Mapping Mortality: The Persistence of Memory and Melancholy in Early Modern England.

This book gathers several strands of early modern literary studies. Frances Yates on memory systems is present. With Praz and Colie, Engel directs emblems toward a "Renaissance metaphorics" (3). His aim is to define "the emblematic mentalite current during Shakespeare's day"; to interrogate that mentalite by "historicizing the metaphorical component of Renaissance symbolic processes"; and to argue that "Renaissance metaphorics was essentially mnemonic and emblematic" (3). The structure of emblems, in picture and text, discloses important themes of body and soul, and these themes indicate the process of mortality. Mortality coils tightly within all literary structures, for Renaissance metaphorics enacts and reveals "the death of the body (figured as a kind of vehicle) and the eternity of the soul (as that which is to be transported)" (3). Melancholy persists because revelations of mortality appear within both literal and literary bodies. We are always already dying, and since cultural formations map that decay, we always confront melancholy designs in what we already are and read.

An intricate argument develops in five chapters that consider variously pictorial space after Giotto, Milton's "Death" (PL 2), Montaigne's kidney-stones, Cervantes's theatricality of death, and Sir Thomas Browne's urns and lozenges. One might well find these selections somewhat puzzling, since the book's subtitle indicates early modern England, and these gathered authors suggest older views of "the Renaissance" as an international phenomenon occurring in Italy, England, France, Spain. Moreover, because mentalite is introduced possessively as "Shakespeare's day," it is surprising that there is no sustained discussion of his plays and only bare citation of Hamlet, which one might anticipate as a privileged map for this territory. But there are other oddities: certain chapter titles couple early modern and postmodern figures: Milton and Derrida (2), Cervantes and Baudrillard (4), Browne and Heidegger (5). It may be that Engel intends a rounding off in theory of all modernity, early and late (but without Bakhtin?). If so, the argument needs to be explicitly theorized and, given this book's emphases, historicized.

Engel is a clever thinker whose ideas continually return upon themselves and this project. He is concerned with representations of what cannot be represented, with frames, framing, and the breaking of frames, with memories of past and future margins (54-57). One is never entirely certain whether an omission or an inclusion is on or off the point. During "Shakespeare's day," almost no Shakespeare? Are those plays Braudel's scorned events? Among the chapter couplings there appears "Montaigne and Florio," a French author of subjectivities paired with an Italian-Protestant-Oxford contemporary who Englished the Essais. Is this an eccentric parallel to the other titles? a crafty symbol of the Renaissance (or the professor) inside early modern England? or what? There is a gamesmanship to this book that is almost always amusing.

The chapter on Montaigne is deeply satisfying. It performs many of the complex tracings Engel promises. It follows its title author carefully and with considerable show of skill and wit, drawing together a number of articles Engel has already published on Montaigne. Happily, the final chapter on Browne and on doublings between Hydriotaphia and The Garden of Cyrus is equally fine, not least because the curious juxtaposition of Browne and Heidegger works wonderfully to the Norwich doctor's favor. Who would sport in the shades with "Being-toward-death" while this native vehicle of time and transport is at hand: "The Huntsmen are up in America, and they are already past their first sleep in Persia. But who can be drowsie at that howr which freed us from everlasting sleep?" Melancholy persists, alas. Engel's quotation sentences Browhe's American and Persia to an urn of elision (226).

MICHAEL HOLAHAN Southern Methodist University