History and Warfare in Renaissance Epic.

Among the new technologies that signal the beginnings of early modernity, gunpowder, printing, and the magnetic compass share a traditional priority conferred upon them most fatuously by Francis Bacon. Michael Murrin has undertaken to explore the effects of one of these world-altering inventions, gunpowder, upon the premier genre of Renaissance literary culture, epic poetry. In doing so he locates his efforts upon a major faultline of that culture, where strains of transition into the new age tellingly make themselves felt. Likewise this project places Murrin on the oft-disputed boundary between the disciplines of history and literature, though he assumes this position with a degree of candor and lack of strain rare among scholars nowadays. Calling himself an old historicist who privileges literary texts over social contexts, he proceeds without further ado to explore in detail works ranging from Luigi Pulci's Morgante (1483) to Samuel Daniel's Civile Wars (1609), with a proleptic examination of gunpowder's role in the war in heaven in John Milton's Paradise Lost (1674). These termini focus Murrin's attention upon the sixteenth century, but along the way from Italy to England he makes a significant passage through works of Iberian poets such as Luis de Camoes's Os Lusiadas (1572), Alonso de Ercilla y Zuniga's La Araucana (1569-89), and Gaspar Perez de Villagra's Historia de la Nueva Mexico (1610). Opening up the canon of the Renaissance epic to include these often neglected poems appreciably enlarges the conversation about heroic narrative in early modern Europe and amounts to an important contribution in its own right. While harking back to classical epic, chanson de geste, and medieval romance and looking forward to the modern novel, Murrin concentrates on heroic poetry of the sixteenth century, which he seeks to read in light of both the dramatic changes in the conduct of warfare during that epoch and the historical records that pertain to the conflicts such poetry aims to represent.

Among canonical epics, none is more central to Murrin's study than Torquato Tasso's Gerusalemme liberata (1580-81), about which he has already written influentially from a quite different perspective in The Allegorical Epic (1980). Limited space leads me to single out this poem as exemplary of the sort of insights and arguments that Murrin's approach enables him to put forward and that otherwise might not emerge or, if they did, would lack the impact of their formulation in the contexts that Muffin creates for them. Ariosto's realism in representing the siege of Paris serves as a prelude to Murrin's discussion of the Crusaders' assault upon Jerusalem in Tasso's epic, and such a sequence bespeaks the freshness of approach in this book. In reading Orlando furioso, few have focused upon its mimetic fidelity to the facts of experience, so Murrin's stress upon this element in Ariosto itself breaks new ground. Indeed, since he precedes this portion of his book with an extensive consideration of Boiardo's use of the classical historians Herodotus and Livy, one can see how Murrin's drive to uncover the traces of lived reality animates his project even in the realm of patent fantasy. In this regard Tasso's steady reliance upon chroniclers of the First Crusade prompts Murrin to claim that in Gerusalemme liberata "the poetry of war comes very close to versified history" (96). But the method of composition from such sources is far more complex than this assertion suggests, and Murrin demonstrates in rich detail how Tasso transposes elements from historical battles such as Dorylaeum and the siege of Antioch to represent military activity around Jerusalem. Yet despite Tatso's ingenious adaptations from accounts of actual warfare, pure fiction dominates almost half his epic (117). Even the portions derived from historical records betray "an academic fierceness" that makes the question of violence for Tasso more "a learned dream than a reality" (208, 210). Comparison with such poets as Ercilla and Villagra, who witnessed many of the brutal actions they represent, enables Murrin to take Tasso's measure with authoritative moral seriousness. Addressing the issue of total war ("guerra a fuego y sangre"), Murrin asks: "Are there limits to violence?" The massacre of native Americans in Chile and New Mexico posed this ethical challenge to early modern adventurers whose technological advantages gave them savage new powers. As Murrin patiently relates the complex military and literary history that lay behind these new world encounters and their narrative representation, he confronts us with a segment of our past whose present consequences we will find much harder to ignore or deny, thanks to this remarkable book.

LAWRENCE F. RHU University of South Carolina