Literature and Society in Renaissance Crete.

Renaissance Quarterly might better have chosen a literary scholar to review this work, but, as Holton confesses, knowledge of texts in Cretan dialect is confined to a small circle of experts - perhaps not much wider than the eight international contributors included in this volume. As a historian, I found the book not only up to high scholarly standards, but quite interesting.

The volume has ten chapters. The first three are on "The Cretan Renaissance," "The historical and social context," and "The literary antecedents." There follow six chapters on various genres of literature. At the end is a chapter on "Literature and popular culture."

Holton defines the Cretan Renaissance as the period from about 1350 to 1669, when Cretan culture received the Italian Renaissance, flowing almost entirely through Venice, which claimed dominion over the island from 1204 to 1669. As in the case of the painter El Greco, Italian and Cretan strains merged, the basic Cretan element being dominant also in literature, thus creating a distinctive Cretan literary language.

Venetian families, branches of which settled in Crete, and rotating Venetian officials provided the channels for Italian Renaissance literature. Marinos Falieros, heir of the Cretan branch of the noble Venetian Falier, borrowed themes from Western literature, especially from Leonardo Giustinian, as Arnold Van Gemert notes. Berghadis's (Bragadin's) Apokopos, an underworld dialogue, is the masterpiece.

The best of the pastoral literature was Giorgos Chortatsis's Panoria. The three extant comedies are all based on the classics, hinge on a long-lost child, and produce much of their humor through stock characters, which, however, do not have stock names, as in the commedie dell'arte. Marriage is also a common theme, and Vincent's balanced view of consensual marriage and parental arrangement deserves commendation, in spite of many scholars who see these as inevitably in conflict. Of the three extant tragedies, by far the best known is Chortatsis's Erofili. The ubiquitous Chortatsis also wrote the best interludes. Bakker's chapter on "religious drama," focussing on The Sacrifice of Abraham, is fascinating, probably because of the inherent drama of this horrible Old Testament tale. Despite this Biblical theme, Cretan drama had no antecedents in church pageants, as did religious drama in the West. The anonymous author improves upon his Italian model, which offers Abraham as a topos, by presenting the patriarch as a tormented human being faced with a terrible choice and by conflict with his wife and servants. (See also the final chapter.) Is there a finer theme for drama than the choice between obedience to God and the life of one's only beloved son (or daughter, as in Euripides' Iphigeneia)? An especially imaginative playwright might give us a version in which Abraham chose for his son to live. Finally, there is only one extant romance, the Erotokritos of Vikentzos Komaros (Vicenzo Cornaro). Holton's analysis of plot and character (even minor characters) is the most thorough in the volume.

The final chapter on "Literature and popular culture" concentrates upon The Apokopos and The Sacrifice of Abraham. I like Alexiou's observation that similarities between works can be due to parallel and interacting developments, rather than to borrowing.

There probably is not a large market for a book on this subject outside of Crete - or maybe Greece - but I enjoyed it, profited from it, and recommend it.

DONALD E. QUELLER University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign