The Reinvention of Love: Poetry, Politics, and Culture from Sidney to Milton.

Low's book argues that with the increasing secularization of England in the seventeenth century, writers like Donne reinvented love, transforming it "from something essentially social and feudal to something essentially private and modern" (33). As is clear from his Sidney chapter and from his conclusion, to Low "love" and "desire" are not synonymous. Modern love is "idealized, Romantic, mutual, and transcendent in feeling" (3); it is also, in Low's reading, perhaps fading in the face of the postmodern politics of desire. Hence "modern" here should be taken as indicating a continuum not between the seventeenth century and the present, but between Donne's marriage and, say, 1968.

The Bible - and, in particular, a verse from Genesis - underlies what Low understands to be a central phenomenon of the modern. He sees modern love to intersect with the idea and practice of companionate marriage; both of these evolve out of a "system of biblical metaphors" itself springing from and encapsulated by Genesis 2:24: "Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh." Low's study stresses this verse and the "intricate system of imagery," ideology, and practices which derived from it: what he cans "the biblical marriage trope."

With a few exceptions, the chapters of this study that focus on Donne and his successors explore "the biblical marriage trope" in both secular and religious writing - primarily poetry. (Sidney is used to demonstrate the prevalence of neo-feudal desire in the Petrarchan mode.) The exceptions come when Low tries to read love in literature "sideways"; reading, for example, Donne's love poetry alongside "New-Scientific method," and Carew alongside some obscure pamphlets on agricultural reform published a decade or more after Carew's death. That the critical bibliography for this New Science turns out to be a single article (albeit a good one) by Marjorie Nicolson, and that the background for the agricultural pamphlets is Low's own The Georgic Revolution, suggests that little new research supports this text's readings. Similarly, Rosemond Tuve (Essays by Rosemond Tuve) looms large behind the Herbert chapter here, as does John Halkett (Milton and the Idea of Matrimony) with much of the Milton material.

Perhaps the most provocative aspect of this study is its exploration of the gender of three poetic speakers in relation to the biblical marriage trope. Briefly put, Low proposes that Donne was too masculine a personality to change easily his secular love to a sacred one (which would involve a Song-of-Songs-like surrender to God); that Herbert was so interested in his absent father that he "substitutes another relationship, that of parent and child . . . [resulting in] an influential unsexing of sacred verse" (3-4); and that Crashaw was a poet of "willing 'femininity'" who "revels in assuming the role of the Bride, which the marriage trope necessarily imposes on poets who employ it" (4).

Because they are not new, Low's generalizations about Milton and companionate marriage in the final chapters here are the least interesting part of this study. This book, advertising itself as concerned with love in the period from Sidney to Milton, passes over or only alludes to the following, among others: Marlowe, Jonson, Shakespeare, drama, formal anti-Petrarchanist poetry, friendship, "bourgeois" love, and documentary evidence (e.g., letters, diaries, court cases). Such omissions take their toll. It is hard not to feel that this book should have been an essay. As such, it undoubtedly would be more widely read, discussed, and quoted.

Douglas Bruster UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO