The Production of English Renaissance Culture.

All except one of the essays in this volume were originally presented at a literary conference called wisemens threasure in 1990. The decision to publish them was well-founded; the essays form an exceptionally strong collection. The debate they generated in their initial presentation is occasionally recorded in the notes, and their strengths and provocations should be evident even in my terse summaries.

Several of the essays impressively pursue cross-disciplinary investigations or challenge disciplinary protocols and assumptions. In "Agons of the Manor," Christopher Kendrick locates Marvell's "Upon Appleton House" and two land division reform proposals, one part of a project of scientific (Baconian) reform and another associated with the Digger occupation of common lands, in the context of historiographical debates about the revolutionary status of the English Civil War. He argues that all three can be understood as revolutionary documents insofar as they articulate a decisive shift in agrarian property relations to a distinctively capitalist mode. In "State, Church, and the Disestablishment of Magic," Richard Lachman, a sociologist, argues that the prevailing approaches to understanding the persecution of witches do not address causal questions or the disparate distribution and intensity of the efforts to suppress witchcraft and magic. He offers a model in which conflict between factions of the ruling elite (Crown, magnates, gentry, high clergy) differentially inflects each faction's perception of a threat from magical practices and their disposition and capacity to instigate persecution. Joseph Loewenstein's essay, "Legal Proofs and Corrected Readings," alternates between discussions of the royalist press, the legal prosecution of printers and publishers of oppositional tracts, the trade practices revealed by that prosecution, and the rise of Anglo-American bibliography. He demonstrates the dispersal of productive agency across industrial and textual sites and the reactive efforts of both Crown censorship and bibliographic practice to eliminate the implications of that dispersal by locating individual agent-authors. Francis Barker's essay examines the opposition Titus Andronicus constructs between the civilized and the barbaric that identifies "culture" with civilization and violence with barbarism. The play's spectacular violence, he argues, works to occlude the legitimated violence exercised in the name of civilization. Taking his cue from a brief scene in which a clown is summarily sentenced to death by hanging, Barker pursues the evidence of "ordinary" violence - that which, like the clown's execution, happens offstage and outside of representation - in the assize records of death by hanging, torture, or prison conditions. Scholars who have worked with the assize records are in a better position than I to comment on his use of them. Suffice it to say that Barker unsettles any easy recuperation of "positive" cultural value for the Shakespearean text. The unrepresented violence, present in the clown scene "under erasure," is, Barker argues, the violence of culture.

Other essays offer exemplary work within more conventional disciplinary modes. Richard Halpern's thoughtful essay on The Tempest juxtaposes Gonzalo's utopian rhetoric and the humanist operations that appropriate, repress and finally erase non-Western influence to the mestizoization embodied in Caliban and his desire to "people the isle." "White cannibalism" substitutes a New World socio-cultural thematics for the egalitarian visions of the European laboring classes and then abstracts a utopian politics from both, producing a "picture of Nobody." In her considered and thorough essay, Margaret Ferguson lays out the multiple narratives in which Aphra Behn's Oroonoko and The Widow Ranter participate. The miscegenous romances in each text, she argues, negotiate the contradictions in which Behn is implicated, producing a "partially critical" perspective that allows sympathetic representation of American Indians and African slaves while at the same time exploiting their images and making their deaths seem inevitable. Clark Hulse's fine essay on the cult of Thomas More traces the effects of the Reformation on the symbolic and material practices of saintly veneration by contrasting the transactions publicly enacted or represented at the shrine of Thomas Becket with the private reproduction and circulation of More's portraits and the preservation of his relics. Bruce Boehrer's contribution, "Bestial Buggery in A Midsummer Night's Dream," argues that the bestiality in the play and other texts functions to produce an unstable justification of patriarchal authority, always threatened by its dependence on the Other(s) onto whom that bestiality has been projected. The volume concludes with Gordon Teskey's essay, "Allegory, Materialism, Violence," a careful exegesis of the philosophical and poetic working out of the rift between matter and form. The gendering of a feminine matter and masculine form in philosophical discourse underwrites the practice of allegory, which must find a way to sublate matter into form. Typically, allegory transforms the gendered conflict between form and matter into personifications, abstractions whose feminine gender conceals the process of sublation and especially its violence. Teskey identifies a "poetics of capture" at work behind personification. Great poets, he argues, expose the violence of capture, and sometimes, as in Dante's figuration of Francesca da Rimini, resistance to the forced imposition of meaning - the rift at the center of the allegorical project.

The editors of the volume eschew the label "new historicist," preferring instead "cultural studies" or "cultural criticism." The change in label is meant to suggest a commitment to greater theoretical rigor, but it also obscures the ways in which most of the essays are doing precisely the kind of work, if in a revisionary mode, that has been called "new historicist." Halpern, for example, calls attention in a note to the corrective he is offering to his own previous work (in The Poetics of Primitive Accumulation). A more complex and telling example emerges from the decision to print an edited version of Barker's essay, a recension that omits an extended critique of the use and implications of cultural anthropology in new historicist work. Considerations of space and balance no doubt played a part in the decision (in The Culture of Violence the full essay runs to more than sixty pages), but the effect of the omissions is to underscore a tacit refusal to engage the controversies of "the new historicism." On the one hand, such a refusal permits the editors to frame questions in an admirably clear and unpolemical fashion. On the other, what emerges by virtue of such a refusal is a neo-Arnoldian problematic that emphasizes the importance of the work that "literary intellectuals" do in addressing questions of culture. Stripped of its engagement with the specific work of the last decade, Barker's challenge to the pieties of cultural value becomes, for the editors, an unviable opposite to Gordon Teskey's valorization of a high poetic tradition that acknowledges the violence of its complicity in constructing metaphysical systems. The opposition between Barker and Teskey - between a deliberate radical posturing and a deep conservatism - rehearses contradictory tendencies lately gathered under the rubric "new historicism." I say this neither to make Barker a new historicist nor to claim a privilege for the new historicism, but rather to insist that a change of rubric does not dispel the complex historicity of discursive formations. The challenge these essays offer is at once familiar and reinvigorated, a challenge to think critically about the diverse tendencies of the work we do and want to do.

ALEXANDRA HALASZ Dartmouth College