Valeria Finucci and Kevin Brownlee, eds. Generation and Degeneration: Tropes of Reproduction in Literature and History from Antiquity Through Early Modern Europe.

Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2001. vii + 327 pp. index. $64.95 (cl), $21.95 (pbk). ISBN: 0-8223- 2655-8 (cl), 0-8223-2644-2 (pbk).

This volume of essays by some of the most innovative and challenging scholars working on literature and history today examines the cultural constructions of generation and degeneration across the premodern period and in the process analyzes a number of powerful discourses that have shaped perceptions of gender, religion, literature, medicine, the body and sex, and the way life was led in the past. Given the volume's emphasis on genealogy as a way of thinking about history it is not surprising that the lineage of these essays regularly goes back to father figures like Foucault, Lacan, Freud, and ultimately Nietzsche, although this is perhaps somewhat ironic given its innovative feminist cast.

It should be noted, however, that while genealogical and generational metaphors are ubiquitous, the volume actually seems more concerned with the history of gender, sex, and the body and perhaps will be most interesting for scholars working in those areas. Essays also tend to fall into two categories: some are more historical or literary, others focus more on the theoretical debates that make contemporary studies of gender, sex, and the body so exciting and contested. The volume opens with an exemplary essay by Elizabeth Clark that combines intellectual with medical and gender history to look at the debate between Augustine and the Pelagian polemicist Julian of Eclanum. What might seem like a technical theological debate becomes a fascinating study of the crucial issues that were involved in arguing that God was the father of Christ, that Christ's birth was a virgin one, and that Mary was conceived without original sin. Two things stand out in this essay: first the way in which the broader cultural context--in this case medical and sexual--played a crucial role in forming philosophical and theological arguments; second, and less consciously-argued perhaps, the way that even sex in the premodern period had an important spiritual component. The first, of course, is a powerful argument for rethinking intellectual history from a cultural perspective, especially recognizing that a broader analysis of a specific historical moment is crucial for understanding the genealogy of ideas. The second suggests how important the spiritual dimension of sex could be in the premodern world: original sin being seen as a spiritual inheritance that was implicit in "normal" sex and procreation and a crucial distinction being made between the male contributing the spiritual form to a child and the female contributing only the matter. This deep spirit/matter tension that underlay the Augustinian and ultimately Christian view of not just generation, but sex itself, warrants further study and returns suggestively in a number of other essays.

In fact, it returns immediately in Valeria Finucci's essay on maternal imagination and monstrous births. Finucci uses the birth of a white daughter, Clorinda, to Ethiopian parents in Tasso's Gerusalemme Liberata as a focus for a broader examination of beliefs about how maternal imagination could form and deform a child and also suggests an intriguing rereading of one of the famous scenes in literature, the tragic death of Clorinda in the Liberata. Clorinda's "somatic monstrosity"--a white child born to black parents--Tasso portrayed as the result of her mother having kept a picture of St. George which she looked at longingly all through her pregnancy. Spiritual desire changed the black matter of her child into the white flesh of Clorinda. Again this was not a view limited to literature; it reflected contemporary medical and popular beliefs that held that a mother's desires could play a role in forming a child and could cause the birth of monsters. With an analysis that melds literature, history, and psychoanalysis Finucci examines the complex genealogy of a discourse that allowed medical thinkers to claim that females contributed only matter to their offspring, yet through their wishful thinking were responsible for deformities, even when men alone provided the form! Finucci does a fine job of making sense of the perverse illogic of this logic.

The next section of the book focuses on boundaries of the body and its sexuality. Dale Martin opens with a discussion of what he sees as two deep contradictions in the Roman vision of sex and the body: first that men were only men when they were sexually active and impregnated women, yet they were more masculine and stronger when they "avoided sex"; second, that menstruation was female, yet men also menstruated without any loss of masculinity. Foucault-like, Martin sees the contradictions in such discourses creating a contested ground that made "masculinity something that often required the care of a physician and the regimen of science ..." and allowed the upper classes to retain control of "masculinity and keep it out of the hands of those who did not deserve it" (107). Gianna Pomata takes Martin's interest in menstruating men into the early modern period in an important essay that argues against the one-sex model advanced by Thomas Laqueur and suggests that especially in the case of menstruation medical thinkers were at times actually capable of seeing the functioning of the female body as superior. One can hardly do justice to all the ideas and issues that Pomata takes on in this wide-ranging essay, but her reevaluation of the significance of menstruation in the early modern period is a tour-de-force that suggests just how important the history of the body can be for rethinking the past. Valerie Traub's article on the "psychomorphology" of the clitoris and the cultural construction of Tribadism in English society in the early modern period reviews her arguments made more fully elsewhere about the way female homoeroticism was reconstructed as a negative form of sex, focusing on a critique of recent historical scholarship on lesbianism. Traub seems to have qualifications to make on virtually everyone who has written on the subject including Freud, Foucault, Laqueur, Lillian Faderman, Ornella Mosucci, Felicity Nussbaum, Terry Castle, and especially Luce Irigaray--but her arguments have weight, especially when she is attacking the present-mindedness of many who write on the history of sex.

In the section on female genealogies that follows, Marina Brownlee looks at the way the seventeenth-century Spanish writer Maria de Zayas used her short stories and her own constructed persona as a writer to undermine "colonial discourses" of race, blood purity, and gender. Labeled as the tenth muse by contemporaries, she seems to have been viewed as a neutered being as a writer; a writer who in Brownlee's eyes denied traditional family and gender roles for women and adapted the tabloid writing style of the period to her own radical purposes. Maureen Quilligan provides a microstudy of Queen Elizabeth I's translation of Margaret de Navarre's religious poem Le Miroir de l'ame pecheresse, tracing its changing status as Elizabeth developed from a young girl with little chance of success in the competition for royal power to become first an insecure Queen and then the virtually unquestioned Queen Mother of England. The incestuous rhetoric of the poem that played on the spiritual incest of the soul's love for God the Father, Quilligan sees as central in Elizabeth's developing self-portrayal as child, sister, spouse, and eventually virgin mother of England itself.

In the final section of the book Nancy Siraisi examines a Renaissance controversy about scientific genealogy: the claim that medicine originated in ancient Egypt rather than in Greece. Especially powerful at the University of Padua, the drive to assert Egyptian origins fit well with new Renaissance enthusiasms for Egyptian primacy in culture and especially magical knowledge and seemed to offer practical possibilities for new cures based on Egyptian pharmacology. Siraisi notes that this enthusiasm fit well with the trade interests of Venice, a plus given that the university was the premiere university of the Venetian state. But the movement failed in the end in part due to the stronger textual tradition of Greek medicine and in part due to attacks by medical writers who felt that Egyptian medicine was too intertwined with increasingly disreputable studies like alchemy and magic. Kevin Brownlee takes the genealogical search for origins back to an earlier period in Italy, looking at how the Italian authors Bruno Latini, Durante, and Dante suppressed their French predecessors and instead focused on ancient Roman authors as the fathers of their own literary efforts. Replacing a French genealogy with a Roman one, Brownlee argues, was crucial for the construction ofa re-naissance Italian literature and helped make these writers the fathers of that literature, and he implies suggestively that this new genealogy might also be a significant moment in the generation of a myth of Italian cultural leadership in the Renaissance. The final essay of the volume returns to the close relationship between the spiritual and material dimensions of the body with Peter Stallybrass looking at the way ghosts in Renaissance English plays, especially in Shakespeare's Hamlet, continued to materialize the underlying realities of genealogy especially in regards to aristocratic identities and patriarchal authority. Stallybrass plays with the ambiguity of portraying King Hamlet's ghost wearing armor which at once suggests that the status and power of the father continued even after death--his armor literally representing the continuity of family status, duty, and tradition, but that same armor suggested that patriarchy and genealogy were not eternal--as it could be transferred from body to body and would ultimately rust away.

In fact, this volume is a suggestive example of how the old, male genealogies of history have changed dramatically. In a way the armor of the ghosts of the past have been passed on and now, side-by-side with fascinating discussions of Renaissance literature, Renaissance medicine, or early Christian theology, we have equally fascinating discussions of menstruating men, the psychomorphology of the clitoris, and maternal imagination and monstrous births. Clearly not everyone will be content with the essays of these new fathers and mothers of history, but as the Renaissance "heretic" Saccardino advised the Inquisition, "the dovecote has opened its eyes," and genealogies are changing in exciting and controversial ways.

GUIDO RUGGIERO

The University of Miami