Writing and Vulnerability in the Late Renaissance.

Tylus' title - especially the word "vulnerability" - and premise - that roughly from 1550 to 1660 European writers experienced a transition in their relation to the institutions which simultaneously confer authority and entail vulnerability - might lead one to expect a history-of-an-idea or an account of residual and emergent cultural formations. Such an initial impression, however, would be inaccurate. Tylus' bolder move is to locate within the tropes of "invulnerability" and the "shade" lent by patronage a connection between those ambivalent or contestatory relations and epistemological issues of authority, audience and (by extension if not equation) authorship.

Tylus organizes the book generically and chronologically. She begins with autobiographers (Benvenuto Cellini and Teresa of Avila), turns to pastoral-cum-epic poets (Tasso and Spenser), and concludes with tragicomic dramatists (Shakespeare and Corneille). Alternatively, the book could be said to discuss in turn a goldsmith, a mystic, a poet, a civil servant, an impresario/entrepreneur, and a dramatist. These alternative occupations are important in her discussion insofar as they make evident (1) the tension between vulnerability to and dependence upon institutional support, (2) the ways each of the writers represents some form of collectivity or community as an alternative to institutional authority, and implicitly (3) the ways those communities made possible the emergence of the author-figure as artistic laborer.

This thesis works well in the opening chapter discussing Cellini's desire to maintain what might be called a gift economy (pure patronage) over a market exchange. It is also especially effective in discussing Tasso's and Corneille's changing relations to the absolute authority (in both monarchical and epistemological terms). It is less effective in the ambitious chapter on Teresa of Avila. Tylus' analysis is significant in its insistence on the importance of Teresa's community of female readers; her analysis of Teresa's desire to cast her autobiography as a means to validate women's mystic experiences is trenchant. Unfortunately, the chapter gives little discussion of the reception of her texts among the very readers it was meant for. It does, however, highlight the importance of female subjectivity to Tylus' larger argument. Indeed, much of her analyses hinges upon female characters: the silence of Tasso's Erminia and Corneille's Chimene as strategies of resistance; Cellini's and Spenser's (more complex) distrust of female generativity and valorization of male collectivity; Paulina, through whom Shakespeare constitutes both onstage and in the audience a community of witnesses, each member of which potentially becomes an unruly actor resistive to royal authority.

Here the importance of symptomatic reading is especially evident: the works analogize conditions of production, the characters analogize projects of accommodation or resistance. In this respect, Tylus' methodology remains informed by new historicist work while arguing against what she sees as new historicism's overemphasis on the omnipresence of power-as-containment. This argument is largely carried out in her extensive footnotes, which is probably right for this issue. As for her treatment of the "emergence" of the author and the tricky question of subjectivity (especially female subjectivity), more direct engagement might have brought these issues to greater prominence, since they subtend, for Tylus and for the writers she discusses, the overarching trope of umbrageous vulnerability.

Space precludes a more detailed discussion of any single chapter - indeed, each is remarkable for pursuing both the specifics of the thesis and an often subtle and always suggestive reading of the texts. Both the details and the scope are noteworthy, and if they leave work to be done, that is a mark of the generative success of this book.

MAX W. THOMAS University of Iowa