The Culture of Capital: Property, Cities, and Knowledge in Early Modern England.

Henry S. Turner, ed. The Culture of Capital: Property, Cities, and Knowledge in Early Modern England.

New York and London: Routledge, 2002. Pbk. x + 304 pp. + 1 b/w pl. index. illus. $25.95. ISBN: 0-415-92925-3.

Nearly a century and half has passed since Jacob Burckhardt told us that Renaissance Italy first saw the time when the subjective side of man asserted itself, and "man became a spiritual individual, and recognized himself as such." What began in Italy soon spread through the rest of Europe, and "the development of the individual" has ever since been the defining theme of all work on what we now call Early Modern Europe. In Burckhardtian terms, the individual defined himself (for such an individual was commonly male) by throwing off the restrictive powers of abstract forces such as the church and the state by refusing any longer to see himself as part of a general category such as a race or party or corporation. Though often attacked, this paradigm has been particularly long-lived, in part because it was flexible enough--with the aid of an epicycle or two--to encompass even such novel structures as Stephen Greenblatt's Renaissance Self-Fashioning and its many avatars. In the last decade, however, the Burckhardtian system and its derivatives have come under renewed attack. If the collection of essays entitled Subject and Object in Renaissance Culture (ed. Margreta de Grazia, Maureen Quilligan, and Peter Stallybrass (1996) may be said to have inaugurated this onslaught on Burckhardt, The Culture of Capital has the merit of advancing the argument still further.

In the introductory matter to The Culture of Capital, Henry Turner notes that the book will use the objects of material culture to provide a path into the history of the era. The objects in question turn out to be discursive constructions, centering around the conception of capital (not capitalism), and we discover that Foucault will have to share with Marx the role of superintending deity. The book, then, will discuss "the discursive history of capital in England during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries" (4), concentrating its attention on three domains: economic capital, which will include production, markets, and conceptions of property; topographic capital, involving the formation of urban communities, here meaning mainly London; and cultural capital, that is, the uses of knowledge for purposes of social and personal gain. In practice, this means that the collection is divided into three sections, each with an introduction that raises appropriate theoretical concerns and discusses the ensuing papers. These three prefatory statements, by Martha C. Howell, Vanessa Harding, and John Guillory, go far beyond the usual conference commentary; they are worth reading for their own sake, not merely as appetizers.

Within the first of these domains are articles by Robert DuPlessis on how "capital" became a keyword, by Lena Orlin on the dangers of reading probate inventories as if they were transparent evocations of past lives, and--with quite startling originality--by Henry Turner on how the word "plot" became central to drama and to surveying, and what this tells us about spatial perceptions in both realms. The section on London opens with an article by David Harris Sacks intended to clear the ground, in large part by dismantling the Brenner Thesis. The second article, by Jean Howard on part 2 of Thomas Heywood's If You Know Not Me You Know Nobody, demonstrates how Heywood constructs London nobility by following John Stow in emphasizing those Londoners who contributed to the city by way of charity, but also counterpoints Stow by turning Thomas Gresham into a symbol of city pride and risk-taking; and this is followed by Chloe Wheatley's piece on John Stow's smaller chronicles, showing how he increasingly organizes these small books around the idea of charitable giving. Karen Newman's quite splendid reading of John Donne's "Satyre I" as a walkabout in a real London, and not merely as a reenactment of Horace, concludes the section. The third domain, concerning culture, seems to me to be too various for optimum coherence. Jonathan Goldberg connects Miranda's speech reproaching Caliban to the concept of race and the ability to write, while Denise Albanese demonstrates how the social uses of mathematics, the way in which putting mathematics down on paper, shifted the subject from the artisanal to the humanist. Peter Stallybrass's rather brief concluding essay, on value and price, on Christianity and economics, and a myriad of other things besides, shoots off sparks in all directions, and thus demonstrates that the approach inaugurated by the book has a considerable future.

No such collection of essays attains perfection. The papers by Sacks and Orlin, useful in themselves, fit awkwardly into the general theme; Wheatley's paper, while it makes a useful point, contains too many errors and neglects to ask enough questions about Stow's religiosity or about the markets at which his chronicles were aiming. In a few instances, the authors indulged themselves in language more obfuscatory than helpful. Nevertheless, these are minor criticisms of a book so carefully and intelligently organized and so successful in leading the reader willingly down hitherto unfamiliar pathways.

FRITZ LEVY

University of Washington