Gisela Engel, Brita Rang, Klaus Reichert, and Heide Wunder, eds. Das Geheimnis am Beginn der europaischen Moderne.

(Zeitsprunge: Forschungen zur Fruhen Neuzeit, 6.) Frankfurt: Vittorio Klostermann, 2002. 532 pp. index. 54 [euro]. ISBN: 3-465-03146-6.

It does not take long for a reader, even one who has not thought much about the topic of this book, to be persuaded that changing notions of what is secret are some of the most important developments in the early modern period, when (to mention but one example) the opposition of privileged knowledge (secrets, for instance, of the ruler) versus public knowledge was giving way to the opposition of the public versus the private. This well-presented and sizeable volume on "The Secret at the Beginning of the European Modern Period" contains twenty-eight articles plus three introductory ones, some in English, some in German. Each essay is followed by a summary in the other language.

The book is divided in four subsections: "The Public and the Knowledge of Rulers," "The Public and the Intimate," "The Body and Sexuality," and "The Arts and Knowledge." The attempt to integrate the essays into a conceptual unit is apparent in that (in addition to the three introductory essays already mentioned) each of the four sections is preceded by an essay called "introductory" to the others by someone to whom that group of essays seems to have been available. The integrative efforts are usually successful, and the variety of incisive views is nothing short of stunning.

The first group opens not with one but two introductory essays, the first somewhat at the perimeter of the topic, for it gets its grist from the etymology of secretary, showing interestingly (although way before the early modern period!) how the change of medium from oral to written at court resulted in a shift of what is secret from the person to a place or piece of furniture; the second (by Jonathan Elukin, one of the originators of the entire project) pointing to what unites the essays in this section, namely linking the practices of governmental secrecy with cultural meaning. Then, starting from Max Weber's idea that bureaucracies invented official secrets as a means of self-preservation, Melissa Meriam Bullard shows that early modern diplomacy functioned as a theater in which secrecy was acted out. In his essay "Invisible Gifts," Valentin Groebner explores the murky area between public gift exchange and a bribe that hides a secret. Jonathan Elukin traces the history of protecting and controlling information in England from the Middle Ages (for instance, by seals and oaths) to an entire and generally accepted secrecy apparatus of government as a main pillar of a stable government in the early seventeenth century. In "The Secrets of Princes," Linda Gregerson describes the making public of politically relevant secrets of a woman's body in sixteenth-century England, while Leonida Tedoldi's "Secrecy, Justice, and Courts" takes a close look at inquisitorial processes in Venice, which relied heavily on secret witnesses (who also had to swear secrecy) and finds that the system, eventually of course wiped out by such progressive legal thinkers of the Enlightenment as Christian Thomasius, worked with extraordinary celerity and was in fact a means of the oppressed to obtain redress for wrongs of the powerful. With "Disclosing Mysteries," Robert A. Schneider takes us to Versailles to which Louis XIV had withdrawn, attended by a chosen few, to insulate himself and keep secrets. In a seamless link with this more general piece, Lynn Wood Mollenauer then studies one particular case, the Affair of the Poisons, in which Louis XIV vigorously pursued the investigation into use of questionable and harmful substances until he began to fear that his mistress, Madame de Montespan, was involved in the affair, at which point he tried to keep the investigation secret; finally he stopped it entirely. In "Say Nothing of What You Have Seen," Jodi Campell describes similar moves by royalty (to hide or keep secret) in Spanish Golden Age drama.

The highlights of the second section, "The Public and the Intimate," are an essay by Daniela Hammer-Tugendhat (a subtle--and perhaps occasionally over-subtle--analysis of what suggests intimacy in Vermeer's paintings), a very brief discussion by Ulrike Vedder of the contradictory use of postal secrecy in the epistolary novel Les Liaisons Dangereuses (contradictory, because so much depends on the violation of it), and finally an essay ("Enlightened Secrets") by Julie Carlson arguing that to William Godwin secrets were so hateful that he even revealed in print what opponents called "dirty secrets" about his wife, Mary Wollstonecraft, after her death.

In the third section, entitled "Body and Sexuality," Thomas Laqueur's essay "The Secret Sin and the Modern Self," is a persuasive statement of his thesis that in the eighteenth century masturbation was constructed as a secret sin with the most horrendous consequences: "It is not a but the solitary vice, not a but the secret sin" (293). In "Anatomical Secrets," Patricia Simons focuses on the pudica gesture of women represented in paintings, statues, and medical illustrations, the hand covering the pudenda, and its function of both hiding and revealing secrets. Helmut Puffs essay, "The Rhetoric of Sodomy in the Works of Martin Luther" (linked to the volume's topic of secrets only implicitly), shows that the allegation of sodomy in all its semantic breadth was a powerful tool in Luther's religious polemic. Deliberately using them for a contrastive study of Dutch mentalite, Brita Rang analyzes emblematically coded secrets in the first half of the eighteenth century and what she calls "enlightened secrets" in the second half of that century. The section ends with a case study, in many senses marginal, of a late nineteenth-century arson threat in a Bavarian village, a threat possibly motivated by a charge of bestiality.

The final section, "Arts and Knowledge," narrows the focus with Verana Oleniczac Lobsien's "Secret Narration," an analysis of George Gascoigne's Adventures of Master F.J. and its narrator's concern with keeping and revealing secrets. The essay seems to suggest that some of what is here called "secrecy" is the obscurity of the beginnings of modern disjointed narration. Klaus Kruger's essay "Hermetic Paintings and the Secret of the Opaque" starts from the striking contrast between one of Hieronymus Bosch's most elaborately allegorical paintings and a detailed sixteenth-century description of it by a contemporary, who concerns himself only with surface elements (including cranes defecating), but not with meaning. In a very complicated but immensely stimulating analysis of this and other paintings, Kruger seems to suggest that looking at a painting was not generally a search for hidden or secret significatio and to argue for the existence of pluralizing and even subversive early modern ways of seeing. Then Tanja Michalsky argues that outstanding works of Dutch landscape painting can be understood as a complement to scientific cartography, but contributes little to the topic of this volume. The next two contributions belong to medical history: in "Secrets of Women," a phrase then synonymous with unexplored secrets of the woman's body, Sibylle Flugge traces the knowledge of midwives in the early modern period in continental Europe. (In England men seem to have made much earlier inroads into "midwifery"); and in "Arcana, Panaceas, and Privileges," Bettina Wahrig-Schmidt examines the shifting connotations of medical secrets (cures, medications) in the eighteenth century. The book ends with an essay (by Susanna Akerman) on the strong echo the secret and secretive Rosicrucian movement had in Sweden (among other things, she confirms Frances Yates' ideas about the importance of John Dee, who, she shows, was read carefully by the Swede Bureus) and finally a contribution by Johannes SuBmann on the famous historian Leopold Ranke's metaphoric use of "holy hieroglyphic" for the unifying idea that a historian has to discover or uncover for each period.

This volume is an impressive monument to an international effort of two different "teams" united by one research topic. Some of the essays fit so well together that they seem like stages of a continuous argument not needing a transition.

WINFRIED SCHLEINER

University of California 

Davis