Ellen Spolsky. Satisfying Skepticism: Embodied Knowledge in the Early Modern World.

Aldershot, UK and Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2001. vii + 239 pp. illus. bibl. index. $69.95. ISBN: 0-7546-0374-1.

This ambitious book seeks to employ the methods of various disciplines in exploring early modern skepticism as it appears in works of literary and visual art by Shakespeare, Caravaggio, Tasso, Sidney, and many others. Cognitive science, art history, and cultural studies all inform the readings of the texts and paintings here under consideration. The author offers this blend of approaches in a lively effort to assess the philosophical and literary options during a period when Pyrrhonist and Academic variants of skepticism both received persuasive articulation, and the literary genre of tragedy was given consummate expression by Shakespeare.

Spolsky's pragmatic confidence in contemporary neuroscience makes her assert certain biological givens in human processes of thought. It also makes her a Pyrrhonist. Her sense of the inevitable limits of human understanding leads her philosophically to esteem the tranquil resolutions of pastoral tragicomedy above the calamitous ordeals of Othello and Coriolanus. To make this case she must write literary history in reverse, moving from Shakespeare's Jacobean agonistics to Sidney's Elizabethan wisdom of accommodation. From her perspective, however, evolution presides over chronology and makes nice questions of periodization seem negligible. She wants to situate human knowledge both within culture and within the human body. If there is any conflict between these ambitions, biological constraints are given priority. The embodied human subject and its capacity for knowledge are Spolsky's fundamental concerns.

In this project Spolsky both takes inspiration from the philosopher Stanley Cavell and disagrees with one of his major arguments. Cavell reads Shakespearean tragedy as anticipatory of Cartesian skepticisms misguided intellectual fastidiousness, whereas Spolsky sees the genre of tragedy itself as promoting unnecessary catastrophes. Othello is simply stuck in the wrong kind of plot, a perception that critics since Thomas Rymer have understood. Both Spolsky and Cavell are unfazed by the taboo against essentialism, although they diverge in their attitudes toward what they perceive as the bedrock of the human condition. Cavell sympathetically experiences tragedy as a cautionary revelation of human fallibility. Spolsky stresses the treatability of the intellectual affliction of skepticism, once we fully appreciate the conditions that promote it.

Spolsky's willingness to range widely in her quest for suitable objects of study is exhilarating, and it yields real gains of enlightenment beyond the confines of any one particular discipline. Her astute analysis of Caravaggio's Doubting Thomas explores the limits of sensory knowledge and the consequences of a mistaken emphasis upon such an access to certainty. It aptly sets the stage for her analysis of Coriolanus, where misperception of the roles of flesh and spirit disqualify the protagonist for the position of Roman consul. Similarly, Spolsky juxtaposes her reading of Othello, which stresses the Moor's misguided imagination of Desdemona's infidelity, with a trio of early modern pastoral poems that ingratiatingly offer potentially helpful instruction about the dangerous entanglements of sex and violence.

For Spolsky, the Reformation debate over the role of images in religious faith and observance dramatizes this culture's traumatic argument with itself over two fundamental ways of knowing: seeing and hearing. Imperfect at best, human understanding requires the full range of its resources to enjoy the reassurance of satisfactory knowledge. By exclusively emphasizing audition, Protestant iconoclasm ruled out one major access to knowledge and gave rise to cognitive deprivation. Artists responded by seeking alternative routes to such reassurance, a process that Spolsky illustrates via analysis of ordinary Dutch landscape painting.

For Spolsky, this recovery of vision as a way of knowing through views of the everyday world helps to replenish the Protestant loss of sacred objects of contemplation. Its stress on the ordinary chimes not only with the prominence of the domestic in a tragedy like Othello but also with the nostalgia for simpler, more natural relations in Elizabethan versions of pastoral. It was to the animals that Montaigne significantly turned to demonstrate the humbling shortcomings of human intelligence and to encourage the acceptance of human limitation and the time-tested wisdom of custom and tradition. Spolsky's affinity for the genres of pastoral poetry and landscape painting reflects a kindred endorsement of a "wise conservatism," although she arrives at that position via today's cognitive science.

LAWRENCE F. RHU 

University of South Carolina, Columbia