Configurations: A Topomorphical Approach to Renaissance Poetry.

Maren-Sofie Rostvig has produced an astonishing and monumental work, whose nature will perhaps not be clear to many from its title. What the author means by "topomorphic" is the analysis of certain literary texts by disengaging numerical structures and patterns from them, which their authors consciously used while writing them. The poet is understood as reproducing the numerical structure of the universe in the structure of his poem. Since the universe was created by God using numbers or what numbers stand for, the poet participates in God's creative act. He can lead his readers - or at least those who are aware of such structures in the poem - back to God. This tradition, rooted in Augustine and in early commentators on Scripture such as Cassiodorus, Rostvig calls "syncretistic," sternly rejecting such terms as "Neo-Platonist," "Pythagorean," or even "numerological."

Rostvig finds theoretical underpinnings in such works of Augustine as the De Musica, the De Vera Religione, and the De Trinitate; the theory operates down through the Renaissance and beyond. Such figures as Francesco Giorgio, Pietro Bongo and Pierre de la Primaudaye assume considerable importance alongside better known names such as Pico and Landino. But the bulk of the book is taken up by painstakingly detailed analyses of numerical patterns in selected literary texts - not all of them Renaissance poems, for Augustine's Confessions is a pivotal work for the author's thesis. Tasso's Jerusalem Delivered, Spenser's Faerie Queene, in particular Book One, and the ten-book version of Milton's Paradise Lost are the texts given the most detailed analysis, often with diagrams, forty-six alone for the Faerie Queene!

Numerological analyses of literary works have been with us of course for decades, and not merely confined to Renaissance works. Specialists in Homer have found concentric patterns (what are here called symmetrical structures) in the Iliad and the Odyssey, and George Duckworth argued for the presence of golden mean ratios in Virgil's Aeneid. In the Renaissance, specialists have found such patterns functioning as structural devices in Montaigne's Essays and most recently in Rabelais and Ariosto.

All of this Rostvig ignores, for she takes a rigid and narrow view of her subject. She is concerned with what she identifies as "a tradition that can be documented - an uninterrupted tradition of structural exegesis" (xii). But she sees this tradition as monolithic. Each writer she locates within it, from Augustine to Milton, had the same intentions and used more or less the same structural principles. And although at least the continuity of the tradition is documented here, there is no sense that it developed or evolved. Such matters as actual influences are often left sketchy. It is enough that two writers are seen as participating in the tradition.

To say that this work is dogmatic is to put it mildly. Such figures as Frances Yates, Northrop Frye and Paul Oskar Kristeller are chided with varying degrees of severity for having incorrectly understood or not having properly appreciated the importance of the tradition as here defined. For Rostvig the patterns she finds are in fact the essential meaning of the works she analyzes. Very few others have seen them rightly, in her view. She is particularly insistent that what is truly moving in the works she studies is the abstract intellectual beauty of the patterns within them, and that this pleasure is intellectual alone, a matter of "pure logic" (365). She ignores virtually all other approaches to understanding these texts, but does from time to time denounce psychological approaches. One can understand why, for as she observes at one point, the danger is that we might think that the patterned structures are the result of "subconscious promptings" (311).

Although this work is eccentric and quite unfashionable in terms of current theoretical approaches, those studying Renaissance literature would do well not to ignore it or dismiss it out of hand. While one can quibble about some of the details, the painstaking analysis and the textual evidence presented - and the sheer bulk of it - are persuasive evidence of the presence of numerical patterns if not of Rostvig's interpretation of their meaning. In considering the work of an age when the essential task of literary creation was seen as the creation of form, a task always thought of as the work of the intellect, the presence of the detailed structuring that could only have been the result of conscious planning should not surprise us. It is unfortunate that Rostvig presents her discoveries in a conceptual straight-jacket, isolated from many aspects of the culture of which they are part.

FRED J. NICHOLS CUNY Graduate Center