Place and Displacement in the Renaissance.

The twelve essays collected in this volume were originally presented at the CEMERS 25th Annual Conference in 1991 on Place and Displacement in the Renaissance. Divided into sections on theater, popular culture and pictorial representation, the conference proceedings indicate the extent to which Renaissance studies today have become an interdisciplinary endeavor. Editor Alvin Vos provides a useful introduction that discusses the group's theoretical framework and summarizes the essays' contents (with the curious omission of Michael Schwartz's piece). For the most part, the authors investigate their subjects using new historicist and interdisciplinary methodologies. Scholars familiar with well established cultural historical paradigms may find some of the essays predictable; other readers may not have the tolerance for the authors' theoretical jargon. Nevertheless, the collection as a whole contains many fine, critically sophisticated readings of little known texts, such as Crystal Bartolovich's treatment of Aaron Rathborne's The Surveyor and Evelyn B. Tribble on Thomas Deloney's Jacke of Newberie. New and perceptive readings of the familiar, such as Leslie C. Dunn on Shakespeare's I Henry IV, Annabel Patterson on Holinshed's Chronicles, and Randolph Starn on Mantegna's Camera Picta, are equally rewarding.

An emphasis on gender, popular culture and ideology unite many of these wide-ranging studies. They are linked as well by the authors' shared belief that "imaginary constructions of place, of interlocking political, social and conceptual roles and realms, were among the great realities of Renaissance culture" (207), to quote one author. The focus on place and displacement is explained by the editor: unlike the oversimplified binary models of order/disorder and subversion/containment, "that of place/displacement modulates and complicates the easy antitheses predicated within the other two, even while it continues to supply a framework within which to analyze the disruptions and anxieties within the cultural fabric that press themselves upon our attention at this moment in Renaissance studies" (xi). The authors' use of this framework is far from uniform, which is often a source of pleasurable surprise to the reader, but at times the notion of place becomes too loosely or abstractly employed, which is clearly a danger inherent in a theoretical approach that ambiguously spatializes social and discursive practices.

The essays in the first section treat the theater as both displaced in society and a force of displacement itself, particularly in the representation of women's place on stage. Jean Howard opens the section with an analysis of antitheatrical tracts, which she treats as "ideological productions designed to master or to mask contradictions in the social and economic life of the culture in which they were produced" (2). The ground Howard covers may seem familiar to many who have read the new historicists' extensive research on antitheatrical tracts, but the essay serves an important function here by clearly setting the agenda for the group's investigations of gender, transgressive sexuality, and anxiety implicit in the struggle for social place both on- and offstage. Particularly rewarding is Dunn's essay which convincingly illustrates how the brief moments in Shakespearean theater when female characters sing signal their displacement from the patriarchal order. Eric A. Nicholson and Lindsay Davis both conduct lively analyses of comedies that follow Howard's views of the stage as a place of struggle.

Not surprisingly, the second section devoted to popular culture is particularly strong, in no small part due to Patterson's excellent essay on Holinshed's Chronicles, which she reads as an example of Elizabethan historiography that employs "local knowledge" to convey popular sentiment. As one of the foremost cultural historians, Patterson presents the reader with meticulous research and "thick descriptions" of texts that reflect the methodological approach of Clifford Geertz. The essays that follow Patterson's examine the linguistic world of popular publications. David Underdown's highly informative analysis of the royalist paper The Man in the Moon and other non-canonical material is especially useful and interesting.

The last section on pictorial representation marks a notable shift in the volume's focus. In a positive sense, the final four essays open the interdisciplinary doors wider to include visual culture in the analysis of social displacement, which further complicates the meanings lodged in the concept of place. But in a more troubling light, the appearance of three essays on Italian painting in a volume essentially devoted to early modern England is a bit jarring and lacks integration with the rest of the collection. Valuable in and of itself, Elizabeth Cropper's study on beauty in the High Renaissance and its displacement in art history asks the reader to travel too long a distance from the English stage and popular culture, especially without the editor having first acknowledged new cultural signposts along the way. The two other essays on Italian painting, seemingly displaced in this volume, are equally valuable, one offering theoretical propositions about the placement of Renaissance images, the other on the placement of the beholder. The final essay takes the reader back to England with Bartolovich's unevenly written but highly suggestive analysis of sixteenth-century surveying. According to Bartolovich, surveying was part of the new scientific production of orderly space which resulted in major social displacement.

On the whole, these essays make for engaging and instructive reading and would be of greatest interest to early modern popular culture enthusiasts and theoreticians.

MARGUERITE A. TASSI Middlebury College