Medusa's Gaze: Casuistry and Conscience in the Renaissance.

The ostensible subject of this study is Elizabeth I's attempts to avoid direct responsibility for the trial and execution of Mary Queen of Scots. These attempts are discussed first as historical event, then as reflected in Book Five of The Faerie Queene. The thesis binding these discussions is the argument that present in Elizabeth's evasive rhetoric as well as in Spenser's allegorical recreation of the "Scots case" is a conflict between two principles of conscience as they were understood in the late Renaissance. On the one hand, there is synterisis, the grounding of conscience in ultimate principles of moral choice, and on the other, there is conscientia, which must make such choices in situations where concrete factors blur moral principle and its application.

I say the above constitutes the book's "ostensible subject," because the author is interested in such matters only insofar as they offer a pretext for developing two other topics: the politics of morality; and the morality of politics. This book, in short, employs a modified deconstruction in the service of a new historicist thesis.

The fact that neither dimension is alluded to explicitly is only one of several examples of the author's espousing assumptions that he either does not articulate, or articulates as if they were (to use his own phrases) "authorless" texts claiming ultimate, unquestionable authority. The result is a study heavy on "scandalous insights" (254) into the self-serving strategies by which those in power "misrecognize" their power's grounding in specific historical circumstances. In other words, Gallagher has come to tell us, yet once again, that political power is derived not from timeless metaphysical or theological origins, but from configurations of specific historical circumstances.

The dialectic of synterisis and conscientia is likewise a pretext for setting forth some of the standard new historicist assumptions. Thus, the (fictitious) "authorless" text of power through which established hegemonies justify themselves, is posed against "contextualized" readings that problematize this text by uncovering the biases which it occludes.

Unfortunately, there is hardly a new historicist analytical tool for unmasking power's evasions that the evasions of Gallagher's own text is not vulnerable to. Perhaps the most revealing example lies in "my [Gallagher's] premise,... [which] is that the prospect of acquiring not only political but also psychological and spiritual power (the sense of 'being in the right') furnished a sustaining motive to suppress, or to 'misrecognize,' the arbitrariness of one's own orthodoxy as well as one's secret complicity in the legitimation of reigning structures of power" (12).

This admission is revealing in several directions. For one, it indicates that the real subject of new historicist writing of the witchhunting, scapegoating type practiced by Gallagher (a kind of "Gotcha!" scholarship) is neither "historical context," nor the "negotiations" between context and text, but its own need to achieve "spiritual power" by "being in the right." For if one probes this study for the "interests" of its author, one discovers behind its rhetorical "occlusions," and its "pose" that its Hobbesian premises are in fact "authorless" and therefore beyond question, it is just this will to be in the right that one finds at its center.

What many new historicists (in this, like academic feminists) find the need to be in the right about is not so much the immorality of power--and it is always immoral--as rather power's dirty little secret: the pretense that power is not "socially constructed" but something "essentialized" (two terms derived from feminist scholarship, whose aptness in the present context is not surprising). Thus what begins as an essay on the politics of morality ends up being just another hectoring diatribe on the (im)morality of politics.

And so, the above passage is revealing in another direction. It seems to take being a member of a university humanities department to be continually surprised (and, of course, morally outraged) by the discovery that political power clothes itself in various rhetorical guises. Plato had said as much. And it takes the particular skewed vision of a new historicist to believe that someone as canny as Elizabeth I "misrecognized" what she was doing in her speeches to Parliament on the subject of the Scots Queen.

But it takes an unusually naive parochialism to believe, as Gallagher asserts throughout this book, that people like Queen Elizabeth are driven to use evasive rhetoric mainly because they feel the need "to be in the right"! That particular assertion, a common one implicit in much new historicist scholarship, is also unsurprising, because new historicism has labored long and mightily to make the Renaissance the repository of its own bad conscience.