a kindly hermit’. Rather, ‘such moments seem to test the poem’s dependence upon the very categories of good and evil, and to test the categories’ dependence, in turn, upon narrative. Spenser is exploring something that might be called the temptation of care, and its particular challenge to the poem’s moral architectonics’ (p. 2). Dolven concludes that, ‘[b]y opposing itself not to evil but to death, care is careless of the good, too—careless of good and evil, and the ultimate good they are supposed to do us. Too much care of life is a greater danger than any pleasure, if someplace good is where you are meant to go’ (p. 17). Jane Grogan, ‘Style, Objects, and Heroic Values in Early Modern Epic’ (SEL 57[2017] 23–44), asks ‘why do the most characteristic techniques of epic style work so hard to evoke the materials and sensations of the everyday? And what kind of semantic work is left to its nonfigurative, often quotidian materials?’ (p. 23). Grogan takes Spenser’s Faerie Queene and James VI and I’s Lepanto [1591] as her subjects, seeking to ‘locate antiheroic and anti-imperial possibilities in the DNA of the genre of epic itself: epic style’ (p. 25). For Grogan, when the epic’s protagonists, such as Britomart in the House of Busirane, are stopped in their tracks as they try to understand the objects they face—‘a strange golden room surrounded by “wilde Antickes” in “A thousand monstrous forms,” its walls hung with broken armor (3.11.50, 53, 54, and 51)’—‘the usual narratological values of epic are suspended to allow for these densely hermeneutic and allusive moments. Such encounters produce pockets of nonheroic time, inserted into the hero’s progress, not only in interpreting but also in experiencing the material force field of those ekphrastic objects.’ These objects ‘reconfigure and renegotiate’ the relationships between objects and characters, and ‘Britomart need not be credited with the individual consciousness of a character in a novel for us to accept that her day in that room reshapes her understanding of the nature of her quest’s challenge—a quest that itself began when she looked not at but into an enchanted object’ (pp. 38–9). J. Seth Lee, in ‘Spenser’s Mind of Exile and Colonial Apologetics’ (SEL 57[2017] 45–65), argues that ‘Spenser’s unique position between cultures, an exile between lands and nations’ allows works such as A View of the Present State of Ireland and Colin Clouts Come Home Againe to ‘open up questions about Spenser’s ideas surrounding England’s attempts to bring a Catholic Ireland completely under the English, Protestant crown’. In A View, the dialogue between Irenius and Eudoxus offers ‘a revision of Ireland’s past in order to prepare it for an English future’ and ‘results in a crucial moment of cognitive displacement from which grows a new narrative of Ireland’s present that conceptualizes exile as a multivalent aspect of colonization and the construction of national identity’. In Colin Clout, ‘Colin represents a precolonial figure, a type of exile whose relation to the nation-state is central to his national identity and to his moral and ethical ambiguity’; ‘Colin is a product of the margins and the center’, and the work as a whole ‘becomes an extended meditation on national and cultural displacement and seeks to transform what it means to be an exile and a true citizen’ (p. 46). Neither work resolves the tensions it highlights, however. Colin Clout, for example, fails in its attempt to redefine what it means to be an exile: ‘not a person relegated to the margins because of an error but a true citizen from the center of England’s political life that is marginalized nevertheless’ (p. 56). Shanelle E. Kim’s article ‘ “Armed to point”: Sansfoy and Imagining the Orient in Book I of Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene’ (Comitatus 48[2017] 117–31) interrogates England’s relationship with the Eastern Other as represented in Book I of The Faerie Queene. The portrayal of Sansfoy reflects how Spenser’s England pictured the East, with which it had increasing contact during the sixteenth century. For Kim, ‘Sansfoy manifests fears of Oriental might and his subsequent defeat at the hands of Redcrosse reveals the instinct to weaken the East without reducing glory for the West in its victory: the Saracen bellows, “Curse on that Crosse … That keeps they body from the bitter fit” (1.2.18.1–2)’ (p. 131). Jin-Ah Lee’s article, ‘The Self in Crisis in the Two Cantos of Mutabilitie’ (MES 25[2017] 101–26), which is in Korean with an English summary, ‘shows that the subversive claims of Mutabilitie anticipate the dissolution of Spenser’s Christian-Platonic idea of self and the emergence of new self-concepts’, precursors of ideas of self and identity found in the works of Descartes, Locke, and their successors (Abstract). There were two articles in English Literary History. William Rhodes, in ‘Why Colin Clout Came Back: English Reformation Literature and Edmund Spenser’s Late Work’ (ELH 84[2017] 503–27), wonders why Spenser would ‘bring back a figure and a genre that suggested youth and pre-epic pastoral experimentation when Spenser’s poetry had come so far since the Calender along its path from bucolic experiment to heroic maturity’. He finds the answer in ‘the Skeltonic source of Colin Clout’s name’, which suggests ‘what pastoral meant to Spenser in Ireland, where he eschewed courtly bucolics in favor of an approach that looked back to the prophetic and critical agrarian reformist verse of the earlier sixteenth century’. This ‘vernacular agrarian reformism’—which Spenser revives ‘for the era of the dissolution of the monasteries’—‘anticipates the unparsable interaction of land, labor, and literary production that would occupy Spenser’s last years as a New English planter-poet’ (p. 503). Amy Cooper, in ‘Allegory and the Art of Memory in Book 2 of Spenser’s Faerie Queene’ (ELH 84[2017] 791–816), engages with Gordon Teskey’s monograph Allegory and Violence [1996] in particular and poststructuralist approaches to allegory in general. When in Book II of Spenser’s Faerie Queene Grylle bewails his transformation from ‘hoggish’ to ‘naturall’ ‘forme’ (II.xii.86.9), readers are left ‘to wonder whether Grylle is a “seeming” beast but a man “indeed” or a seeming man and a hog indeed’. For Cooper, ‘Grylle would seem to provide his own answer, since his name, in Greek, means “hog” and conventionally signifies the beastly pursuit of sensual pleasure’. As Cooper goes on to observe, ‘[i]n hoggish form, Grylle means exactly what he appears to mean, and yet Guyon somehow fails to recognize that he is already legible: his question—“what meant those beastes, which there did ly?”—insists that Grylle means something else’ (p. 791). Guyon’s failure, in Cooper’s nuanced and hugely insightful reading, suggests a hermeneutic comparable to ‘the structuralist tradition within which Teskey is writing’, both ‘understand[ing] the nature and function of imagery in much the same way’, ‘both labor[ing] under an aesthetics of the image that is fundamentally iconoclastic’. In what is a highly original critique, Cooper argues that, ‘[b]y reducing images to signs, or allegory to semiotics, post-structuralist approaches to allegory have completed the aesthetic trajectory of sixteenth-century iconoclasts: the poetic image, so central in earlier conceptions of allegory, now names a distinction without a difference’ (pp. 792–3). David, Shackleton’s article for The Review of English Studies, ‘The Pageant of Mutabilitie: Virginia Woolf’s Between the Acts and The Faerie Queene’ (RES 68[2017] 342–67), though it is mainly interested in reading Woolf’s Between the Acts, offers a new perspective on Spenser’s reception in the twentieth century. A comparison of Miss La Trobe’s pageant in Between the Acts with Mutabilitie’s pageant in the Mutabilitie Cantos of The Faerie Queene allows Shackleton to reveal the role of the aevum—‘a third order of duration that “lies somewhere between eternity and time” ’, conceived by Thomas Aquinas in his Summa Theologiae [1274]—in Woolf’s novel (p. 347). Spenser’s and Woolf’s similar uses of the concept suggests that ‘recent interpretations of Woolf that depict her as holding a revolutionary materialist conception of history’ ought to be qualified (p. 342). In Woolf’s novel, ‘the fiction of the aevum is redeployed in an equally ideologically-suspect manner’ to that found in early modern justifications of colonial rule. ‘Here, the aevum is employed not to entrench the monarch’s position of dominance at the top of the class structure, but rather to fix agricultural labourers in an aeviternally-frozen state of subordination at the bottom of that structure’ (p. 366). Though Spenser’s Mutabilitie Cantos expose the idea of the monarch’s aeviternal permanence as fragile, they criticize Elizabethan foreign policy in Ireland ‘for not being aggressive enough’. In Woolf’s novel, by contrast, ‘the possibility of a future for England not marred by the repetition of war, depends on the rejection of colonial and patriarchal violence’ (pp. 357–9). There was one article in English Literary Renaissance. Yulia Ryzhik, in ‘Complaint and Satire in Spenser and Donne: Limits of Poetic Justice’ (ELR 47[2017] 110–35), discerns two distinct approaches to the decay of the sublunary world in the respective poetics of Donne and Spenser. For Ryzhik, ‘while Spenser tends to lament the decay of constancy (the “pittious worke of Mutabilitie”), Donne usually lambasts the constancy of decay, as he does in his grotesque imitation of Spenser, Metempsychosis, or The Progress of the Soul. These two tendencies can be said to characterize, respectively, the poetic modes of complaint and of satire, which partake of the same philosophy but diverge in their rhetorical practices.’ Significantly, ‘complaint and satire expose discrepancies between two kinds of truth, metaphysical and historical. Complaint typically emphasizes the former, promoting an ideal of the world as it should be, while satire focuses on the latter, attacking the facts of the world as it is’ (p. 110). Ryzhik aims to complicate this dichotomy, ‘illustrating the presence of satire in Spenser’s works and of Spenserian complaint in Donne’s satires, and calling into question which of the two is more committed to truth as an abstract ideal’ (p. 111). Jamey E. Graham, in her article ‘Character in The Faerie Queene: Spenser’s Phenomenology of Morals’ (MP 115[2017] 31–52), suggests that ‘moral identity appears to consciousness in The Faerie Queene according to a logic—in other words, that Spenserian character composes a phenomenology of morals’. Drawing on the work of Barbara Machosky (Structures of Appearing: Allegory and the Work of Literature [2013])—who uses the phrase ‘structure of appearance’ to describe allegory as, in Graham’s terms, ‘the phenomenological art form par excellence, art that brings about the orderly appearance of certain things in other things’—Graham contends that ‘the structure of truth’s appearance in The Faerie Queene’s moral allegory is … “practical Platonism,” a fifteenth-century interpretation of metaphysical realism that stressed the pragmatic and therapeutic applications of the hierarchy of being’ (p. 32). Catherine Nicholson’s article, ‘Old Spelling and the Forging of Spenser’s Readers’ (MLQ 78[2017] 173–204), drawing on traditional bibliography, intellectual history, and digital database analysis, suggests that modern editors’ retention of the old spelling of The Faerie Queene is ‘as much an artifact of the mid-eighteenth century as it is of the late sixteenth—and that its relation to Spenser’s intentions is less clear than the role it has played in securing norms of scholarly rigor, historical accuracy, and textual precision’ (p. 173). Nicholson contends that ‘[t]he paradox of old spelling today is that it frustrates the very desire for scholarly precision that it was meant to satisfy: if [William Henry] Ireland’s orthography was “the spelling of no time,” the orthography in a modern edition of The Faerie Queene is the spelling of many times: a hybrid of the 1590 and 1596 texts first blended in the 1750s’ (p. 199). A.D. Cousins, in ‘The Mythology and Theology of Love in Spenser’s Amoretti’ (ES 98[2017] 97–119), details ‘an immanent mythological and mythographic patterning’ in Spenser’s sonnet sequence ‘more elaborate and specific than has been hitherto acknowledged’ (p. 97). In this article, ‘Spenser’s text travels from Petrarch’s while retaining contact with it’ much as Sidney’s does in Cousins’s reading of Astrophil and Stella in the article for Parergon reviewed above (p. 118). Here, ‘Spenser connects transformation of the lady, whom he identifies initially as a donna angelica, with the mythology and mythography of Cupid. Yet inseparable from his doing so—and of greater subtlety—is his depicting her in association with the mythology as well as mythography of Venus’. Spenser also connects the transformation of his own persona with Cupid, but, ‘with greater subtlety he links his persona with the figure and lore of Ulysses’. Both these ‘mutually interactive transformations’ are driven by ‘an experience of love where eros and agape meet in eventual and precarious harmony as caritas’. For Cousins, a ‘distinct theology of love informs the mythic design of Amoretti’ (pp. 97–8). Siyeon Lee, in ‘Colonial Discourse on Irish Dress and the Self as “Outward Dress”: Swift’s Sartorial Self-Fashioning’ (ECF 29[2017] 455–77), highlights Jonathan Swift’s challenge to the legacy of Spenser’s A View of the Present State of Ireland, ‘a colonial attack on Irish dress that combined the Renaissance notion of dress generating identity by permeating the wearer and a more modern presumption of essential differences between the Irish and (New) English’ (p. 455). Lee shows how Spenser’s View inadvertently ‘blur[s] the edges between the Irish and English to a dangerous extent, as well as undermining the internal stability of the category of Englishness’ (p. 468). Spenser’s ‘colonial view of Irish dress is inherently flawed because it assumes a sort of cankerous Irish essence, which is at odds with its own assertion of a malleable, surface-oriented selfhood’ (p. 473). There were three contributions to Notes and Queries on Spenser in 2017. Misha Teramura, in ‘Spenser’s Chrysogone and Euripides’ Medea’ (N&Q 64[2017] 254–5), observes that ‘[i]n his retelling of the Medea story, Spenser was clearly indebted to Ovid and Seneca; however, he may have been familiar with Euripides’ play as well, and the name of Chrysogone might perhaps serve as one piece of evidence’. In particular, ‘reading the Medea before the emendations of eighteenth-century editors, Spenser would have encountered a direct juxtaposition of the two halves of the name Chrysogone’ (p. 255). Ian C. Parker’s longer contribution, ‘Marvell and Spenser: “The Gallery” and “The unfortunate Lover” ’ (N&Q 64[2017] 427–35), highlights Marvell’s use of Spenser’s Faerie Queene in the poems ‘The Gallery’ and ‘The unfortunate Lover’. Parker’s evidence suggests that Spenser’s poem was a significant source for Marvell, and that it is more likely that ‘The unfortunate Lover’ was composed during Marvell’s Nun Appleton period than has been hitherto suggested. Parker also proposes, from evidence underlying this contribution but not provided here, that ‘Spenser’s direct influence is more widespread in Marvell’s poetry than in “Upon Appleton House”, “The Gallery’”, “The unfortunate Lover”, and in other works—from “Clorinda and Damon” to “The last Instructions to a Painter”—where echoes of Spenser have been identified’; and that ‘Spenser is important for Marvell not only at the level of language and imagery, but also at the thematic level and at the level of his religious imagination’ (p. 435; emphasis original). Anthony W. Lee, in ‘Two Allusions in Samuel Johnson’s The False Alarm’ (N&Q 64[2017] 491–3), examines (alongside a reference to Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy) an intertextual allusion to the initial encounter between Braggadoccio and Trompart in Book II, canto iii of Spenser’s Faerie Queene in Johnson’s late political pamphlet The False Alarm. Lee suggests that, ‘[i]n Johnson’s allusion, Braggadoccio’s theft of Sir Guyon’s steed may be read as a metonym emblemizing [John] Wilke’s [sic] attempt to mount a Parliamentary seat’ (p. 492). Wilkes was singled out as a prominent opponent of George III’s ministers. Andrew Escobedo’s book Volition’s Face: Personification and the Will in Renaissance Literature will prove to be a major contribution to the field of English studies in general, but it does also include a great deal of material that will be of significance for Spenserians. Primarily, Escobedo ‘argues that the energy characteristic of premodern literary personification [which persists into the Renaissance] is best understood, not as a derivation of personhood, but rather as an expression of will. Figures such as Joy, Fear, Rumor, and War emerge from the agent or from the landscape and take action in the world’ (p. 3). Escobedo illustrates his argument in chapters that ‘focus on a single passion or quality personified in English Renaissance literature’, each one founding its discussion on a particular text or texts: Conscience in moral interludes; Despair in Doctor Faustus and Book I of The Faerie Queene; Love in Books III and IV of The Faerie Queene; and Sin in Paradise Lost (p. 13). Escobedo’s approach is based on Theresa Krier’s work on prosopopoetic agency (see ‘Daemonic Allegory: The Elements in Late Spenser, Late Shakespeare, and Irigaray’, SSt 18[2003] 315–42; ‘Psychic Deadness in Allegory: Spenser’s House of Mammon and Attacks on Linking’, in Elizabeth Jane Bellamy, Patrick Cheney, and Michael Schoenfeldt, eds., Imagining Death in Spenser and Milton [2003] pp. 46–64), in which ‘personification has the potential to express vital energy’. Krier draws on Luce Irigaray’s concept of ‘elemental motion’, suggesting that ‘the daemonism of late antiquity functioned as a kind of allegorical cosmology, whereby the will of the gods was translated into a physics imbued with divine energy’ (pp. 25–6). In terms of the scholarship on allegory, Escobedo contests the views of Angus Fletcher (Allegory: Theory of a Symbolic Mode [1964]) and Gordon Teskey (Allegory and Violence [1996]). Though both scholars are acknowledged as providing the basis for aspects of the author’s theory, Volition’s Face goes much further than either allows in its advocacy of ‘the daemonic basis of personification’ (pp. 47–55). In the book’s treatment of Despair in Book I of The Faerie Queene, Spenser’s ‘personification [Despaire] both transmits and enacts religious despair’, yet also ‘short-circuits the agency typically implied in literary prosopopoeia. With Spenser’s figure, we can neither entirely divorce suicide from despair nor identify the two things. If we think of despair as transmitted to Redcrosse Knight from the outside, as it were, entering him as he becomes aware of his sins, then we will likely understand it as an episode that an act of will resolves one way or another. But if we think of the personification’s attempted suicide as an enactment of the despair that the knight has long unconsciously suffered … then we are likely to think of it as an ongoing condition’ (pp. 152–3). Escobedo’s chapter on Love in Books III and IV of The Faerie Queene (pp. 173–207) sees Cupid as both daemonic agent (as he is in Plato and the Platonists) and personification of love, but, more significantly, ‘Cupid is not like Fear, who signifies a single note’. Eros has different versions: ‘[i]n the Garden of Adonis, Cupid participates in an allegory in which the Soul, finding Love after many trials, yields Pleasure’; and yet, ‘[i]n Busirane’s house, he participates in a quite dissimilar allegory that anatomizes the passion of Love as a psychological process involving Fancy, Desire, Doubt, Suspicion, Fury, and so on’ (pp. 179–80). For Escobedo, ‘Spenser finds the cruelty of Cupid indispensible [sic], if also lamentable’ (p. 193). Escobedo is also the editor of a new, comprehensive introduction to studying Spenser in context from Cambridge University Press: Edmund Spenser in Context. As Escobedo notes in his introduction, ‘the rubric of context … does not stretch to encompass any possible object that we might compare to Spenser. Thus, Chaucer counts as a context because his poetry impinged on the production of Spenser’s works, but Tennyson does not count as a context, interesting though such a comparison would be.’ Part I is devoted to ‘Spenser’s Environment’, defined as ‘structures and institutions to which Spenser responded’; Part II to ‘Genre and Craft’, concerned with the modes in which Spenser wrote; and Part III, ‘Influences and Analogues’, covers the resources on which Spenser drew (p. 2; Escobedo’s emphasis). There are thirty-seven relatively short chapters divided between the three sections. The volume also includes a chronology of Spenser’s life and a useful list of further reading. The contributors are all prominent scholars in the field, and they provide authoritative introductions to subjects on which they have often written more extensively elsewhere. Richard McCabe’s chapter on ‘Patrons’ is a useful companion to his recent monograph on patronage, ‘Ungainefull Arte’: Poetry, Patronage, and Print in the Early Modern Era [2016], for example. Judith H. Anderson’s monograph Light and Death: Figuration in Spenser, Kepler, Donne, Milton contains two chapters specifically on Spenser. They are both derived from chapters in essay collections that were published in 2010: the first in Jennifer C. Vaught’s Rhetorics of Bodily Disease and Health in Medieval and Early Modern England, and the second in a collection on Spenser’s Mutabilitie Cantos edited by Jane Grogan, Celebrating Mutabilitie: Essays on Edmund Spenser’s Mutabilitie Cantos, published to coincide with the 400th anniversary of their first publication in 1609. The first chapter, ‘ “The body of this death”: Donne’s Sermons, Spenser’s Maleger, Milton’s Sin and Death’ (pp. 15–31), shows Spenser’s representations of the Deadly Sins in the House of Pride in Book I of The Faerie Queene to be ‘natural’, especially in ‘the gloomy light’ of Donne’s sermons. Avarice, for example, suffering from gout, is ‘psychically fixated and physically fixed’ (p. 21). When Anderson turns to Maleger in Book II, she finds that Arthur, ‘who fights Maleger as a natural man, cannot unveil his magic shield or use his magic sword’; and she grounds Maleger’s ‘profoundly and mysterious persisten[ce]’ in St Paul’s ‘desperate outcry in Romans for deliverance from the body of this death—not simply the body of death … but the inextricability of sin, death, and the body’ (pp. 24–5; Anderson’s emphasis). The second chapter, ‘Mutability and Mortality in The Faerie Queene’ (pp. 32–51), uses the relation of sin and death in the Mutabilitie Cantos to frame a discussion of this relation elsewhere in Spenser’s poetry, often focusing on Books I and II of The Faerie Queene. Following, and challenging, the readings of Harold L. Weatherby (especially those from his article ‘Two Images of Mortalitie: Spenser and Original Sin’ (SP 85[1988] 321–52)), Anderson’s scope is broader than that of her guide, and she concludes that Spenser’s ‘metaphorizing, allegorizing, analogizing poetics … comprehends a good deal more openness, inclusion, and uncertainty than doctrinaire readings would allow’ (p. 51). Jason Crawford’s monograph Allegory and Enchantment: An Early Modern Poetics contains a chapter entitled ‘Violence and Apocalypse: The Faerie Queene’ (pp. 138–74). Here, Crawford examines Book I of Spenser’s poem hoping to persuade the reader that ‘[t]he more completely [he or she] can dispense with the narrative of The Faerie Queene in favor of its transcendent meaning … the more thoroughly the poem will have done its work’ (p. 38). In this chapter and the one that follows on Bunyan, allegory is regarded as ‘the residue of an enchanted history’, reflecting the authors’ engagement with post-Reformation anxieties. Arguing that in Book I Spenser ‘translates the experience of historical loss into various forms of eschatological desire’, Crawford suggests that the agents of Spenser’s allegory ‘strive toward dissolution from the order of narrative into an eschaton of pure significance, and the poem’s hero, the Redcrosse Knight, embarks on a campaign of cleansing from which he cannot rest until all the infiltrators of his body and the world body have been purged away’ (p. 43). Spenser’s ‘knight’s suspension in an in-between place, between history and eternity, between hope and despair, participates both in the fragile paradoxes of allegory and in the complex dynamics, world-negating and world-renewing, of apocalypse’ (p. 173). John H. Cameron and Goran Stanivukovic have an essay on Spenser in the collection Timely Voices: Romance Writing in English Literature, edited by Stanivukovic, which also includes Catherine Bates’s essay on Sidney’s Arcadia (reviewed above). In ‘Straggling Plots: Spenser’s Digressive Inventions in The Faerie Queene’ (pp. 60–87), Cameron and Stanivukovic treat the device of digression ‘as a narrative as well as a rhetorical strategy that engages the reader to ask questions about the text and the world from which it emerges, questions that extend beyond allegorical and political readings of the legends and the marvels’ (p. 21). For the authors of this essay, building on the work of Jeff Dolven (Scenes of Instruction in Renaissance Romance [2007]), ‘romance is not merely a detached mode of literature, existing in its own discursive and narrative vacuum for the purposes of entertainment, but rather is deeply rooted in the strategies of writing informed by early modern practices of humanist education, and concomitantly engaged with issues raised by the external world’ (p. 82). Lindsay Ann Reid’s chapter, ‘Unsoiled Soil and “Fleshly Slime”: Representations of Reproduction in Spenser’s Legend of Chastity’ (in Eklund, ed., Ground-Work: English Renaissance Literature and Soil Science, pp. 78–101), brings a fresh perspective to the ‘inharmonious ideas about the nature of love and sexual generation’ in Book III of The Faerie Queene. Reading Spenser’s poem from the perspective of soil-based horticulture, which, as a subject, is ‘symbolically represented throughout canto 6 as a possibly clean alternative to the beastly filth of carnality and rape’, Reid finds that ‘the demonstrably permeable relationships between bodies, plant life, and earth in book 3 draw attention to the similarly permeable boundaries of chastity and lust. In short, when we start digging around in Spenser’s allegorical dirt, things get awfully muddy’ (p. 101). Abraham Stoll’s monograph Conscience in Early Modern English Literature contains a chapter entitled ‘Spenser’s Allegorical Conscience’ (pp. 47–78) that is adapted from his article with the same title in Modern Philology (MP 111[2013] 181–204). Here, Stoll continues the book’s argument—that ‘the Protestant conscience falls away from scholastic structures, becoming the inchoate and reflexive faculty of the theorists of conscience’—by examining allegory in The Faerie Queene. For Stoll, this reflexive faculty ‘fits, and fails to fit, into representation’, and in the case of The Faerie Queene ‘there is no character in the poem that presents a personified Conscience’. Nonetheless, ‘conscience … proves to be of deep importance’ in particular moments: ‘playing a crucial role in the despair and subsequent salvation of Redcrosse Knight’ in Book I, and ‘shaping the justice enacted by Artegall, Talus, and Britomart’ in Book V (pp. 16, 48). In the case of Redcrosse, ‘Spenser brings [the knight] backward in time, from the psychological complexities of Protestant despair to the clarity of a medieval-tinged conscience. In a deft blend of early modernity and archaism, conscience is both informed by Protestant theology and couched in the poetics of psychomachia’ (p. 60). The ‘return of allegory’ is ‘a means of curing Redcrosse’s shattered conscience’ in Book I, but, in Book V, ‘its return constitutes an exclusion of conscience. The ascendant allegory of justice [in this book] has no room for conscience’ (p. 73). Kellie Robertson’s monograph Nature Speaks: Medieval Literature and Aristotelian Philosophy includes an epilogue, ‘Nature’s Silence: Humanism, Posthumanism, and the Legacy of Medieval Nature’ (pp. 323–48), in which the author examines how the book’s argument—‘that Aristotelian physics and vernacular poetry could not help but use the same metaphors to make meaning out of the material world, precisely because it was these metaphors that allowed them to compare nonhuman processes to human ones’—relates to Spenser’s poetic practice (p. 8). For Robertson, Spenser’s works represent ‘medieval Lady Nature’s last allegorical stand’. Spenser, ‘a poet whose response to his medieval poetic antecedents in The Faerie Queene was just as atypical as that of his friend [Gabriel] Harvey’, ‘looked backward and forward at once: back to the medieval tradition of personification allegory and ahead to the new ways in which popular Protestant writers would envision the powers of nature within a providential eschatology’ (p. 325). Significantly, ‘Spenser’s representation [of Nature in the Mutabilitie Cantos] departs from his medieval prototypes in order to harness Nature into the literary and theological traces of The Faerie Queene. In separating off Mutabilitie from Nature, Spenser effectively seals off the divinely sanctioned human world from the fallen nonhuman world of continual striving’ (p. 327). Kenneth Borris, in Visionary Spenser and the Poetics of Early Modern Platonism, begins with an introduction and definition of literary Platonism, especially as it applied to early modern theories and practices, then proceeds to delineate the relationship between Platonism’s ‘conceptions of the sublime’ (p. 4) and the works of Edmund Spenser, particularly The Shepheardes Calender and The Faerie Queene. The first chapter, ‘Platonism in Early Modern Poetics and Spenser’s Poesis’ (pp. 37–80), is testament to the breadth of influence that Plato’s works and ‘their Neoplatonic elaborations’ had on literary theories of the period, and Borris identifies ‘how Spenser’s poetry relates to these currents of thought’ (pp. 37–8). In ‘Spenser’s Phaedran Calender’ (pp. 83–121) and ‘The Calender’s Visions of Beauty’ (pp. 122–52), Borris demonstrates, in turn, the importance of the Calender’s ‘Phaedran intertext’ for understanding its ‘thematic and literary ambitions’ (pp. 105, 115), and how the Calender ‘also reflects the Symposium’s inquiry into beauty’s relation to love’ (p. 123). The chapters on The Faerie Queene, ‘The (H)eroic Idealism of Spenser’s Faery’ (pp. 155–88) and ‘Gloriana’s “True Glorious Type” ’ (pp. 189–233), see Spenser adopting a ‘program of fashioning readers “in all vertuous and gentle discipline” [that] addresses the instructive criteria of Platonic and Horatian poetics in a manner informed by Christian Platonism’ (p. 157; quotation from the prefatory letter to Ralegh), and Borris exploring The Faerie Queene’s ‘mimetic idealism’ in order ‘to clarify the textual expression of Gloriana’s idealized role, and its implications for the poem’s architectonics’ (p. 189). This is an indispensable text for the understanding of literary Platonism and Spenser’s place in that tradition. Now for three books published by Manchester University Press in the Manchester Spenser series. Literary and Visual Ralegh [2013], a collection of essays edited by Christopher M. Armitage, was overlooked in earlier reviews. The first four essays engage at length with the relationship between Ralegh and Spenser. The densely allusive essay ‘Raleigh in Ruins, Raleigh on the Rocks: Sir Wa’ter’s Two Books of Mutabilitie and Their Subject’s Allegorical Presence in Select Spenserean Narratives and Complaints’ (pp. 31–88), by James Nohrnberg, examines Sir Walter’s The Ocean to Cynthia with an eye to Spenser’s ‘Books of Mutabilitie’ and concludes that the ‘relative formlessness of Raleigh’s confessional poem, paradoxically, is an essential of its form—its water-like, or Walter-like, changeability’ (p. 36). Wayne Erickson, in ‘Spenser and Ralegh: Friendship and Literary Patronage’ (pp. 89–99), shows that ‘Ralegh was more important to Spenser’s life than Spenser was to Ralegh’s, just as Spenser scholars need Ralegh more than Ralegh scholars need Spenser’; ‘Ralegh apparently took care of his friends and relatives, and he certainly read and supported all kinds of literature, but his patronage of writers, including Spenser, played a very small part in his vast life’ (pp. 89–90). Thomas Herron, in ‘Love’s “emperye”: Raleigh’s “Ocean to Scinthia”, Spenser’s “Colin Clouts Come Home Againe” and The Faerie Queene IV.vii in Colonial Context’ (pp. 100–39), finds that ‘Ocean to Scinthia’ ‘shadows’ Spenser’s Colin Clouts Come Home Againe (p. 101) and that ‘Spenser allegorizes Raleigh’s tumultuous love life’ in The Faerie Queene ‘through the character Timias’ (p. 105). Herron explores the poets’ relationship in the context of Irish affairs, and ‘[t]hrough “Ocean to Scinthia” we gain valuable insight into the colonial mentalité of one of the Munster Plantation’s prime movers and shakers and its largest landowner, Raleigh, a fellow writer-planter of the greater writer but lesser planter, Spenser’ (pp. 105–6). ‘Ocean to Scinthia’, ‘[l]ike “Colin Clouts Come Home Againe”, to which it bears strong affinities in style and content … is a literary feast, deploying a mixture of epic, pastoral, Petrarchan and neoplatonic motifs, including numerological symbolism and somatic metaphors, that reflect courtly clichés and colonial desires in the New World and (especially) Ireland’ (p. 138). Anna Beer, in ‘ “Bellphebes course is now observde no more”: Ralegh, Spenser, and the Literary Politics of the Cynthia Holograph’ (pp. 140–65), connects Colin in Colin Clouts Come Home Againe and Timias in The Faerie Queene with Ralegh as ‘Ocean’ in Oceans Love to Scynthia. For Beer, the ‘Cynthia holograph’—the title given by Michael Rudick to the four poems of the Hatfield manuscript—'probes the identity not only of the Queen but also that of its author. Self (Ocean) and other (Scinthia) are conflated in a poetic world in which the one cannot be separated from the other.’ Moreover, ‘Ralegh’s explorations of identity become a critique of Edmund Spenser’s allegorical fictions’ (p. 142; see The Poems of Sir Walter Ralegh: A Historical Edition, ed. Michael Rudick [1999]). Syrithe Pugh’s Spenser and Virgil: The Pastoral Poems [2016] was not received in time for review in the last edition, so it will be covered here. Pugh offers a fresh perspective on the relationship of Spenser’s career trajectory to that of Virgil, asserting that ‘Spenser does not follow [Virgil’s] career as “assiduously” as he himself leads his readers to expect’. Indeed, Pugh observes that ‘[t]he progression from eclogue book in The Shepheardes Calender to dynastic epic in The Faerie Queene is recognizably Virgilian, and … Spenser is at pains to point this out to his reader. But there is no work which corresponds clearly to Virgil’s middle stage, the Georgics—an omission which some try to explain by arguing that “georgic poetry” is replaced in Spenser’s career by another genre, such as epithalamion.’ Pugh shows throughout her book that Spenser finds in Virgil and ‘Virgil’ (doubtful attributions from the Appendix Virgiliana) ‘other possible generic alignments which turn aside from the relentless upward trajectory traced by the three more canonical works’ (pp. 6–7). Chapter 1, ‘Intertextuality and Allegory in Virgil’s Eclogues’ (pp. 41–81), ‘makes a case for taking seriously the allegorical mode of reading Virgil’s Eclogues prominent in the commentary tradition from Servius to the Renaissance, by way of an examination of his method of imitation’ (p. 38). Chapter 2, ‘Virgilian Negotiations in The Shepheardes Calender’ (pp. 82–158), ‘examines how The Shepheardes Calender seeks to replicate the Virgilian dynamic of bargaining with power in its opposition to the D’Alençon match [with Queen Elizabeth], in a way which both deepens the gloom of the original and heightens the confidence of the poet in his own power to influence public opinion through his poetic skill’ (p. 38). Chapter 3, ‘Virgilian Structure in The Shepheardes Calender’ (pp. 159–81), ‘consider[s] consider the structure of the Calender as a whole. Drawing attention to striking patterns which have not previously been noticed’, Pugh argues that ‘the structure of the work represents an orderly and significant development of the concentric ring-structure of Virgil’s eclogue book, focused on the displacement of Caesarean praise by an amplification of topical satire as defining Colin’s public role’ (pp. 38–9). In chapters 4 (‘Reshaping the Virgilian Cursus: Pastoral Vocation in “Astrophel” ’, pp. 182–221) and 5 (‘Reimagining the Pastoral Muse in “Colin Clouts Come Home Againe” ’, pp. 222–301), Pugh ‘analyse[s] the volume in which Spenser returns to pastoral in 1595, Colin Clouts Come Home Againe, focusing respectively on the two eclogues by Spenser which comprise most of its bulk, but considering them in the context of the whole. Both poems engage particularly with Virgil’s tenth and final eclogue, in which he bids farewell to pastoral, and together they work to reject the values which motivate that farewell, and to place a new version of pastoral, reconceived as prophetic, at the top of the generic hierarchy, above epic’s tales of kings’ (pp. 38–9). Like Pugh’s book, Spenserian Satire: A Tradition of Indirection by Rachel E. Hile offers a new viewpoint on Spenser’s career trajectory, ‘A Portrait of the Artist as a Satirist’, as Hile puts it (pp. 31–7). For Hile, although ‘Spenser built his career in an arc leading to the highest poetic genre, so that he could claim the status of an epic poet’, there is another, often neglected, side to his career in which, ‘in his time, and for his contemporaries, his inventive muse led him to a larger array of genres, of experiments, of poetic stances’. Of these experiments, ‘[h]is satirical works were an important part of who he was’ (pp. 36–7). Hile sees Spenser as experimenting in a form of ‘indirect satire’, the indirectness necessitated by a ‘desire to make poetry matter, coupled with an equally strong desire to avoid punishment or censorship’ (p. 32). She observes that ‘all texts are indeterminate, incomplete … but some are extra-indeterminate, written by design to be extra-incomplete, to require, more than other texts, that the reader transfer meaning from other texts and from other semiotic fields altogether in order to correctly interpret the meaning’. This is what Hile refers to as ‘intersemiotic transfer’, without which indirect satire cannot be understood (p. 1; Hile’s emphasis). Hile proceeds to plot Spenser’s development of this mode in texts such as The Shepheardes Calender, Mother Hubberds Tale, The Ruines of Time, and The Faerie Queene, the poet achieving ‘a balance between the caution of The Shepheardes Calender and the rashness of Complaints, a balance that Aristotle might describe as true courage’, in the books of the 1596 Faerie Queene (p. 36). Hile also devotes a considerable portion of her book to the ‘inspiration for creating their own puzzlingly indirect works’ that other writers found in Spenser’s ‘indirect satirical tools of allusion and allegory’ (p. 8). Among those that found inspiration in Spenser’s indirect satire were Joseph Hall, William Bedell, Thomas Nashe, Tailboys Dymoke, Thomas Middleton, Michael Drayton, William Browne, and George Wither. Hile’s monograph develops an interesting theory of satire that has a broad application for understanding Spenser’s oeuvre and its multifarious reception. Hazel Wilkinson’s monograph Edmund Spenser and the Eighteenth-Century Book is a detailed bibliographical study of the editions of Spenser published between 1715 and 1795. Wilkinson demonstrates how these editions ‘shaped the way in which Spenser has been read and possessed ever since’, and how ‘[t]hey also had a broader effect on the literary landscape of the eighteenth century’ (p. 6). Spenser’s eighteenth-century afterlife differed significantly from those of Chaucer, Shakespeare, Jonson, and Milton, not least because of The Faerie Queene’s ‘conspicuous allegory’, which ‘encouraged its adoption for political purposes’ (pp. 8–9). Books Reviewed Anderson Judith H. Light and Death: Figuration in Spenser, Kepler, Donne, Milton . FordUP . [ 2017 ] pp. 328 . £54 ISBN 9 7808 2327 2778. Google Scholar Crossref Search ADS Google Scholar Google Preview WorldCat COPAC Andrea Bernadette. The Lives of Girls and Women from the Islamic World in Early Modern British Literature and Culture . UTorP . 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TI - VI The Sixteenth Century: Excluding Drama after 1550
JF - The Year's Work in English Studies
DO - 10.1093/ywes/maz006
DA - 2019-12-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/vi-the-sixteenth-century-excluding-drama-after-1550-g3Yn0sJAPy
SP - 301
VL - 98
IS - 1
DP - DeepDyve
ER -