Karen Rosoff Encarnacion and Anne L. McClanan, eds. The Material Culture of Sex, Procreation, and Marriage in Premodern Europe.

Houndmills and New York: Palgrave/St. Martin's Press, 2001. xiv + 286 pp. index, illus. $59.95. ISBN: 0-312-24001-5.

The editors of this anthology explain that it "began as a project in women's history intended to use material culture as a means of reexamining the possibilities of gaining access to the lives and experiences of medieval and early modern women" (2). The time is ripe for such an undertaking. Recent studies of material culture have offered a wealth of objects to be read and histories to uncover, but few have focused entirely on how these "things" can illuminate otherwise obscured paths of access to women's lives. Single-authored books such as Jacqueline Musacchio's The Art and Ritual of Childbirth in Renaissance Italy and Roberta Gilchrist's Gender and Material Culture have brought this approach to bear in the analysis of medieval and early modern women's lives. One of the distinguishing virtues of McClanan and Encarnacion's book is that it contributes to this nascent enterprise the variety of perspectives and interests characteristic of a multi-authored collection.

In compiling the book's eleven essays on sex, procreation, and marriage in premodern Europe, McClanan and Encarnacion have recognized the multiple approaches to material culture that each academic field has developed by including work by art historians, archaeologists, classicists, and historians of science. They are to be commended for acknowledging the vast differences between each field's take on this increasingly popular approach and for bringing them together in a single volume for readers to study. As a point of comparison, the majority of contributors to many other recent collections on early modern material culture are members of English and Comparative Literature departments; obviously their scholarship represents a range of theoretical differences, but it also bears the unmistakable marks of a common disciplinary history that must be taken into account. In her introduction to Renaissance Culture and the Everyday, for instance, Patricia Fumerton describes how "the shift from the old political historicism to a new social historicism of the everyday" has resulted in "the new movement": "a"--not "the"--new historicism (4).

On the one hand, McClanan and Encarnacion's anthology is free of this imperative to situate itself within a dominant disciplinary narrative; on the other hand, it lacks a certain coherence that collections which share an engagement with old and new movements, and with particular historical periods, often can claim. The editors have selected essays that range from late antiquity to the early modern period in an attempt to "draw the historical and cultural contours of the medieval world in a way that would cohere historically and culturally, but at the same time would allow for examination of those threads of continuity and difference weaving their way through this period" (5). This is a laudable goal, but one that the vast temporal and thematic scope of the essays does not adequately support. The collection begins with a piece by Janet Huskinson on representations of women on late antique Roman sarcophagi and ends with an essay by Helmut Puff on the sodomite's clothing in early modern Germany and Switzerland. Although both topics fall under the wide umbrella of "sex, procreation, and marriage," the essays do not complement one another as effectively as they might--in part because of the anthology's topical and geographical breadth, but also because (to cite the editors) as "social conditions change historically, so do the definitions of sex, procreation, and marriage" (3).

The threads of continuity and difference that the editors hope to weave do appear when one reads Geraldine Johnson's piece on early modern Marian reliefs in conjunction with Katharine Park's analysis of an Italian holy woman's bodily production of relics and Charlene Villasenor Black's piece on images of the lactating Virgin in early modern Spain. But the chronological organization of the collection and its broadly conceived thematic scope at times tangle those threads. All of the authors deftly raise questions about gender, sexuality, and social hierarchies at different points in time and in different places, and readers interested in material culture will learn a lot from the expertise of each scholar. Read as a group, however, these wide-ranging essays do not generate the kind of sustained dialogue with each other that an anthology ideally encourages.

CAROLINE BICKS

Boston College