Renaissance Culture and the Everyday & Renaissance Configurations: Voices, Bodies, Spaces 1580-1690.

Patricia Fumerton and Simon Hunt, eds., Renaissance Culture and the Everyday

Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999. vi + 367 pp. $45.00 (cl), $19.95 (pbk). ISBN: 0-8122-3454-5 (ci), 0-8122-1663-6 (pbk).

Gordon McMullan, ed., Renaissance Configurations: Voices, Bodies, Spaces 1580-1690

London: Macmillan, 1998. xxiii + 263 pp. $59.95. ISBN: 0-312-21348-4.

In her introduction to this excellent (and lavishly illustrated) collection, Patricia Fumerton situates Renaissance Culture and the Everyday as "a new new historicism," distinguished from the old new historicism by its shift of attention from national or courtly politics to "the common person, the marginalized, women" (5). All of the fifteen essays are good.

Challenging the assumption that Renaissance fascination with mirrors signals a newly self-reflective subjectivity, Debora Shuger shows that the object viewed in a Renaissance mirror "is almost never the self," and that representations of mirrors "ignore the viewer's subject-position"; she concludes that the self reflected from Renaissance mirrors was "distinctly not modern" (22, 27). My only quibble with Karen Raber's fine essay on the political implications of William Cavendish's book on dressage is that her statement "the methods Cavendish's texts describe and advocate inadvertently endow his horses with will, agency, and character" (43) implies that in fact horses lack these attributes. Anyone who has dealt with these creatures knows (sometimes to her cost) that they possess plenty of will and agency, and also strongly individualized personalities.

Providing a fascinating glimpse of life in early modern Florentine nunneries, historian Judith Brown assembles demographic information which reveals (contrary to received opinion) that "the nuns of Florence lived longer than did the patrician women of Milan, the bourgeois women of Geneva, the women of the English aristocracy, and those of all the ruling families of Europe.... They fared better than the best nourished and the most privileged women in Europe" (131). Brown's multifaceted explanation for the nuns' longevity is persuasive except that it does not really explain why these nuns lived longer than did Florentine monks. Also dealing with Florentine history is Stephanie Jed's experimental effort to situate her own historical labors in a history of organizing and reclassifying knowledge of historical events; Jed explores how women's place in history has been obscured by systems which classify knowledge.

Don Wayne does a "new economic" analysis of Jonson's Staple of News; Patricia Fumerton gives us a Deleuzian/Guattarian reading of Jonson's stage dialects as alternative languages. Shannon Miller shows Mary Wroth struggling to represent female subjectivity by "expressing the interiority of women through the external object" (145) especially the architectural structure. Richard Helgerson teases out, from from such everyday activities as laundering, a power struggle between courtly and local culture in The Merry Wives of Windsor. Lena Orlin, in a fascinating survey of sewing scenes in plays, uncovers a trope paradoxically valuing personal invisibility -- for men as for women. Frances Dolan explores the sanctioning of female violence toward domestic servants and other subordinates. The puzzling gentility of a Dutch painting representing a transaction between a mercenary soldier and a prostitute, Ann Jensen Adams argues, is a response to anxieties about the instability of the marketplace. Richard Corum invites us to reconsider the common belief that the ending of Love's Labors Lost is non-comedic: he argues that the four couples are only pretending to courtship, and really want not to marry; in an age when marriage was being deferred and adolescence prolonged, these adolescents seek to evade the law of the father. Simon Hunt attributes to the influence of censorship the fact that the drama renders toothless some insurrectionists like Jack Cade, by making them comic. And Juliet Fleming breaks new ground with a thought-provoking essay on Renaissance graffiti and wall-painting.

Complementing Fumerron's mainly American essay collection is Gordon McMullan's very British collection, with contributors from England, Ireland, and Scotland. The first three essays complement each other nicely. James Knowles writes on structures of closeting in Marlowe's plays, as related to issues of secrecy, surveillance, and interiority, with particularly illuminating remarks on royal closets and what was signified politically by access to them -- "proximity was power" (11) -- and on the dynamic of professionalism and friendship animating the position of secretary. Sasha Roberts peeks into the early modern women's closet, where she discovers women reading The Rape of Lucrece, a possibly aphrodisiac activity, their privacy enguarded by "an extraordinary range" of available anti-theft devices, including "false keyholes,...coats of arms covering the real lock mechanism -- even steel jaws with the power to amputate the thief's fingers, pistols aimed to fire at the thief, or devices designed to shoot a sudden blast of pepper at the unsuspecting intruder" (53), which ought to have left any woman reader feeling safe to enjoy the stallion scene in peace. Helen Hackett, in an essay sorting well with Shannon Miller's essay in the Fumerton/Hunt collection, writes of Mary Wroth that "Pamphilia can seem like a case study in the relationship between private architectural space and the enabling of psychological interiority," and goes on to argue that "Wroth makes it abundantly clear that Pamphilia is to be understood as a melancholic" and that "the established association of melancholy with secrecy and privacy rendered it a legitimating mode for writing by a woman" (64-69).

In a richly detailed essay on the Renaissance representation of Sappho, Michael Pincombe establishes that for most of the sixteenth century Sappho was an exemplar of transgressive hetero-erotic desire. Kate Chedgzoy writes of the possibility of cultural relativism in seventeenth-century discussions of heauty and racial difference. Gordon MeMullan writes on same-sex desire and literary collaboration in The Two Noble Kinsmen -- an essay that could have profited from reference to Jeffrey Masten's Textual Intercourse. Amanda Piesse grapples rather unpersuasively with some huge generalizations about differences in subjectivity between the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods ("viewed in the framework of lrigarayan theory, it is easy to see that the self-representation favoured by Elizabeth is a feminine one, multiple, open to interpretation, flexible, undefined, whilst the control and release principle which informs the Jacobean hegemony is masculine" (154). Mark Thornton Burnett sets The Dutch Courtesan in political and theatrical contexts of 1604, with much topical specificity

The collection closes with three strong essays on women writers. Noting that contemporaries including Donne and Jonson seemed genuinely to admire Mary Sidney's translation of the Psalms while modern feminists dismiss them as derivative translations and find dispiriting their lack of opposition to patriarchy, Suzanne Trill voices what I think is an important concern: that "in seeking 'oppositional' writing, we distort the picture of women's literary history and run the risk of marginalising significant literary texts by women" (198). Challenging the assumption "that translation is a 'marginal' and 'feminine' activity," Trill reminds us that "translation was central to the Renaissance and it formed a significant part of men's education"; further, "the psalms were regarded as a crucial discourse for the construction of Christian subjectivity during this period" (199). (She might, though, have considered Valerie Wayne's point that men, unlike women, were actively encouraged to go beyond translation eventually.) Persuading students (or ourselves) to choose Sidney's translated psalms as pleasure reading might be difficult; but Trill's important point remains: what we value in womens writing from the past can be very far from what they valued in their own writing, and we merely court frustration when our political agenda demands that we look for what is seldom to be found.

Susan J. Wiseman writes fascinatingly on the "semi-subjective voice of echo" in Renaissance poems, which "can become another personality, even a disorderly personality, inhabiting the poem"; in cases of female echoes of male poetic voices, echo achieves what Renaissance women so often tried to negotiate: "the power of a female voice to reply while claiming silence" (221, 230). And Ros Ballaster writes of Margaret Cavendish and Katherine Philips, who as Royalist sympathizers wished for the restoration of the monarchy, but "as women . . . had experienced new agency and power in the Civil War and Commonwealth years," and wanted to keep it (234).

Both of these collections brim with useful and thought-provoking essays, and make good additions to one's Renaissance library.