Goran V. Stanivukovic, ed. Ovid and the Renaissance Body.

Toronto and Buffalo: The University of Toronto Press, 2001. viii + 281 pp. index. $65. ISBN: 0-8020-3515-9.

The reading of Ovid during the Renaissance was done in the light of new contemporary philosophies (Plato, Ficino). Ovid and the Renaissance Body is written in the light of actual critical philosophy of literature. Through exploration of Ovidian influence, the Renaissance body as an eroticized object is a part of the construction of the early modern subject.

Different cultural representations emerged, shaping Renaissance subjectivity; the body, particularly the Ovidian body, was considered an excess in its representation. The mutability of the self or its "metamorphosis," arousing tremendous curiosity, might have been the cause for the interest in Ovid's work. On the other hand, the practice of the rhetorical device of "imitation" was central at the time, and choosing Ovid's works opened the field to multiple interpretations and versions and provided a new Ovidian discourse on sexuality.

The ways of contemporary theory, poststructuralist theories of sexuality, historicism, and writing referred to in this book are able to inform us about how Renaissance authors used Ovid's stories in order to build the history of bodies and sexualities.

Approaches such as feminism, speech-act, queer, cultural materialist, gender, and print culture are widely used for the study of Ovidianism in the study of the Renaissance body. It appears that Ovidianism speaks to the theories of identification and desire, to discussions of normative and non-normative sexuality, and to analysis of the relationship between the body, writing, and printing. Most of Ovid's major works are challenged: Metamorphoses, Ars amatoria, Amores, Fasti, and Heroides are brought forward in comparison with English, French, and Italian Renaissance writers who imitated Ovid's works of different genres in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Prejudices on Ovid's works, accumulated over centuries, are now totally abolished.

The six essays on queer theory, lesbian subjects, and male-male erotics in poetry and drama make a clear distinction between identification and polymorphous desire in Ovid and Renaissance Petrarchism. This is brightly developed in Carla Freccero's essay; particularly convincing is the textual identification and desire in Louise Labe's use of the Metamorphoses and Heroides. Jim Ellis considers the denial of Petrarchism (via Ovid) through heterosexual alienation of the subject from language uses according to Luce Irigaray and Monique Witting. Mark Dooley views female sex erotics in Gallathea as obvious lesbianism in the Renaissance. For Morgan Holmes, the female-female erotics of Andrew Marvell's lament, challenge the norm by subversion of "sexual orthodoxy." Mario DiGangi traces the use of the Narcissus myth in the Renaissance as a social signifier of anxieties about court life; his study contributes to psychoanalytical historicist queer theory. Ian Moulton helps viewing the construction of masculinity in Renaissance texts (such as Ariosto's Orlando Furioso.

For speech, voice, and embodiment, Gina Bloom based her study in the trope of Echo's "echoic sound" in the myth of Echo in G. Sandy. Misogynistic silencing of the female voice is a new way of male poet's appropriation of the female body. For feminism to find new models of the female is an assertion of voice against the ideology of silencing. Contemporary criticism's claims about effeminacy as a site of male anxiety about female sexuality is a perfect ground for the debate proposed by M. Pincombe and B. Boehrer.

Textualization, or how the Ovidian body enabled discourses of writing, translation, poetic identity, and print culture, constitutes the subject of four essays. Particularly interesting is the wax metaphor showing the overlapping cultural practices of shaping texts and representing desires.

Le corps a la Renaissance (Paris, 1990) is no more the only reference for this topic. Ovid and the Renaissance Body offers renewed approaches to apprehend culture, particularly the exploration of gender and sexuality, besides being a welcome complement to recent studies on Ovid, such as those of Elizabeth Harvey, Valerie Traub, Debora Kuller Shuger, Mario DiGangi, and Lynn Enterline.

Goran V. Stanivukovic's introduction circumscribes very seriously this masterpiece anthology which is expanded by the very well grounded afterword by Valerie Traub, two texts which show (without blurring the sixteenth-century texts) the pluralism of the critical methodologies and approaches to the Ovidian body as agent of cultural and textual discourse on the body. It is the most learned book ever written on the subject, a tool for the reading of the cultural history of genders.

ILANA ZINGUER

University of Haifa