Introduction

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...

“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: 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: 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...

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...

Reviewed by: Aztec and Maya Apocalypses: Old World Tales of Doom in a New World Setting by Mark Z. Christensen Amara Solari Aztec and Maya Apocalypses: Old World Tales of Doom in a New World Setting. By Mark Z. Christensen (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press. 2022. Pp. xii, 252. $55.00. ISBN: 978-0-806-19035-8.) Writing amid our current apocalypse, the global COVID-19 pandemic, historian Mark Z. Christensen has offered a complete reimagining of the fundamental role the idea of “Doomsday” played in the Christianization of the Indigenous populations [End Page 223] of the American continents in the early modern period. The author—an ethnohistorian who is renowned for his translation abilities in both colonial Nahuatl (the Aztec language) and Yucatec Mayan (the Mayan dialect spoken in most of the Yucatan Peninsula)—clearly outlines in his Introduction three goals for his tome. His overarching goal is to translate and analyze relatively obscure eschatological texts, composed in these two Indigenous languages, to convey their creative adaptation to serve the idiosyncratic spiritual needs of the evangelical endeavors in New Spain. Secondly, Christensen strives to complicate the historiographical tendency to approach native responses to Christianity in one of two modes: to assume the wholesale adoption of the European religion, or on the more extreme end of this continuum, envision that all Indigenous interpretations of Christianity were inherently subversive. Christensen’s approach is much more nuanced than either of these, as he stresses the importance of a scholarly appreciation of both contributing religious traditions, an academic method that ultimately allows for Indigenous Christianity to be the result of active and ongoing negotiations between Indigenous neophytes and their resident friars. The importance of Christensen’s approach cannot be overstated as it serves to reinscribe agency onto native communities of New Spain. His final articulated goal is to offer his readers English translations of his textual source base. After providing an overview of Spanish and Mesoamerican worldviews of the early modern period, Christensen spends his first body chapter succinctly synthesizing contemporaneous eschatology, explaining how and why millenarianism was a pragmatic worldview for the Spaniards responsible for New World conquests of both territory and of souls. Thereafter, Christensen craftily organizes the remaining chapters along an eschatological chronology. Chapter 2 turns to the topics of the first judgement, limbo, and purgatory, using Juan Bautista Viseo’s Confesario (1599), Ignacio de Paredes’s Promptuario (1759), Juan Coronel’s Discursos (1620), and the anonymous Sermones en lengua Maya (18th century) to analyze how these moments of “personal apocalypses” were conveyed to Nahuatl and Mayan-speaking audiences. Chapter 3 moves on to the Apocalypse proper, providing translations of such important texts as the “Fifteen Signs” from an anonymous Maya sermons copybook (which can be partially correlated with texts and images from the 15th-century German book, Der Antichrist und die fünfzehn Zeichen) and Bautista’s Nahuatl Sermonario (1606). Personal resurrection following the Final Judgement is the topic of the next Chapter, which analyzes the Seven Articles in the Dominican Martín de León’s Camino de cielo (1611) and in Coronel’s Discursos predicables. Chapter 5 finishes the body chapters, focused on four texts (Fabián de Aquino’s 16th-century copybook, Coronel’s Discursos and Discursos predicables, and the “Teabo Manuscript”), which describe heaven and hell. This book is a welcome and overdue addition to the academic subfields of Latin American religious studies and ethnohistory; Christensen’s analytically rich translations of Nahuatl and Mayan documents are a true gift. It also bears noting that beyond the relatively small circle of Mesoamerican ethnohistorians, this book speaks to the larger field of Catholic studies, evidencing, as it does, one of the most [End Page 224] creative examples of religious localization and native negotiation in global history. Moreover, this text could be easily incorporated into an undergraduate or graduate syllabus as Christensen’s conversational writing style makes for a very enjoyable read, despite his apocalyptic subject matter. [End Page 225] Amara Solari The Pennsylvania State University Copyright © 2023 The Catholic University of America Press ...

Reviewed by: Communicating with the Spirits Michael D. Bailey Gábo Klaniczayr and Éva Pócs, eds., in collaboration with Eszter Csonka-Takács. Communicating with the Spirits, Demons, Spirits, Witches 1. Buda-pest and New York: Central European University Press, 2005. Pp. vii + 295. This is the first in a series of three planned volumes containing essays presented at a conference on “Demons, Spirits, and Witches” held in Buda-pest in 1999. While this volume offers essays dealing with demonic possession, visionary experiences, trance states, and shamanism, future volumes (the [End Page 257] contents of which are listed) will focus on demonology, both elite and popular, and on witchcraft. In all, forty-three articles will be published. As is typical with conference proceedings, indeed with essay collections of any sort, the articles in this volume vary considerably in their focus, and in the depth and breadth of their coverage. The most extended contribution is that of Éva Pócs, who seems to have exercised editor’s privilege and expanded her essay to sixty-eight pages. Most of the other articles, however, appear to have been revised only slightly, if at all, beyond their original forms as conference papers. Many are only ten to twelve pages long. In terms of coverage, Pócs’s article spans several periods, but focuses on East-Central Europe. Of the other ten essays, five focus on medieval Europe, three on the early modern period, one on the modern, and one is essentially ahistorical. The authors come from several different disciplines, including history, literary studies, and folklore, although only one article really makes an issue of its particular disciplinary approach. Almost all of the articles are worthwhile. Because of their typically short length, however, few can do more than offer preliminary insights or pose interesting questions. Nancy Caciola introduces the notion that medieval concepts of demonic possession presented demons as physical presences occupying various spaces within the body. In the years since the original 1999 conference, she has actually worked out this argument to much greater extent in other article and monograph publications, which she cites here. Renata Mikolajczyk presents the demonological thought of the medieval Silesian scholar Witelo. While some of his natural interpretations for demonic activity are intriguing, she herself admits that most of his thought was not extraordinary but drew on standard demonological notions. She does not have space, however, to develop these issues fully. Moshe Sluhovsky examines ideas of demonic possession in early modern Catholic countries. His main conclusion is that problems of discernment continued unresolved from the late Middle Ages into the early modern period. Sophie Houdard, examining visionary activity in seventeenth-century France, indicates that these problems persisted, but that in this period visionary activity as a whole was coming under greater suspicion. Regardless of whether visions were supposedly divine or demonic, all such experiences were now more frequently regarded as fake. Éva Pócs closes out the section on demonic possession by presenting a long survey of categories of possession phenomena and what she calls “possession systems”—the social and cultural forms that possession experiences took in Central Europe over an extended span of time. She argues for these effectively, but also cautions that her results are only preliminary. The next section of the volume, on “Contacts with the Other World,” [End Page 258] begins with an excellent article by Wolfgang Behringer, in which he argues that late-medieval Waldensian heretics became associated with witchcraft because their holy men (and women) claimed to possess the ability to be in contact with the dead, as well as having other supernatural powers. The argument is necessarily more suggestive than conclusive, but sheds useful light on the otherwise odd association of Waldensians with witchcraft. This is followed by a short article on “thanotopic aspects of the Irish Sidhe” by Tok Thompson. Here he asserts that Irish fairy-beliefs are rooted in archaic notions of communication with the dead, since the Sidhe are associated with Neolithic burial mounds. At the end of his paper, however, he admits that he has not actually established the central linkages on which his argument hinges (pp. 200–201); instead he refers readers to his unpublished master...

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: Speaking for Nature: Women and Ecologies of Early Modern England Edith Snook (bio) Sylvia Bowerbank . Speaking for Nature: Women and Ecologies of Early Modern EnglandJohns Hopkins University Press. xii, 288. US $49.95 Speaking for Nature: Women and Ecologies of Early Modern England is a ground-breaking contribution to the history of women's ecological thought. Few scholars have even broached the subject of pre-nineteenth-century women's writing about nature, and fewer still have made such a sustained attempt to place early modern women's thinking in dialogue with contemporary ecofeminism. The premise of Speaking for Nature is that one should not take the definition of 'nature' as a given but explore how nature itself assumes different meanings. Thus, in part 1 Sylvia Bowerbank examines the forest as a historically changing construct, first in relation to Penshurst and Mary Wroth's invocation of the Arcadian pastoral in The Countess of Montgomery's Urania. Likewise, the discussion of several of Margaret Cavendish's works hinges on Bowerbank's analysis of Cavendish's relationship to Sherwood Forest and nearby Welbeck Park, one of the Duke of Newcastle's estates. Part 2 takes up religious understandings of nature, a particularly important approach to consider, given the prevalence of religious language in both ecological and non-ecological arguments. The chapter on Catherine Talbot and Mary Rich, Countess of Warwick, however, takes nature to mean something more like 'human nature,' as Bowerbank brings into focus the concept of 'good nature' in female piety. The next chapter ponders the apocalyptic writings of Jane [End Page 244] Lead and Anne Bathurst to draw attention to their intentional communities and the way that they incorporated principles, such as voluntary simplicity, familiar to the contemporary Green movement. Part 3 thinks through nature in relationship to the home. One chapter draws attention to little-studied didactic writing for children and women's attempts to inculcate compassion for animals. Another reads Anna Seward's verse through her efforts to preserve the natural environment. The last two chapters in the book are the most politically engaging. Bowerbank considers two women who observe how cultures alien to their own encounter the natural world: Mary Wollstonecraft in Sweden and Elizabeth Simcoe in Canada. The piece on Elizabeth Simcoe is a lively discussion of Cootes Paradise in Hamilton that should be of interest to Canadianists, as well as to scholars of women's writing. This book is a wide-ranging scholarly study of nearly two hundred years of women's literary history. It raises a number of questions for future scholars to pursue. We will need to attend, as this author does, to how the concept of nature shifts over time. But critics may also want to undertake - as this author cannot because of the book's broad scope - more detailed historical analyses of the impact that the changing social and political landscape had on how and why women might 'speak for nature.' In addition, because Speaking for Nature selects religious writers who do not define 'nature' in relation to animals and plants, Bowerbank asks readers to consider what 'nature' means, but she also leaves open the question of how women used religious language to confront more conventionally ecological topics. Finally, beyond Francis Bacon, this book is not especially interested in the interchange of women's writing with that of their male contemporaries, nor is it engaged with the body of ecocriticism growing around writers like Shakespeare and Milton. With Bowerbank's caution against assuming an essential connection between women and nature well in hand, researchers might use these contexts profitably to pursue further questions around gender, nature, and women's writing. Speaking for Nature demonstrates that women were intelligently and diversely engaged with ecological thinking in the early modern period. Bowerbank's is an innovating foray into what I hope will become a significant field in early modern feminist scholarship. [End Page 245] Edith Snook Edith Snook, Department of English, University of New Brunswick Copyright © 2006 University of Toronto Press Incorporated

Reviewed by: Shipwreck Modernity: Ecologies of Globalization, 1550–1719 by Steve Mentz Gayle K. Brunelle Steve Mentz, Shipwreck Modernity: Ecologies of Globalization, 1550–1719 (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press 2015) ix + 225 pp. In Shipwreck Modernity, Ecologies of Globalization, 1550–1719 Steve Mentz sets out to disrupt the traditional linear narrative of modernity that posits the Renaissance as a rupture that began the modern era. Scholars of the Renaissance, from Jacob Burkhardt to Stephen Greenblatt, have argued that in attempting to revive the worldview and aesthetics of the Classical era, Greenblatt's "swerve," Renaissance humanists set the stage for modernity. Mentz contends that this paradigm of early modernity as a necessary break [End Page 234] initiating the development of modernity, most notably and recently celebrated by Stephen Greenblatt in his Pulitzer Prize winning book The Swerve: How the World Became Modern (2012), misses the fundamental complexity not just of the early modern era, but of history, and of the human condition. Mentz is a literary scholar, and his analysis is based on examination of mostly English literature about the ocean and shipwrecks from the sixteenth through the early twentieth centuries. His goal is to offer an alternate way of understanding not just pre-modern European culture and the whole concept of "modernity," but also our own culturally and ecologically disrupted era. Mentz argues in Shipwreck Modernity that the traditional interpretation of modernity is too "dry," too "land-based" to serve the needs of contemporary culture. By this Mentz means that our world is now too global, and too ecologically threatened, for a narrative that is Western in outlook, linear in trajectory and optimistic and positivistic in tone to help people make sense of the rapid ecological changes, globalization and fragmentation of the Western-dominated world order that characterizes our century. Mentz questions the usefulness of the periodization of history into medieval, early modern, and modern that still dominates scholarly chronology and the discourse, the actual language we use to describe history. Mentz offers an alternate discourse, a "wet" discourse in which the sea is at the center, not only because interaction with the sea was central to the development of the increasingly global economy and culture of the early modern and modern periods, but also because the formless sea, with no distinct lines or breaks, which reaches in all direction and disorients the human body plunged into it, seems a better way to understand historical change. Mentz argues that early modern European culture was "fundamentally ecological in nature" (2) because what historians have traditionally called the "expansion of Europe" obliged Europeans to interact with the ecologies, human and natural, of the entire globe. Like shipwrecked sailors, Europeans were plunged into a strange, formless ocean of new peoples, plants, animals, geographies, and topographies that they could neither categorize nor control. Survival meant figuring out how to float or swim until they reached the shore. And like the ocean, a single body of water that surrounds all land masses and mingles currents from all parts of the world, the intellectual "ocean" in which early modern Europeans found themselves adrift mingled past and present, hither and yon, indiscriminately. Humans sought ways to catalogue, periodize, and structure the waters around them, but ultimately the fundamental disorder of the oceanic nature of our world rendered any intellectual structures they created fragile and contingent. Surviving a shipwreck requires abandoning the vessel at some point and plunging into the salt water in an effort to reach the shore. The new land cannot be attained without first breaking up the structure of the ship and experiencing the disorientation of the formless ocean. And the shore itself is always contingent, since humans cannot create a global world without experiencing the ocean. This, for Mentz, seems to be his central metaphor for the crisis of modernity, and in particular the effects of climate change with which our own world is contending. Old structures, understandings and solutions are inadequate and in fact are fragmenting under the relentless [End Page 235] pressure of the ocean, rising ever higher to meet us as the global temperature warms. We cannot survive by clinging to a wreck. We must all plunge in and swim...

Between Carnival and Lent: The Scientific Revolution at the Margins of Culture Paula Findlen (bio) How curious, after all, is the way in which we moderns think about the world! And it is all so novel, too. E. A. Burtt In the half-century since the “Scientific Revolution” became a meaningful description of the transformation of attitudes toward nature in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, it seems to have enjoyed more lives than the Cheshire cat and to have remained as enigmatic. 1 Since its original formulation in the late 1940s, it has been the topic of a lively debate about the origins and character of modern approaches to nature and, more generally, knowledge. The result has been not only increased skepticism that the Scientific Revolution could be reduced to any single narrative, but also a profusion [End Page 243] of narratives about what constituted its fundamental characteristics. As Hayden White observes, “any given set of real events can be emplotted in a number of ways, can bear the weight of being told as any number of different stories.” 2 In the process, the Scientific Revolution, perhaps more than any other area of science studies, has become a testing ground for new approaches to the historical understanding of science and new ways of understanding the process of scientific change. Why should we feel so compelled to tell and retell this particular story in the history of science, when there are so many other episodes worthy of our attention? Surely part of the fascination lies in the sense that the Scientific Revolution is, in many respects, the original story in the history of science. From the sixteenth century onward, humanist natural philosophers—from the anatomist Andreas Vesalius to the astronomer Johannes Kepler—wrote the histories of various sciences in order to publicize the importance of their reformation of knowledge. By the eighteenth century they had become the story, protagonists of a narrative rewritten by new scholarly communities in search of modern ruptures with the past. 3 The crafting of scientific narrative has been a prolonged and self-conscious exercise in which scientists as well as historians have participated over the centuries—all the more so because neither the scientist nor the historian enjoyed distinct intellectual identities until fairly recently (quite often, as the case of the seventeenth-century statesman, historian, and natural philosopher Francis Bacon demonstrates well, they were the same person). Accordingly, we might see the Scientific Revolution as one of the fundamental experiments in narrating the history of science. While the grand narrative of the Scientific Revolution has largely been a story of the rise of modern science that takes science in a fairly defined sense as its focal point, cultural approaches to the history of science suggest a variety of other possibilities that explore in greater detail the imagery that early modern Europeans had at their disposal when they attempted to describe nature. Such imagery was [End Page 244] not simply an afterthought to the study of nature; often it was so deeply embedded in the act of seeing and understanding nature that it would be impossible to separate how a particular natural philosopher viewed nature from how he viewed culture. 4 Defining nature and defining culture were complementary activities in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. If we wish to truly understand what it meant to do early modern science, then we need to think more carefully about what it meant to be early modern. The approach I am suggesting has already had a number of advocates. Several years ago, John Schuster remarked that “the Scientific Revolution consisted of a process of change and displacement among and within competing systems of natural philosophy,” and he recommended that historians look more carefully at the “privileged images, metaphors or models” that defined these different approaches to knowledge. 5 The literature exploring the fundamental cultural themes of the early modern period can be a rich resource for expanding our interpretations of the Scientific Revolution. 6 Since nature was never an isolated subject of study during this period but always part of some larger project, we should examine more closely those features of early modern society that best illuminate the place of...

Criminal Law in Muscovy George G. Weickhardt Nancy Kollmann, Crime and Punishment in Early Modern Russia. xvi + 488 pp. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. ISBN-13 978-1107025134. $115.00. On the last page of this monumental and important work Nancy Kollmann summarizes some of her principal conclusions: “This research also shows that Russia in the early modern period possessed a defined law and functioning legal system. It was not excessively violent in the European context, nor was it arbitrary in applying the law. Justice could be slow in coming or suborned, but the system was not one of unbridled satrapies, vigilante justice or uncontrolled brutality. Russia was not a despotism” (426). Thirty years ago, the claims that the early modern Russian legal system was not arbitrary and that Russia was not a despotism might have been greeted with disbelief and derision. But scholarship on Russian law in the last three decades has pointed toward Kollmann’s conclusions, which she fully supports with thorough and meticulous research into the actual practice and application of criminal law in the 17th century and Petrine period.1 Kollmann’s principal data base is homicide and serious felony cases from two regions: Beloozero in the north and Arzamas in the Middle Volga. The Beloozero archive consists of the records of 128 “litigations” (“criminal actions” might have been a more suitable term), of which 53 are homicides but only 23 are complete (extending through judgment, sentence, and punishment), including 13 homicides. The Arzamas archive contains records of 100 criminal actions, of which only 12 are complete, including 8 homicides (11). “To counterbalance the dearth of completed cases,” Kollmann also looked at 152 criminal actions from the Military Service Chancellory and [End Page 461] two other archives, which include 72 homicide cases, of which 30 were complete. In sum, her data base consists of 380 total criminal actions, of which 51 are complete homicide cases. Any doubts about how representative this data base is are removed by Kollmann’s inclusion of countless other cases and evidence from published sources, including a register of 158 cases from Tobol´sk listing the crime, social status of the accused, and the punishment (218–22). Kollmann incidentally explains the scarcity of complete case records by the loss of records over time and the possible abandonment of cases by the litigants (128). Although Kollmann’s data base of criminal actions is the largest studied to date, one hopes that future scholarship will locate and analyze more complete cases. It is, of course, difficult to judge how fairly justice was dispensed without knowing the sentence and punishment. One particularly valuable contribution of this superlative work is to compare Russia’s legal system with contemporary systems in states of Western Europe, generally assumed to have been more sophisticated and advanced. Kollmann, however, concludes that “Russia essentially fit into the pattern of statebuilding, local governance and adjudication seen in some of its early modern peers” (425). Russia was so vast and sparsely populated that it, like its early modern peers, had to rely on the local population to support centrally assigned officials. Coopting the local community meant that community norms played an important role in the administration of justice.2 Kollmann’s book is divided into two parts. The first deals with “Judicial Culture.” In this part she describes the various judicial organs or courts, both in Moscow and the provinces, and how they were staffed. She argues that judicial expertise resided in the scribal class (d´iachestvo), who assisted members of the upper service class heading the central chancelleries and serving as governors. The scribes would receive essentially “on-the-job” training in the law throughout their often decades-long service. They would master and follow a uniform model of bureaucratic language and paperwork. That they developed legal expertise is evidenced by the written reports of cases, which generally show familiarity with the Conciliar Law Code (the huge codification completed in 1649) and other statutes. Indeed, this Law Code itself is the best evidence of the vast accumulated expertise of the Muscovite legal system: it was one of the most comprehensive codifications of its time.3 [End Page 462] Kollmann, however, perhaps overstates...

Narrating Witchcraft:Agency, Discourse, and Power Esther Eidinow and Richard Gordon This collection of thirteen essays—three issues of a special volume of this journal—explores "witchcraft narratives" over time, place, and culture. Most of the contributions are based on papers delivered at a conference entitled "Narrating Witchcraft: Agency, Discourse and Power," held at the University of Erfurt at the end of June 2016, which took up the theoretical challenge of the Lived Ancient Religion project (LAR). This five-year research project, which ran from 2012–17 and which provided funding for the conference, was directed by Professor Jörg Rüpke of the Max Weber Center for Advanced Cultural and Social Studies at the University of Erfurt, Germany, and focused on the individual, situational, and larger global trajectories of the pluralistic religions of antiquity. This special volume, Narrating Witchcraft, takes a similarly multi-dimensional approach: scholars of different disciplines, including ancient, early modern and modern history, anthropology, and gender studies, introduced a broad variety of case studies. In acknowledgement of the theme of lived ancient religion, most of the contributions to this special volume—specifically, the articles that appear in the first two issues and that set up the thematic content—focus on malign magic as perceived and practiced in the "Ancient Mediterranean," which includes the Ancient Near East and connected areas over a time span of some thirty-five hundred years. Articles that continue to explore the theme in the early modern and modern worlds are contained in Issue 3. The original conference was explicitly framed as a project in comparative history with an emphasis on the ancient world. While the conference organizers and participants acknowledged the difficulties of cross-cultural translation, we worked with a shared understanding of the term "witchcraft" along [End Page 1] the lines of what Ronald Hutton recently described as standard scholarly definitions of witchcraft: causing "harm to others by mystical means," or "evil magic and sorcery."1 The papers presented at the conference did (and the articles across the volume do) discuss points of terminology (see especially the insights of Peter Geschiere in Issue 3), and work from a wide variety of primary material, introducing diverse methodologies. But they start from the assumption that the conceptual power of witchcraft beliefs and practices is both diachronic and cross-cultural, encompassing both local and global meanings, and with a historical trajectory that extends back to ancient Mediterranean cultures. This starting assumption has allowed them to focus on exploring witchcraft's dynamic, cross-cultural manifestations: in particular, the question of how, across and within widely differing discursive representations, these manifestations each maintain their own distinctive character, while still achieving a "family resemblance," as Esther Eidinow (this issue) describes it. The question of representations introduces the other key term of the conference and volume title—"narrating"—and our concern with the ways in which witchcraft is both engendered by narratives and, in turn, creates them. Narration here is considered as storytelling, and a narrative as a story; as Aristotle suggests of plot, it is a mimesis of a sequence of events with a beginning, middle and end, of a length that can be coherently remembered, of a size which permits a transformation to occur in a probable or necessary sequence of events, from adversity to prosperity, or vice versa. In terms of contemporary theory, we here orient ourselves toward the general theory of narrative elaborated by Albrecht Koschorke, which is useful because its framework is geared to adapting narrative theory to social science. It also considers cognitive processes, where, in an elementary sense, narrative is considered as a kind of "reduction" of knowledge, in which "narrative patterns thus function similarly to cognitive schemas allowing the surplus of unsorted empirical data to be reducted to typical, easily recognizable forms."2 The reduction is not limited to any particular core of real acts or real things; indeed, its interest for us, as for him, has to do with it the way it can both appear to be, and to manipulate, experiential truth; narrative has the capacity to create both orientation and nonsense, both order and disorder. As Koschorke writes, [End Page 2] Like thinking and speaking in general...

Authenticity, Antiquity, and Authority: Dares Phrygius in Early Modern Europe Frederic Clark Dares Phrygius, “First Pagan Historiographer” In his Etymologies, Isidore of Seville—the seventh-century compiler whose cataloguing of classical erudition helped lay the groundwork for medieval and early modern encyclopedism—offered a seemingly straightforward definition of historiography, with clear antecedents in Cicero, Quintilian, and Servius.1 Before identifying historical writing as a component of the grammatical arts, and distinguishing histories from poetic fables, Isidore confirmed that “history is a narration of deeds [narratio rei gestae], through which things done in the past are discerned.”2 Thereafter, he equated historical writing with eyewitness observation, insisting that “among the [End Page 183] ancients, no one wrote history unless he had been present and seen those things to be recorded.”3 But Isidore’s further treatment of historiography grew more perplexing. Upon affirming that “among us, Moses first composed a history, on the beginning of the world,” he unexpectedly declared that “among the pagans, Dares Phrygius first composed a history, concerning Greeks and Trojans.”4 Only later did the encyclopedist mention more well-known Greek historians (to modern audiences at least) like Herodotus. 5 Isidore’s invocation of his “first pagan historiographer” referred most likely to the De excidio Troiae historia (henceforth DET), a fifth- or sixth-century Latin pseudo-history billed as an eyewitness account of the Trojan War. Conveyed in sparse, dry, and inelegant language, the DET was long thought to have been the war diary of one Dares Phrygius, purportedly a Trojan participant in the conflict.6 In reality, the Latin DET was a two-part forgery, as its spurious dedicatory epistle—supposedly from the Augustan-era biographer Cornelius Nepos to the historian Sallust—claimed that “Nepos” had discovered the work in an Athenian archive and rendered it “truly and simply” (vere et simpliciter) from Greek into Latin.7 While potentially derived from a Greek antecedent, perhaps composed as an anti-Homeric jeu d’esprit during the Second Sophistic, the Latin Dares was assuredly not an accurate and verbatim translation of any lost Greek original. 8 Notwithstanding its uncertain origins, Isidore’s pagan counterpart to Moses would go on to achieve canonical status in the medieval Latin West, and survives today in approximately 200 manuscripts. Moreover, Dares’s authority was extended through practices of compilation integral to medieval [End Page 184] textual culture.9 This compilatory impulse—which spawned countless multi-text anthologized codices and similarly animated Isidore’s encyclopedism—encouraged the Phrygian’s codicological pairing with numerous sources both ancient and medieval. Not only did the DET serve, codicologically, as a prologue to Trojan origin narratives like Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia regum Britanniae, but it was also integrated into the structure of universal history, utilized as a means of augmenting the Chronicon of Eusebius-Jerome.10 Throughout the Middle Ages, Dares served not only as a name to invoke, but also as a source to appropriate and rework: to insert into universal chronicles, append to Trojan genealogies, or render into epic verse. Moreover, the pseudo-author’s status as “first pagan historiographer” was hardly lost on medieval sources: for instance, when William of Malmesbury inserted the DET into his anthology of ancient Roman histories, he made sure to include Isidore’s endorsement directly before the text’s incipit.11 For nearly a millennium, Dares’s fabricated claims of antiquity and autopsy constituted airtight guarantors of textual auctoritas. Between Criticism and Credulity: Dares in Early Modern Scholarship But Dares did not remain undisturbed in the canon. Instead, the DET saw its first recorded challenge with the advent of the early Renaissance. Writing in 1400 in his De tyranno, the Florentine Chancellor Coluccio Salutati turned to the Phrygian when debating a favored subject of nascent Italian humanism—the history of early Rome. Here Salutati sought to counter the long-held claim, attested in the DET, that Aeneas was not a pious hero driven from Troy, but rather a duplicitous traitor who had himself betrayed the city to the Greeks.12 The Florentine Chancellor correctly acknowledged that Aeneas’s treason was alleged by “the most ancient historians Dares [End Page 185] Phrygius and Dictys Cretensis” (Dictys, another late antique...