Michael Witmore. Culture of Accidents: Unexpected Knowledges in Early Modern England.

Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001. xii + 224 pp. bibl. index. $55. ISBN: 0-8047-3556-5.

Michael Witmore's Culture of Accidents examines a number of prominent New Historicist themes from a new but not wholly unprecedented perspective. Drawing on this school's typical concern with the interaction of theater, spectacle, and wonder in late Renaissance culture, Witmore shows how Calvinist theology intensified the providential or "anagogic" wonder surrounding unexpected or unusual phenomena at the same time that early modern science intensified speculation into their natural or secondary causes. Because the "new" Calvinist God is an active participant or "playwright" rather than a passive spectator of his universe, he now scripts fortuitous and/or tragic accidents as blessings upon the elect or warnings to the wavering Christian. In response, the Calvinist believer actively searches these "wonders taken for signs," as his final chapter rightly calls them, for personal, spiritual, sectarian, and/or national significance without "superstitiously" ruling out naturalistic explanations of their causes. Witmore's introductory chapters skillfully trace this new preoccupation with accident to the demise of the "old" or Aristotelian view incorporated into scholastic theology, which strikingly differs from Reformed theology in regarding unexpected coincidences as meaningless conjunctions produced by independently occurring, natural chains of events.

Although obliquely indebted to the standard Weberian account of Protestant mentalite, Witmore is far from adopting its methodology. Predictably practicing the "genealogical" approach favored by "interpretive historicists," as he terms them, his investigation of this mentulite is much more analogical than analytic. This is unfortunate, since it prevents him from posing the kinds of questions ordinarily asked by interpreters of historical change. Thus when he mentions the biblical understanding of miracle as part of the new configuration, he never stops to distinguish between distinctly Protestant and earlier interpretations of divine "signs" or to consider how accident shades into miracle in Protestant conversion narratives or "prophecies." These kinds of omissions occur at every level of the study, including its central discussions of literary change. For instance while noting the positive role given to fictional accident in Aristotle's newly influential Poetics, he does not show how it influences or interacts with Protestant theology in Jacobean tragedy in general or even in Hamlet, a play taking up an entire chapter of the book.

Both chapters on Shakespeare (including one on The Comedy of Errors) are also seriously weakened by a network of textual analogy so dense that thematic concerns all but drop out. They not only fail to make any real contribution to our understanding of providential wonder, but after some initial (and extremely tedious) forays into tropology, fall back on the New Historicist cliche of identifying the theatrical with the "disciplinary," or Foucauldian, subject. The playwright then predictably becomes the God/king or theatrical "judge" working through the wondrous powers of theatrical interruption and Derridean reconjunction. Needless to say, this approach does little to explain the specifically Calvinist coloring of the stage metaphor of human life or distinguish it from its earlier incarnation(s) in classical drama. Fortunately, however, Witmore's chapter on the role of accident in the new philosophy of Francis Bacon is much more imaginative and well adapted to his theme. Although not wholly original, his discussion of Bacon's contribution to the transformation of Aristotle is cogent and informative, especially for literary scholars unduly persuaded by Horkheimer and Adorno (Dialectic of Enlightment) or Carolyn Merchant (The Death of Nature) that his only contribution is the invention of instrumental or imperialist certitude. Instead, Bacon rightly emerges as a thinker highly attentive to error, accident, and uncertainty in constructing "Learned experience" as a form of experimental or probable truth. But once again, Witmore's characteristic avoidance of comparison and contrast leaves us wondering how this positive naturalistic treatment of unexpected events supports and/or conflicts with their position in the Calvinist tradition.

This failure to deliver the kind of analysis seemingly intrinsic to a project ostensibly aimed at showing how the older binary oppositions between essence and accident, truth and fiction, certainty and probability converge and reemerge in new seventeenth-century shapes is an especially serious flaw in a book offering little in the way of literary insight or finesse. Eventually, it causes its purported themes to emerge as mere window-dressing in a study less truly concerned with history than with story--with the ways in which Reformed subjects flame life- and nature-altering events. While this is obviously a legitimate subject in itself, a more frankly and clearly framed exploration would shed more genuine light on how events like the Blackfriars Accident of 1623 (the subject of its concluding chapter) illustrate a mentalite still much too murky in the end.

CATHERINE GIMELLI MARTIN

The University of Memphis