Time's Purples Masquers: Stars and the Afterlife in Renaissance English Literature.

Alastair Fowler. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996. viii + 171 pp. $52. ISBN: n.a.

Alastair Fowler's erudite new book explores Renaissance concepts of fame and immortality. Countering the narratives of rupture and discontinuity which underpin much New Historicist scholarship and seeking to emphasize the importance of religion in Renaissance culture, Fowler contends that "it cannot be appropriate to describe the Renaissance as a secular movement, or as a decentralization" (9). By examining Renaissance writers' preoccupation with stellification - an individual's posthumous translation to the stars - Fowler seeks to demonstrate that "far from 'displacing' religion, early science extended it" (11). Rather than annihilating the medieval world-picture, Fowler maintains, post-Copernican astronomy actually complemented traditional beliefs in complex ways.

In his first chapter, Fowler outlines the "creative chaos of Renaissance astronomy" (36). Although ultimately resulting in what Thomas Kuhn famously categorized as a paradigm change, the new astronomy, Fowler argues, did not precipitate an "immediate revolution of ideas" (35). The interaction of myriad hypotheses, variously combining both Ptolemaic and heliocentric theories, made the acceptance of Copernican astronomy less a revolution than a very slow, incremental process. Although John Donne complained that the "new philosophy calls all in doubt," Fowler argues that "enthusiasm and excitement" were more characteristic responses to the Renaissance controversies about planetary systems (57), and he provides a swirl of far-ranging examples - stellar images found in heraldry, architecture, the visual arts, masques, and poetry - to indicate the cultural importance of "the mysterious Renaissance passion for astronomy" (48).

Fowler next examines the Renaissance belief in stellification. Fowler argues that we should not regard sixteenth- and seventeenth-century allusions to a stellar afterlife as merely figurative. Drawing upon Hermetic and Pythagorean-Platonic lines of thought, Renaissance Christians hoped to attain "the spiritual body of Pauline theology by ascent to the incorruptible (or less corrupted) stars" (77). In this context, "the new astronomy suggested exciting possibilities for the afterlife" (69), as the discovery of new stars, lunar mountains, and sunspots revealed the cosmos to be both larger and more mutable than previously thought. If the stars were indeed more numerous and more accessible, then "ordinary people, not just emperors, might partake of stellar substance and find niches among the stars" (70).

The final two chapters of the book depart from Fowler's initial focus on developments in scientific thought to examine more generally medieval and Renaissance concepts of fame and images of stellification. Fowler casts his net wide: he discusses Chaucer's The House of Fame; analyzes Spenser's Panthea (a crystal tower mentioned in The Faerie Queene) and Renaissance "lantern houses" as symbols of immortality; enumerates images of the stellified King Arthur; considers the astronomical imagery of Carew's masque Coelum Britannicum; surveys the conflict between fame and virtue in writers such as Montaigne and Milton; and remarks on the symbolism of funerary pyramids and obelisks. The book concludes with a brief lamentation for our own secular, scientific world-view which "tends to exclude, or explain away, or simply ignore, religious experience and hopes of resurrection" (126). As I watch my own university wrestle with a shrinking budget for library acquisitions, I instead tend to lament Oxford University Press's decision to ignore the economic realities of contemporary academic experience and charge $52.00 - 30 cents per page - for Professor Fowler's richly detailed study.

MARJORIE SWANN University of Kansas