Pastoral Conventions: Poetry, Language, and Thought in Seventeenth-Century Nuremberg.

Newman's overarching concern in this highly original and richly complex work is ultimately less the culture of seventeenth-century Nuremberg than the construction and power of institutions, broadly understood, and, more narrowly, of the power of texts to make and to confine history by functioning as institutions and as constitutive of institutions. She takes issue with new historicists who, she says, despite their disclaimers use texts as means of access to issues of power and politics in an ontologically prior history; she counters with a theory of texts themselves as instituting and institutionalizing story, thus according them a primary status and recognizing their power. The texts of a group of seventeenth-century Nuremberg poets - exemplary in part because the comparative absence in them of a thematized historical background renders them unsuitable as means of access to that background - allow Newman to explore how textual institutions function: on the one hand, they arise and respond to particular moments, often nonetheless making claims to inclusivity and universality; on the other, existing over time by virtue of their nature as written records, they obscure the contingency of their origins and gain a transcendent, exclusionary, and potentially oppressive authority. In her final chapter, Newman uses her insights into the functioning of institutions, and particularly the interplay in them of convention, community, and meaning, to take on the vastly larger, implicitly feminist and multi-culturalist task of arguing that even those theorists of interpretation who claim to keep interpretation democratically open by recognizing its contingency (she refers to Richard Rorty, Stanley Fish, and David Bleich) create excluding mechanisms by implicitly claiming universality for their pragmatist approach itself and by privileging a notion of community, a notion (Newman cites Elizabeth Meese) that can exist only by positing the existence of excluded nonmembers. In closing, Newman argues for a return to the text as the only guarantor of plurality and openness: "because the text is always objectively other than its reception (as well as its origin), it cannot be locked or coopted into coinciding with any particular reception, interpretation, or collective stance" (260).

Newman's work potentially addresses many audiences; she and the press have striven to make it generally accessible by consistently citing the German texts in (Newman's) English translation. The various audiences will nonetheless face difficulties that are, however, worth surmounting. Some traditional scholars of the German baroque will bridle at the heavy doses of literary theory, but will find a reward in Newman's non-condescending attitude to texts often disqualified as minor and manneristic; by taking them and their project seriously, she is able to evaluate them on their own terms and to demonstrate how and why their nature is fundamentally different from the Renaissance and Enlightenment texts that too often provide the standards for their evaluation. It will probably not be only non-Germanists who bog down in three middle chapters of the book where Newman analyzes at length and in (too) much detail the function of the text as institution on the basis of three sorts of works produced by the "Pegnitz-Schafer": language theory tomes, works of poetics, and pastorals. The thrust of her argument is each time the same, and by the time one gets to the analysis of the third set of texts one knows how the story will turn out. A repetitive, turgid style here (in contrast to the lucidity and dynamism of the theoretical chapters) does not help matters. Each of these three chapters, nonetheless, has its inherent interest, and students of language theory, Renaissance poetics, and the pastoral respectively will find much of value in them. In sum, the interest and importance of Newman's work vastly outweigh its flaws, and it should provoke fruitful discussion within and across many disciplines.