Communicating with the Spirits (review)

Reviewed by: Bewitched and Bedeviled: A Cognitive Approach to Embodiment in Early English Possession by Kirsten C. Uszkalo Patrick J. Murray KEYWORDS Patrick J. Murray, K. Uszkalo, possession, embodied religion, English Christianity, Early Modern Christianity, demonic possession, demonology, demons, witchcraft, English witchcraft, Early Modern witchcraft, demonology kirsten c. uszkalo. Bewitched and Bedeviled: A Cognitive Approach to Embodiment in Early English Possession. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. Pp. 264. The study of bedeviling and its attendant literature offers a unique insight into the world of possession in early modern culture. As Kirsten C. Uszkalo [End Page 268] writes in the opening chapter to this new book Bewitched and Bedeviled: A Cognitive Approach to Embodiment in Early English Possession, "As we read our own literature, fiction and nonfiction, as reflecting something of the human condition, in describing the demoniac's language, gestures, and torments, possession literatures provide insight into 'real' experiences that underpin early modern possessions" (1). Consequently, by interrogating what possession meant for Renaissance thinkers and writers, we gain insight into not only those deemed "bedeviled," but also, more profoundly, an understanding of their ostensibly clearheaded contemporaries. The performance and recording of possessions, and the subsequent dissemination of "possession literature" was a minor, but nonetheless substantial field of early modern literary production. According to Uszkalo there were approximately 133 people recorded as being possessed between 1564 and 1699, out of a total of 621 "victims of witchcraft in early modern English texts counted so far" (3). Within this, the corpus varied dramatically in genre—some were ephemeral accounts, others depositions, while many of the most well known (such as that of Charity Philipot in 1681) were extended narratives, containing details such as current medical case histories. Uszkalo guides us through this body of work, attempting to synthesize recent findings in neuroscience with theoretical paradigms of sociocultural discourse and practice to help elucidate our understanding of what possession meant for the tumultuous age of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England. "This project," the author writes, "couples close reading with the use of concepts from cognitive science and discoveries from neuroscience as interpretive tools useful to interrogate various stages of possession" (3). Always, however, Uszkalo is mindful of the very real human experience at the heart of the literature—"[t]he experience [of possession]," she correctly notes, "is embodied, not transcendent; it is a situated event" (7). Direct consideration of both theoretical and actual environments are at the forefront of the book. Analyzing the experiential accounts of figures such as the aforementioned Philipot, Mary Hall, and Joyce Dovey, Uszkalo attempts to interpret the discourses at play within the social dynamic between the possessed and the recorder. Beginning appropriately with how possession was first diagnosed in a patient, Bewitched and Bedeviled shows how symptoms were deemed psychological as well as physiological—convulsions and glossolalia, rage, and ulcers were deemed as signifying preternatural influence. In addition to this broad scope of manifestation, causes were similarly multiple. While physiological theory made its interventions, the dominant debate of the period—which centered on these symptoms' religious meaning—held sway. "Reformation [End Page 269] ideas of election and reprobation meant that no 'good works' one did on earth would change the state of one's soul in the afterlife," Uszkalo informs us, and thus, "damnation was a thread that tied the bewitched and bedeviled together" (7). Fear of inescapable hell understandably drove some—such as Joan Drake (who swallowed pins) and Hannah Allen (who entombed herself beneath the floorboards of her attic)—to seemingly possessed behaviors. If Chapter 1 provides a survey of the types of possession recorded, Chapter 2 sketches out how they were interpreted and understood in their own time. Here Uszkalo touches upon the seminal ideas of early modern theoretical approaches developed by the likes of Helkiah Crooke, Thomas Adams, and John Downame. Furthermore, in keeping with her attempt to comprehend and diagnose the underlying causes of possessive behaviors, Uszkalo pays particular attention not only to contemporaneous medicinal textbooks such as Crooke's Microcosmographia (1616), but also late-twentieth- and early-twentyfirst-century approaches to possession literature. Citing the important work of Diane Purkiss and Nathan Johnstone, Uszkalo shows how historians of medicine, sociology...

Reviewed by: Exorcism and Its Texts: Subjectivity in Early Modern Literature of England and Spain Barbara H. Traister (bio) Exorcism and Its Texts: Subjectivity in Early Modern Literature of England and Spain. By Hilaire Kallendorf. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003. xxi + 327 pp. $65.00. Hilaire Kallendorf has written a surprising study of early modern exorcism; it surprises by its definition and choice of exorcism texts, by its rigorous exclusion of exorcism associated with witchcraft, and by the structuralist model of analysis Kallendorf has chosen. Due in large part to these surprises, her book offers a refreshing—if often unorthodox—approach to a subject [End Page 356] that is currently under discussion by literary and historical scholars such as Nancy Caciola, Sarah Ferber, and Philip C. Almond. Because she writes about only literary texts from early modern England and Spain, Kallendorf does not deal with historical exorcism narratives. Neither does she treat literary texts in which witches incite or summon demons to pursue their enemies; Kallendorf considers these to be witchcraft rather than exorcism stories. She does, however, draw on a wide range of literary genres: dramatic comedy, satire, romance, saints' plays, dramatic tragedy, and the novel (i.e., Don Quixote). Thus, most of the texts she discusses are not those ordinarily treated in studies of exorcism. In fact, the texts might be called possession texts rather than exorcism texts because in some, particularly the tragedies, exorcism appears only in its failure or absence: "Most commonly, exorcism is absent from tragedy; when it does appear there, it fails. . . . Demonic possession resonates through the genre of tragedy, but the hope for an ultimate exorcism is forever raised and then dashed to pieces. It is the nature of the tragic experience that exorcism cannot succeed" (14–15). Working from a model derived from Lévi-Strauss, Kallendorf isolates a number of theologemes ("constitutive units of myths bearing theological content" (9)) found in a representative group of literary texts about demonic possession and exorcism. She explains that "which aspects of the exorcism experience are highlighted or emphasized usually depends on which genre the writer is working within" (9). Using this structuralist approach she charts the frequency of occurrence of eleven theologemes (for example, "the demon's entrance into the body" and "relics, holy water, and other props") in twenty-seven literary texts (xxi). This method allows Kallendorf to demonstrate (as scholars like Walter Cohen have done in other contexts) the close affinities between the literatures of England and Spain in the early modern period. Particularly notable is her conclusion that exorcism in many of the tragic texts provides an explanation for otherwise inexplicable evil. The demon becomes a scapegoat for the villain's evil, for only one possessed by an evil spirit could perform such cruelties as, for example, the husband in A Yorkshire Tragedy. In other genres, Kallendorf argues, the exorcism ritual is humanized as exorcists use rhetoric and logic to battle indwelling demons, and their appeal as texts stems largely from the struggle and ultimate victory of the exorcists. In all Kallendorf's analyses, genre is the most important variable, and her conclusions are nearly all genre specific. Perhaps the volume's most important point arises from one of the theologemes: Kallendorf argues, too sporadically given the broad presence she claims for this theologeme, that in more than two-thirds of the texts she [End Page 357] cites exorcism is a synedoche for purifying and curing the body politic. If true, this suggests a more integral relationship between church and state in the literature of both England and Spain than we are used to granting. Indeed, Kallendorf defends the presence of the "Christian legitimate marvelous" in this period, arguing that "exorcism and its texts, be they of whatever genre, are powerful testaments to the beliefs of some early modern writers in the existence of angels and demons" (198). In places, Kallendorf's analyses of her proof texts remind the reader of the mid-twentieth-century textual exegesis of scholars like Irving Ribner, Joseph Summers and Roy Battenhouse. But Kallendorf assembles her arguments from different materials than the religious allusions and analogues traced by these earlier scholars. Broadly informed by literary...

Gecser, Ottó, József Laszlovszky, Balázs Nagy, Marcell Sebők, Katalin Szende, eds. 2011. Promoting the Saints – Cults and their Contexts from Late Antiquity until the Early Modern Period – Essays in Honor of Gábor Klaniczay for his 60th Birthday. Budapest: Central European University Press. 325 pp. Illus. Reviewed by Kathleen V. Kish, San Diego State University, California

JEMCS Forum:What is Early Modern? Thomas Dipiero and Devoney Looser In an 1890 issue of Modern Language Notes, James Garnett of the University of Virginia protested that scholars deployed the terms "Middle English" and "Early English" too cavalierly when they were discussing the language of Chaucer. Garnett proposed to close the Old English period at 1150 and the Middle English period at 1400, with all subsequent strands of the language falling into the category of Modern English. Recognizing that some scholars might seek out more subtlety in their classifications, he suggested that we call "Early Modern" the English spoken and written between 1400 and 1600 (189). The following year, Henry Sweet made a similar argument, but Sweet stipulated that "Early Modern" English was to be confined to the years 1500-1650 (211). Following the 1890s, many philologists and historians of the English language entered into this debate about how to classify and assign dates to the evolving English tongue. In fact, at the turn of the last century, the term "Early Modern" had some of its most specific meanings to date—if dates are, in fact, an index of specificity—precisely when it referred to phases in the chronological development of English. In that respect, the words "Early Modern" performed a more or less purely sequential function, designating the years preceding and following the point in question as only numerically—and not necessarily historically or culturally—different. More recently, however, we have come to question whether the periods— or even the individual years—that appear simply to follow one another are indeed of the same literary, historical, or cultural valence. We have furthermore [End Page 69] begun to interrogate the meanings of successive years and periods when we compare them across cultures, recognizing the Eurocentrism—and, indeed, the Anglocentrism—that has characterized much reflection on the "Early Modern." Does "Early Modern" refer simply to that which came before modern? Is such a designation always and everywhere valid? Or does "Early Modern" have specific historical—and cultural—valences exceeding its ordinal classification? In their introduction to The Cambridge History of Early Modern English Literature, David Loewenstein and Janel Mueller write that the term "Early Modern" allows them "to explore continuities (as well as differences) between the literature of the 1640s and 1650s and the literature preceding and immediately following it. The result is to challenge and complicate traditional chronological boundaries . . ." (5). For Loewenstein and Mueller, "Early Modern" refers at least in part to a contested zone, one that does not simply link two ostensibly known quantities. But "Early Modern" is not simply about a period of time: Loewenstein and Mueller write that they chose the phrase "Early Modern" over the word "Renaissance" because in their view "the word 'Renaissance' meaning rebirth evokes a world of high or urbane literary culture, often associated with the court, humanism and the great revival of antiquity leading to an emulation of classical models for composition" (6). Loewenstein and Mueller's choice of "Early Modern" over "Renaissance" is a sign of the times, in light of the fact that an increasing number of English departments appear to be using the former to replace the latter, perhaps for the very reasons Loewenstein and Mueller delineate. But how do we understand the term "Early Modern" when it refers to a time and a culture other than post-medieval Britain? Does "Early Modern" indicate a break, or perhaps merely a discontinuity, in historical or cultural chronologies—one that separates us decisively from the past? Or does it refer to a period much like our own, save the fact that its analogous institutions, phenomena, modes of knowing, and interrelationships exist in a less developed form? Could "Early Modern" invoke particular intellectual, economic, philosophic, and aesthetic movements and developments largely unrelated to manifestations of those phenomena in our own time? Our own era—or perhaps better, our current moment—is characterized in large part by far-reaching changes in science and technology, communication, globalization, and world economics, and by new aesthetic forms. The years— perhaps in some cases the many years—following what we conventionally call the medieval period were equally profoundly affected by increased empirical [End Page 70] observation...

Introduction Thomas DiPiero and Devoney Looser This post-1660 issue of the Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies includes, as is customary, several fine essays and book reviews. The issue begins with Ellen R. Welch's "Dancing the Nation: Performing France in the Seventeenth-Century Ballets des nations," which considers a court entertainment in which costumed dancers impersonated stereotypical national types. Welch uses this dance as an occasion to investigate how Frenchness is defined in contrast to foreign national types, showing how the ballet sets the stage for subsequent conversations on nations and nationhood. Gunhild Eriksdotter's "Did the Little Ice Age Affect Indoor Climate and Comfort?: Re-theorizing Climate History and Architecture from the Early Modern Period" considers the understudied confluence of climate history and architecture, taking as its starting point the need for significantly longer heating periods in the "Little Ice Age." Architectural changes during significant periods of cold in Northern Europe, from 1550 to 1730, allow us to investigate ways that status was linked to comfort during the early modern period. Eriksdotter shows why we need to integrate climate history as a dynamic variable in the study of historical buildings and remains. "The Hazards of Expurgation: Adapting Measure for Measure to the Bowdler Family Shakespeare," by Adam H. Kitzes, shows us that "bowdlerizing," at least in the case of this particular play, involved a more complicated editing process than scholars have previously understood. Kitzes looks over several editions of Family Shakespeare in order to document the full extent of the changes made by Bowdler and to speculate further on why they were undertaken. The essay argues that, rather than merely censor Shakespeare, Bowdler sought to reconcile a longing for a perceived oral culture of literary social coteries with an acceptance of the plays as carefully edited printed texts. Following these three essays readers will find a special section made up of brief explorations and position papers. With this issue, we introduce a forum [End Page 1] on "What is Early Modern?" which will continue through several upcoming issues of JEMCS. Of course, the Editors of JEMCS are keenly aware of the ways in which the term "Early Modern" is variously perceived and used, not to mention debated and misunderstood. The very way in which we have conceived of our enterprise as a journal has been informed by a sense of the differences between "early" and "late" early modern. Indeed, for more than eight years, we have divided our contents into pre- and post-1660 issues, an editorial decision that itself raises questions about the label "Early Modern" and its utility in demarking periods and dates, not to mention its national associations. To further scrutinize and consider this term, in the past and in the present moment, we asked a number of scholars from different disciplinary perspectives to consider what "Early Modern" means and has meant to the scholarly enterprise. We are proud to introduce the first fruits of those invitations, in the form of four thoughtful essays by top scholars Mitchell Greenberg, Laura Mandell, Andrew McConnell Stott, and James Thompson. We look forward to continuing this conversation with our readers and in future issues of JEMCS. [End Page 2] Copyright © 2013 JEMCS, Inc.

Reviewed by: Demonic Possession & Lived Religion in Later Medieval Europe by Sari Katajala-Peltomaa Claire Trenery Carrothers Middle Ages, demonic possession, demoniacs, lived religion, gender and possession, blasphemy, intercourse with demons, Fourth Lateran Council sari katajala-peltomaa. Demonic Possession & Lived Religion in Later Medieval Europe. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020. Pp. x + 211. Sari Katajala-Peltomaa's latest monograph investigates some of the most intriguing phenomena of the Middle Ages: the presence of demons in everyday life and their possession of humans. Whilst Katajala-Peltomaa identifies demonic possession as a "spiritual phenomenon" (1), the book is concerned with its physical, mental and—perhaps most particularly—social ramifications. She defines "lived religion" as "a social process, a way to live, interact, and participate in one's community" (2), and she uses this framework to explore demonic possession in terms of the interactions—rather than the polarity—between "individual and collective religious participation" (27). The book's chronological scope runs from the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215 (at which the Devil and demons were defined as creations of God, turned evil by their own doing and capable of tempting humans into sin) to the fifteenth century (when ideas previously associated with demonic possession were increasingly co- opted into the concept of maleficium). Geographically, Katajala- Peltomaa sets up an interesting comparison between northern and southern Europe, which serves to illustrate regional distinctions in understandings of demonic possession. She focuses on Swedish and Italian sources, in which cases of demonic possession are "especially numerous" (24). Beyond being a "theoretical framework" (18) for analysis, the concept of "lived religion" is, for Katajala- Peltomaa, the "methodological tool" (19) that guides her reading of the sources. Each document is a reflection not only of widely held cultural understandings of demonic possession but of the specific community that brought about its creation: both monastic or clerical communities that constructed the written records and lay communities that witnessed the actions of demons and testified to their effects. Thus, "careful contextualization" (24) of the source material is crucial. Katajala- Peltomaa's main source base is records made at canonization hearings for prospective saints of miracles they were believed to have performed. Her close attention to context does not mean that she is unable to observe patterns across her sources, but she uses her analysis of the nuances to call for a "critical evaluation of the concept of 'medieval Europe' [as a] single, coherent entity" (27). The chapters are organised thematically based on stages of communal interaction with demons: from causes of demonic interference; to identification of the possessed; to communal responses to demoniacs; and finally, to wider societal and cultural discussions. The first chapter (Chapter 2, since Chapter 1 is an introduction) deals with perceived reasons for demonic possession, with a focus on whether or not the possessed were held responsible [End Page 432] for their affliction. Though not unanimous, the consensus in this period was that sufferers of demonic possession were victims of unfortunate—and often not blameworthy—circumstances. Katajala- Peltomaa sees the "accidental nature of demonic possession" (45) as related to collective but regionally specific anxieties. She illustrates this through a comparison of the environmental conditions associated with demonic possession in northern and southern accounts. For example, in the densely populated Italian city states, the threat of wilderness and forests was connected with demonic activity, whereas, in Nordic accounts, forests, which were a mundane component of daily life for many people, posed only physical threats (such as getting lost or being attacked by wild animals). Chapter 3 takes a closer look at the victims of demonic possession, particularly addressing whether women were seen as both physically and spiritually more vulnerable to demonic attacks than men. Katajala- Peltomaa reads in the accounts of female demoniacs "personal and social anxieties concerning the signposts of physical growth and social maturing" (menstruation, marriage, pregnancy, etc.) (47), but she notes that connections between the female lifecycle and vulnerability to demonic possession were not inevitable and largely came into play "when something went wrong" (47). Demonic possession represented something beyond the norm and necessitated extreme responses from communities, which could include physical restraint. These responses seem to have been practical solutions to the threat...

Reviewed by: The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages by Geraldine Heng Celeste Chamberland The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages. By Geraldine Heng. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. 493 pages. $49.99 (cloth). Categories of race and ethnicity have long elicited heated debate about the complex ways in which structural conditions and differential access to power have shaped identity and social relations in the modern world. While such discussions have shed much light on contemporary racial paradigms, they have focused less on the pre-modern origins of racial thought. Canonical race theory, in particular, has provided crucial insight into the historical connections between systemic racism and cultural perceptions of race, but has typically focused on the construction of race as a modern phenomenon that emerged in tandem with colonial encounters alongside the Spanish Conquest and the Atlantic Slave Trade. While early modern [End Page 196] constructions of race undeniably aligned with practices of plunder and hegemony in the era of colonialism and imperialism, their ancient and medieval origins are generally overlooked by scholars who have typically regarded the category of race as too presentist to appropriately characterize categories of identity prior to the sixteenth century. As Geraldine Heng persuasively asserts in The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages, however, long before the advent of modern constructions of epidermal race, Europeans developed discourses of colonialism as ideological justification for occupying the territories of others and marginalizing Jewish and Muslim communities in their midst. Heng’s masterful analysis traces the nebulous formation of race alongside configurations of power and discourses of difference in medieval Europe. Identifying the development of pre-modern racial disparity and prejudice, as Heng asserts, is not only vital to our understanding of medieval history, but also illuminates contemporary categories of race, since the interplay of the past and the present continues to inform racial thought and the pervasiveness of systemic racism. By providing heretofore widely overlooked historical context through the lens of an innovative multidisciplinary methodological framework, The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages will undoubtedly initiate crucial scholarly discussions about the pre-modern origins of race that will likely be of great interest to medieval scholars and critical race theorists alike. Inasmuch as the construction of pre-modern racial thought reflects the shifting intersections of religious dogma, legal theory, mercantile capitalism, and expressions of cultural belief, The Invention of Race adopts a thematic scheme of organization that effectively underscores the complex processes of othering that unfolded from the twelfth through the fifteenth centuries. As Heng incisively contends, ideas of race in medieval Europe were not only formed as a result of colonial encounters in Africa, Asia, and the Americas, but were also expressed in the cultural treatment of Jews, the conquest of neighboring Christian countries, and anti-Islamic sentiment in the high and late Middle Ages. By focusing on themes [End Page 197] of state, color, empire, slavery, and the European imagination across Europe, Heng’s analysis effectively reflects the complexities of numerous sites and contexts of racial formation. The book, moreover, assesses nascent pre-modern racial thought through the methodological lens of medieval studies and draws theoretical inspiration from an array of disciplines, ranging from Queer Studies to Postcolonial Theory. Rather than merely cataloguing or describing taxonomies of race and ethnicity in medieval Europe, Heng’s aim is to provide new paradigms and an appropriate model with which the notion of pre-modern race can be approached. By considering the construction of race within the context of early Christian Europe, Heng’s brilliant volume not only contributes a sorely needed dimension to the existing scholarship on race, but also sheds light on a central, but long overlooked, component of the socio-cultural history of medieval Europe. In recent years, some medievalists, notably Robert Bartlett and Peter Biller, have addressed the concept of race in medieval Europe, but they have generally focused exclusively on the somatic and biological features of race, such as bloodline, purity, and physiognomy. As Heng ably demonstrates in this shrewd work, however, such narrow focuses overlook the socio-cultural determinants of race in the Middle Ages, particularly religion and concepts of barbarity and civility...

“Wanton loves, and yong desires”: Clandestine Marriage in Marlowe’s Hero and Leander and Chapman’s Continuation Katharine Cleland Christopher Marlowe’s Hero and Leander and George Chapman’s continuation offer commentary on a controversial Elizabethan social practice: clandestine marriage. After the Protestant Reformation, clandestine marriages became more controversial as they violated not only the tradition of arranged marriages in the upper ranks but also the new marriage rituals of the Book of Common Prayer.1 The ecclesiastical courts could punish those who wed secretly but not invalidate their marriages because the marriage vows, not the church ceremony, resulted in a legally binding union.2 The fact that marriages [End Page 215] performed without a church solemnization were transgressive, but not illegal, resulted in confusion over what constituted both a legitimate and a proper match. In light of this controversy, the paradigm of the Hero and Leander myth—a secret courtship and consummation-would have translated in an early modern reader’s imagination into a story about clandestine marriage.3 In his continuation of the myth, Chapman concentrates on the marriage ceremony, confirming that the issues of heterosexual courtship and marriage were originally at stake in Marlowe’s poem. Recent scholarship, however, has been most interested in Marlowe’s exhilarating tour-de-force of young love and sexuality, with particular attention paid to the latent homoeroticism in the description of Leander and in the Neptune episode.4 By neglecting Chapman’s continuation, we neglect an early modern literary conversation that can shed light on Elizabethan marriage practices and the way in which Marlowe’s poetry is likely to have been interpreted in its own day. Whether or not we consider Marlowe’s poem to be a “fragment,” the difference in the style and tone of Chapman’s continuation suggests that he did not finish Marlowe’s Hero and Leander so much as he responded to it.5 [End Page 216] Just as the issues of love and agency are central to most recent criticism, so do they lie at the heart of the early modern discourse on clandestine marriage. Since mutual consent was the only requirement for a match, entering into a clandestine marriage through a handfasting or trothplight gave couples complete freedom in their marital choice.6 Henry Swinburne’s A Treatise of Spousals, or Matrimonial Contracts outlines the meaning and significance of the spousal vows that could accompany a trothplight or handfasting.7 According to Swinburne, such contracts could take the form of de praesenti or de futuro vows. While the de praesenti contract, or vows spoken in the present tense, resulted in a union, the de futuro contract indicated the promise of future marriage.8 The sexual consummation of a betrothal (a de futuro contract) also resulted in a legal union. While the Protestant ideal of companionate marriage might seem to encourage individual freedom when making matches, private spousal contracts (individually, and one might assume, “freely” negotiated) were considered to be motivated by sexual desire rather than mutual love and the common good.9 In an effort to suppress [End Page 217] the practice, spousal vows were eventually absorbed into the public wedding ceremony (as they are today) to help eliminate the possibility of irreversible, and potentially regrettable, clandestine contracts. Complicating the issue further, the formation of spousal contracts did not have to follow a particular formula. A variety of verbal and nonverbal expressions of love could result in, or at least be confused for, a promise of marriage.10 A lack of witnesses and the ambiguity surrounding the practice could make clandestine marriages of any sort difficult to prove in the church courts. In order to assuage the problems associated with early modern marriage, domestic handbooks and marriage pamphlets circulated as a means to instill normative marriage practices and to contain the agency available to couples when making matches.11 During the Elizabethan period, poetry, particularly sonnets, served as a valuable means through which lovers might carry out courtship rituals.12 Marlowe’s evident rejection of the sonnet craze in the 1590s, however, signifies his resistance to the inactive, and thus effeminate, subject position of the Petrarchan lover.13 Edmund Spenser enfolded [End Page 218] the...

Reviewed by: Women and the Divine in Literature before 1700: Essays in Memory of Margot Louis Kirsten Inglis Kathryn Kerby-Fulton, ed. Women and the Divine in Literature before 1700: Essays in Memory of Margot Louis. Victoria: ELS Editions, 2009. 279 pp. As the title indicates, this collection of essays is dedicated to the memory of Margot Louis, a scholar whose primary publication interests were in the field of Victorian literature but whose “first love, and … abiding passion” was for medieval literature (vii). The volume’s dedicatory framework is appealing in its sincerity and its heartfelt tribute to Louis as a scholar and a teacher, with memories of Louis in these capacities infusing the contributions from her colleagues, friends, and former students. As Kathryn Kerby-Fulton [End Page 129] makes clear in an elegant preface to the volume, these essays seek to offer new scholarship that nevertheless captures the particular bent of Louis’s own approach to medieval literature: namely, explorations of “the role of allegory, myth, visionary experience, and the feminine divine in the medieval imagination” (viii). The eleven essays (including the introduction) offer a cohesive critical approach while covering a wide range both temporally and generically. Kerby-Fulton notes that the collection is envisaged for use by scholars and teachers, and indeed the volume would be a useful supplement in classes on visionary and mystical experience in the Middle Ages or on medieval women’s writing more generally. The essays introduce and contextualize their subject matter sufficiently to make them accessible to advanced undergraduate students or non-specialists while concurrently maintaining a level of scholarship that make them attractive for scholarly researchers. Kerby-Fulton’s introductory essay, “Skepticism, Agnosticism and Belief: The Spectrum of Attitudes Toward Vision in Late Medieval England” does the work of introducing the controlling vision of the collection (the reception of women’s divine writings), concisely reviews recent scholarship on medieval reception of visions and visionary experience, and offers an intriguing link between skepticism about visionary experience and religious doubt more generally. Kerby-Fulton argues that women’s visionary experiences were taken seriously by their male redactors with some, like Birgitta of Sweden, being “seriously authorized” by their transmitters and others, like Julian of Norwich (as discussed in Jonathan Juilfs’s contribution to the volume), undergoing a process of containment through “abridgement and revisionist biography” (2). Linda Olson’s exceptional contribution to the volume is concerned with representations of Monica both by her son, St Augustine, in his writings and by later medieval readers. Olson’s essay considers written sources as well as visual representations of Monica and argues that she is depicted in these medieval sources far more frequently than would be suggested by her presence in Augustine’s Confessiones. Monica is an important spiritual leader in her own right, and Olson is justified in hoping that this essay will help to draw her “once again from the enormous filial shadow where scholarship has too frequently and too complacently left her” (42). Thea Todd’s contribution reads Christina of Markyate’s Life in the context of her redactor, who, Todd argues, seems to have revised the Life “in light of much later developments of ecclesiastical thought on marriage” (49). Todd provides a detailed and thoughtful reading of the way in which this author uses dramatic dialogue informed by the thinking of the primary authorities of Church and community (authorities [End Page 130] often in tension with one another) on questions of marriage and consent to present Christina’s Life. As is evident thus far, many of the essays in the volume are concerned with the hagiographic tradition and with the visionary experiences of historical figures. Adrienne Williams Boyarin’s “Sealed Flesh, Book-Skin: How to Read the Female Body in the Early Middle English Seinte Margarete” continues this theme, as do the contributions of Johanne Paquette, who offers a fascinating reading of the Book of Margery Kempe and the marginalia of the text’s red ink annotator, and Jonathan Juilfs, who considers the textual transmission of Julian of Norwich’s Revelation of Love from the mid-fifteenth century Amherst manuscript through its first printed manifestation in Hugh Cressy’s edition of 1670. Not...

Reviewed by: Renaissance Earwitnesses: Rumor and Early Modern Masculinity Jennifer C. Vaught Keith M. Botelho . Renaissance Earwitnesses: Rumor and Early Modern Masculinity. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Pp. xiv + 199. $80.00. In this excellent study of rumor and early modern masculinity, Keith M. Botelho begins by contextualizing Renaissance earwitnessing, or judicious listening, in terms of the importance of discerning truth in our noisy, modern world. In the preface, "Listening in an Age of Truthnapping," he contends that our auditory and visual senses are continually subjected to cell phones, the Internet, radio programs, and the nightly news that spins stories as if they were entertainment. These multiple, rapidly changing sources of news contain unverified information that can generate devastating rumors, a distortion and garbling of the truth distinct from gossip because of their large-scale social and political implications. In the Renaissance, "Rumor or Fama" is "an ambiguously gendered figure" that relentlessly undermines masculine and feminine authority, onstage and off (3). In the introduction, "Buzz, Buzz: Rumor in Early Modern England," Botelho outlines the literary, historical, and theoretical implications of his innovative [End Page 361] argument about earwitnessing in plays by Marlowe, Shakespeare, Jonson, and Cary. Throughout this well-executed, carefully constructed, and witty book, he examines a wide range of texts about rumor and related subjects like cautionary aural discernment. His accessible, detailed analyses of dramatic works are impressive in a project that contributes to existing criticism on sound studies by Bruce Smith, Kenneth Gross, Wes Folkerth, and Gina Bloom (22). He makes an important contribution to early modern scholarship by complicating the restrictive alliance of hearing and its accompanying ideas of "obedience and receptivity" with femininity. Instead, he focuses on dramatists who feature men whose informational authority is based on their earwitnessing when subjected to male rumormongers (3). Despite the vilifying and scapegoating of the tongues of women allied with gossip in Renaissance dramatic works, conduct books, and marriage manuals, Botelho presents the ear as an alternative site of female resistance to their disempowerment in a number of Shakespeare's plays (75). Botelho makes effective use of recent, compelling works on masculinity such as Mark Breitenberg's Anxious Masculinity in Early Modern England, Bruce Smith's Shakespeare and Masculinity, and Jennifer A. Low's Manhood and the Duel: Masculinity in Early Modern Drama and Culture, among others. The study as a whole could benefit from the inclusion of even more theoretical, secondary sources about gender, masculinity, and femininity to further illuminate the large number of plays he discusses. Nevertheless, his historicizing of early modern concepts of masculinity in relation to earwitnessing and rumor is strong. He deals insightfully with Elizabeth I, whom he calls the "paradigmatic earwitness of the period" (23), Francis Bacon, and humanist education theorists such as Juan Luis Vives and Roger Ascham. Though he sometimes blurs the distinctions between literary and historical men and women with respect to earwitnessing, he points out the common link between historia and storia in an early modern age when opposing and alternative interpretations of current events were printed rapidly and distributed widely like pulp fiction (54). In fact, the rise of print culture and relatively high literacy rates in Renaissance England markedly increased one's vulnerability to rumor and gossip (21). He concludes that "perhaps this pastiche of voices—an historical and theatrical babel—becomes a more accurate representation of truth than any one particular account" (54). In chapter 1, "Table Talk: Marlowe's Mouthy Men," Botelho sets the stage by examining the playwright's rumor-filled life and humanist education treatises that emphasize careful discernment. He then analyzes Dido, Queen of Carthage, The Massacre at Paris, and Edward II in terms of male rumormongers and failures of earwitnessing. Botelho concludes that in these plays, "the uncontrolled speech of men" threatens "to undermine and destroy male authority" despite the fact that multiple early modern discourses tend instead to stigmatize women as gossipers [End Page 362] (36). Yet in Dido, Marlowe relies on "gendered binaries" of male "controlled speech" and "silence" and female "raving" (39). Dido reinforces the stereotype of "the woman who attempts to destroy a man's fame with her loose tongue" (39). In Edward II, Queen Isabella...

Reviewed by: Performing the King Divine: The Early Modern Spanish Aulic Festival by Lucas A. Marchante Aragón Alejandra B. Osorio Lucas A. Marchante Aragón. Performing the King Divine: The Early Modern Spanish Aulic Festival. EDITION REICHENBERGER, 2017. 300 PP. THE STUDY OF EARLY MODERN COURTLY CEREMONIES has experienced a significant surge in the last decade or so, revealing their centrality in the public and political cultures of Europe and its empires. These studies have, among other things, identified early modern courts as centers of great artistic production that enriched material and cultural life, while also enhancing the power of their monarchs or princes. Monarchs and nobles often commissioned artistic works from painters, architects, and musicians—as well as writers, historians, poets, and philosophers—for inclusion in courtly plays and ceremonies. As these events conveyed the patrons’ habits, tastes, and worldviews, they shaped early modern societies, delineating the hierarchies that ordered them and those of the more private sphere of the court. The production and staging of royal triumphal entries, masques, ludic games, and plays employed all the arts available to rulers to exercise their authority and instruct wider audiences on the workings of social and political power. In the specific case of court theater, new techniques combining music, dance, architecture, perspective scenery, and sophisticated stage machinery enhanced written texts, producing great works of “magical illusion at the service of the exaltation of the monarch” (6). Performing the King Divine examines these various techniques in Spanish court theater, not just as printed literature but also as dramatic texts that came to life through a “net of communicative strategies, verbal and otherwise, that formed part of the [overall] spectacle” (8). Moving chronologically, Marchante Aragón examines transformations in court theater from the late Middle Ages, during which it conveyed the king’s physical proximity to the divine, to the end of the seventeenth century, when it presented the Spanish Habsburg king Charles II as himself a divine being. In examining this process, the author draws from speech act theory the notion of the “performative utterance.” This approach informs the title of the book, Performing the King Divine; in other words, onstage performances of kingship produced monarchical divinity. [End Page 165] One characteristic of early modern court theater that made these transformations possible was the inclusion of the patron in the audience as part of the spectacle, dissolving the boundaries between the “real” and the “performed” worlds. Such blurring of boundaries conveyed to audiences the special link between the worldly and the divine, as found, for example, in the court dramas created at the turn of the sixteenth century by Juan del Encina and Gil Vicente. Such associations worked within a larger courtly ceremonial language derived both from political thought and from ritual performances aimed at legitimating kingly rule. Under the reign of Charles I (1516–56), as part of the claim to the imperial title that in 1519 made him Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, Habsburg dynastic language came into use in Spanish court theater. According to Marchante Aragón, this language was founded on “fabulous genealogical arguments” (87–95) entrusting the Spanish Habsburg with the “providential mission of restoring the earthly Paradise represented with images of the classical Golden Age” (10). These genealogies connected the emperor with Jesus Christ via the Roman emperors, gods of antiquity, and priest-kings of the Old Testament the Habsburg claimed as their ancestors, ultimately transforming him into the ruler best positioned to bring back the Golden Age. Charles V’s divine descent and genealogical rights along with his inherited virtues were made explicit in plays by means of the use of mythological imagery. Habsburg genealogies and mythological imagery were imbued in larger fields of meaning. The salón de saraos, the theatrical space built circa 1605 in the royal palace in Valladolid, was designed in such a way that its decorative and architectural programs were essential components of the “performative text” (105). The building itself was part of a dynamic creation of meaning, as for Marchante Aragón, this space was intended “to create and fix the memory of a divinely ordained imperial dynasty by displaying a series of symbols in its architecture...

Reviewed by: Engendering Islands: Sexuality, Reproduction, and Violence in the Early French Caribbean by Ashley M. Williard Frederick C. Staidum Jr. Engendering Islands: Sexuality, Reproduction, and Violence in the Early French Caribbean. By Ashley M. Williard. Women and Gender in the Early Modern World. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2021. 312 pages. Cloth, ebook, pdf. Contemporary scholarship often uses intersectionality as a catchall term reducing complex relationships among race, class, gender, sexuality, ability, and more into an oversimplified, additive formula (for example, Black + man + deaf = identity) where the essentialized properties of each social position remain discrete. Kimberlé Crenshaw, who originated the term, however, formulated intersectionality to expose and name the processes by which diverse modes of marginalization and privilege compound and co-constitute each other, creating new and unique configurations of oppression and opportunity—and, by extension, new subjectivities.1 For Atlantic history, this concept indicates that one cannot explicate the histories of colonization, slavery, and race without also chronicling gender and sexuality because modern conceptualizations of race were founded on interpretations of so-called grotesque and abhorrent African and Indigenous reproductive anatomies, sexual behaviors, and family formations. These categories, moreover, were mutually constitutive and interacted in ways that created new forms and contexts of vulnerability and privilege.2 Ashley M. Williard’s Engendering Islands: Sexuality, Reproduction, and Violence in the Early French Caribbean is an important intervention in this conversation as it interrogates the intersections of gender, race, and (dis)ability in the Atlantic world, especially between the early modern French metropole and its Antillean colonies (particularly the understudied Lesser Antilles). Williard focuses on constructions of social positionalities—specifically masculinity and femininity—from 1635 to 1715, the period when the Compagnie des Îles de l’Amérique and later the French state first introduced and then cultivated slavery in the Antilles. Engendering Islands astutely demonstrates how polymorphous constructions of gender, sex, race, and [End Page 192] ability were woven throughout early modern “juridical, religious, and medical discourses” (1) and practices, which in turn upheld and were upheld by seventeenth-century French colonization and slavery. And she argues that the gendered discursive mechanisms of colonization produced new forms of human alterity, including novel racial and ableist categories. Williard builds on important work on the early modern racialization of gender and sexuality by incorporating concepts and practices of ability, disability, and hyper-ability.3 As she shows, colonization and enslavement generated ontologies of (dis)ability through various modes, ranging from public maiming to adjudicating economic value, and from conceiving nonwhite bodies as malformed Europeans to endowing those same bodies with fantasies of pathological sexuality and even supernatural abilities. She thus joins emerging scholarship focused on the meaning and experiences of disability in early modern colonial societies of the Atlantic world, bringing together two trends in disability studies that rarely overlap.4 First, scholarship focusing on early modern Europe has illuminated how ideas of human deformity influenced Renaissance-era and seventeenth-century developments in language, performance, medicine, science, social organization, crime and punishment, and—above all—gender and sexuality.5 Second, scholars have given increasing attention to the impairing violence of slavery in the Americas, explicating the centrality of race to the shaping of marginalizing categories such as “lame,” “dumb,” “backwards,” and “dependent,” which defined through contrast what it meant to be a human, citizen, and modern subject.6 [End Page 193] Though these two areas of inquiry have developed in parallel, Williard cogently sutures this divide while also extending both approaches and linking their narratives. Moreover, she does not assume a linear, one-way evolution of gender, sexuality, race, and (dis)ability. In her account, French gender constructs were not exported as stable forms from the metropole to the colonies, and race was not singularly devised in the colonies and then conveyed to France as a fixed concept. Rather, these categories were entangled in a cyclical exchange of invention, resignification, and repurposing that remade ideas of human difference on both sides of the Atlantic. Williard examines an array of early modern actors, including Indi- genous Kalinago people, members of Catholic religious orders, enslaved Africans, French pirates, indentured servants, colonial administrators, merchants, and planters. In each of the book’s four chapters...

The Nature of Nature in Early Modern Europe Lorraine Daston (bio) Introduction: What Was Modern about the Early Modern? The very term “early modern” implies a historical doctrine of preformationism: whatever characterizes modernity was somehow present in embryo—tiny but recognizable—in the period from circa 1500 to 1789. “Early modern” is as screamingly anachronistic and teleological a label as “the Middle Ages”; yet even a generation of historians trained to revile anachronism and teleology as cardinal sins still clings not only to the letter but also to the spirit of the term. The most provocative recent works of cultural, intellectual, social, economic, and political history locate the origins of the modern state, modern capitalism, the modern mind, the modern individual, and, of course, modern science in this pivotal period. The history of science has long underwritten, and continues to underwrite, the validity of the periodization “early modern” by singling out much the same chronological territory with its own portentous label, “the Scientific Revolution.” Despite upheavals in the recent historiography of the Scientific Revolution, the narrative remains one of mythic origins: the remarkable historical work of the past decade presents, for example, seventeenth-century experiments in a very different light than did James Bryant Conant or Marie Boas Hall, but the old and new studies agree that seventeenth-century experiments were at once a dramatic innovation with respect to all that came before, and the ancestor and model for all that came [End Page 149] after. 1 Even those who, like Bruno Latour, loudly assert that “we have never been modern” take this seventeenth-century moment to be seminal of our characteristic brand of unmodernity. 2 Like the preformationist fantasy of uncountably many human generations nested one within another in the womb of Eve, all that is modern, from secularization to commodity capitalism to scientific experiment, is imagined to lie curled within the fertile and capacious womb of the early modern. 3 Mythologies, especially origin mythologies, are notoriously deep-rooted and resilient. Dispense with them in religion, and they crop up in art: nineteenth-century biblical scholars debunked Genesis, only to embrace Der Ring der Nibelungen. Sigmund Freud’s “return of the repressed” was primarily and literally the return of buried mythologies—Oedipus, Jocasta, and company. Myths are tenacious because they defy the too-simple logic of true versus false. They are typically false in all their details, and true in their essences. I cherish no illusions about the efficacy of empirical counterexamples, or rational argument, or even ridicule to loosen the hold of such mythologies on the collective imagination of historians. Rather, I want to examine the most powerful variant of the myth of the early modern pregnant with the modern, the variant that has elevated the Scientific Revolution to epoch-making significance not only in the narratives of the history of science, but also in the grander (and usually gloomier) narratives of cultural critics, from Max Weber to Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer to Michel Foucault. This is the myth of the disenchantment of nature, here summarized in bare-bones version. Sometime between the mid-sixteenth and the mid-eighteenth centuries, so runs the myth, nature lost its soul. No longer animated [End Page 150] nor active, nature was reduced to brute, passive, stupid matter. The Scientific Revolution transformed creative nature into a machine, blindly obedient to cause and effect. But as nature’s IQ plummeted, its authority soared. Nature replaced God as the ultimate basis for legitimation: natural law warranted the social and political orders, natural desires justified the expansion and deregulation of commerce, natural theology proved the existence and benevolence of the deity. Mythologists in this tradition resolve the apparent paradox of nature’s simultaneous fall and rise by pointing to the cultural logic of naturalization. Nature’s authority in hotly contested social and political matters such as the subordination of wives to husbands or the subordination of subjects to monarchs or the subordination of infidels to established religion depends on the claim that nature is a neutral party to such strife. And what is more neutral than a stupid machine? The very enslavement of nature to a metaphysics of regularity, necessity, and uniformity recommended it...

The Horse and the Holy Man, and: Winged Hussars, and: God the Condor, and: Mothers, and: 1963 Sandra Alcosser (bio) the horse and the holy man Spirit is not in the I, but between I and thou. It is not like the blood that circulates in you, but like the air in which you breathe. Martin Buber The stable shadows indigo as the boy strokesThe neck of his beloved that coatsHis hand with a must of sweat and leatherThe dappled gray leans into the pressureWhile the boy in the red riding habit poursPeppery oats into a mangerThen large teeth with small scratches from grazingBegin to chew inside its sensitive lips What better expresses beauty of the innerThan infant tenderness toward another—I have watched two alone in a pastureWhicker, exchanging weathersNo longer beasts, no longer orphan beings—They breathe into the nostrils of each other winged hussars Once we wore swan feathers—Eagle Vulture Ostrich Goose. O the beauty of our fear— Winged Hussars charged toward usToward us and through. We wore cymbals and feathersTo make ourselves biggerTo deafen the others— [End Page 6] Fear snaps like a banner.Fear chatters. Like now. Like footfall.Like clatter. I hearA heart coming for me, charging throughThe vestibule, charging throughThe bony labyrinth of my ear. god the condor I pull the God of Thunder I pull HimFrom a nest I pull a little nestling limp Hold Him to my chest from His stomach takeHalf a cup of plastic half a cup of glassAnd from His crop lift four bottle capsWhat will make us well again what will makeUs sing poisoned by ideas poisoned by machinesGod is cleaning up now God is eating Inside a clown-pink face lead bullet casingsA black boa frames His shoulders like a paintingImagine no more soaring no more PleistoceneNo more clouds pulled together by His wingbeats God's coming for us now He looks a little queasyHe rubs his head against the rock He sharpens His beak mothers From under water and under tar,Down from the walls of cavesThey came The biologist madeA circle with her armsThat calf's heart must have weighedTwenty-five pounds she said. Deep insideEach bison there is a bible,Otherwise how could they surviveOur bullets and cliffsOur cities and flamesOur soups simmeringWith the heads of their babiesEach mother grazes patiently—A ton of flesh made of grass blades [End Page 7] 1963 1 presidents and premiers address the young ladies of the seminary from outer space Birds shimmy seeds into topknots of treesBeget strangler figs dangling toward gravityTo shelter the seminary Who sit in a circle of white pleatsAnd blue blazers and listen to their leaders'Voices from outer space preaching—Mutually assured destruction by land or sea Who will they rocket next—a chimpanzeeFruit flies, a dog they snatch from the streetWe cultivate anomie—roaring at realityWith its roots in everything the king can see One girl lacquers her hair into a torpedo Who can we believe? We girls of the seedBed, we—young ladies of the seminary 2 i had just come to terms with fallout, and along comes rachel carson (cartoon in saturday review) 1963 and the earth said a little less poison pleaseWith rustling sounds through fallen leavesThe sparrows flitting understorySaid yes please less for me—the ant hoistingHis brother's body in the nest said yesAnd sharks feeding in the sea and fish eaglesBuilding cribs of mops and lawn chairs yesAnd vultures who couldn't stop eatingCould not stop eating A little less 2-4-d—less ddt and bhcA little less in our well a little less in our bloodstreamFrom the nerves of earthworm to the ovariesOf thrush and their exquisite melodiesFor everything eating and eaten—a little less poison please [End Page 8] Sandra Alcosser Sandra Alcosser is the author of Except by Nature (1998) and A Fish to...

The Dilemmas of Dissidence in East-Central Europe: Citizen Intellectuals and Philosopher Kings. By Barbara J. Falk. Budapest: Central European University Press, 2003. xxxiv, 478 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. 27.95, paper. - Volume 63 Issue 1