Body Narratives: Writing the Nation and Fashioning the Subject in Early Modern England.

Susanne Scholz. Body Narratives: Writing the Nation and Fashioning the Subject in Early Modern England.

Houndmills and New York: Palgrave/St. Martin's Press, 2000. ix + 208 pp. index. bibl. $59.95. ISBN: 0-312-22783-3.

This book engages a number of topics that have preoccupied early modern studies for the past two decades (the body, gender, subjectivity, emergent nationality, early colonialism). Scholz's central purpose is to explore the nature of corporeality in Elizabethan England, and in the first three chapters she examines how the body intersects with or produces subjectivity. She considers how self-government is installed and cultivated within the subject (Norbert Elias, Erasmus, Spenser), how courtesy books (The Courtier, The Faerie Queene) produce courtly behavior, and how the female body is sexualized (Petrarchan discourses). In the second half of the book, Scholz looks at the way the somatic infiltrates and shapes political processes. The representation of the nation's body as an impregnable fortress forms the topic of one chapter, the symbolic body of Queen Elizabeth is the subject of another, and the final two chapters focus respectively on Astraea, Ireland, and the body politic and on the body of the Other in R alegh's Discoverie. Not surprisingly, Spenser's Faerie Queene is the central text, and such works as Lyly's Endimion, the courtly entertainment, The Four Foster Children of Desire (which Sidney may have helped create), Ralegh's Discoverie, and Spenser's A View of the Present State of Ireland figure as planets orbiting around it.

Scholz's view is that the body is fundamentally historical. Although different cultures and historical periods produce the illusion of a prediscursive, naturalized body, she argues that attending to the way cultures "produce" bodies will allow us to understand historical change. Scholz's conception of corporeality is, of course, recognizably Foucauldian, though strongly mediated by Judith Butler's performative model and by the more diffuse influence of new historicism. The book's theoretical matrix is a deft but predictable fusion of recent ideas circulating in early modern studies and postcolonial theory, and while Scholz brings a range of issues together in often intelligent ways, she relies too frequently on the formative perceptions of scholars reading the primary material rather than interrogating those received ideas or grappling with the primary material in new ways. Thomas Laqueur becomes the authority she cites for the Galenic homology instead of Galen or one of his Renaissance interpreters, for exam ple, and because she mentions neither the controversies Laqueur's work have generated nor the arguments about Galen that were current in England in the late 1500s, the relationship between the body and early modern medical texts is curiously flattened. In her later discussion of the hymen, she begins to allude to the early modern debates about the existence and function of this membrane, and this is exactly the kind of promising glimpse into a world of material Renaissance bodies that should occur more often.

While the body is one of the most important and revelatory areas of early modern studies, Scholz's treatment of it is more superficial methodologically and less fulfilling in its historical specificity than it might be. She is often insightfully attentive to issues of gender, for instance, but seemingly unaware of the critiques of new historicism; she focuses exclusively on the world of the court. Indeed, what is striking about this book is the near complete occlusion of material bodies and a visible political culture (though her chapter on Ireland does gesture towards a more developed political analysis). Both bodies and courtly or national politics are almost immediately translated into a symbolic register: the Queen's body is virgin land, the hortus conclusus, an icon, it stands for the English nation and the English Church, and it is represented in multiple forms and characters in the literature of the period, but Scholz's treatment makes both Elizabeth and the English nation finally profoundly disembodie d, somatic and political entities sacrificed to iconographies that sustain a cultural imaginary. The mechanisms that produce these symbolic figurations are not examined in any detail, so that the highly intricate relationship between Petrarchan discourse and Elizabethan court politics, for instance, is shrunk to a bald statement: the "Petrarchist" model was the "predominant structure" in which "courtly self-fashioning" could take place (39-40). There is a great deal of potential in Scholz's topic, and her joining of somatic and political registers is full of possibility. This is a useful book in its ability to bring recent scholarship, theory, and familiar texts together, but its insights need to be extended into yet unmapped territories.