Europe Book Reviews

2010-09-07T09:20:00.001-07:00

The French Atlantic: Travels in Culture and History. By Bill Marshall.
Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, February 2010. Cloth: ISBN 978-1846310508, $95; paper: ISBN 9781846310515, $35. 256 pages.

Review by Kadji Amin, Columbia College, Chicago

Bill Marshall's The French Atlantic: Travels in Culture and History is a site-based study of a series of transatlantic exchanges involving French language, commerce, and culture. The book is divided into seven chapters, each of which focuses on a single location. It begins with Nantes, France's principle slave port; then moves on to la Rochelle, a major port of the Huguenot diaspora to New France; Saint-Pierre and Miquelon, two North Atlantic centers of the Acadian diaspora; Quebec City, the location of a distinctive French nationalism outside of France; New Orleans, a uniquely Caribbeanized French colonial city within the United States; Cayenne, the creolized capital of Guyane and the site of France's most famous overseas penal colony; and Montevideo, a vantage point from which to consider oft neglected Francophone-Hispanic interactions in the New World. Each of these seven sites functions as historically specific node within a web of transatlantic flows, interactions, and exchanges. Marshall interprets "transatlantic" narrowly to exclude circumatlantic movements that might encompass the Western coast of Africa. Nevertheless, the diversity of Marshall's selection of sites, each of which plays a highly specific role within Atlantic histories of slavery, commerce, migration, racialization, and colonialism, is the principle strength of this study.

Marshall critically situates his book as an Atlantic corrective to certain weaknesses inherent within Francophone studies on the one hand and postcolonial studies on the other. Given that "Francophone" describes any and all populations that speak French outside of the French hexagon, Marshall argues that Francophone Studies reinforces the construction of France's former colonies as the periphery whose meaning exists only in relation to a French metropolitan center. Postcolonial studies has critically deconstructed such a division between metropolitan center and (post)colonial periphery. Marshall points out, however, that, in addition to being Anglophone-centric, postcolonial studies has tended to neglect the material and the economic dimensions of colonial histories. He sees in Atlantic Studies, on the other hand, the potential to "open a space within and beyond the sometimes clashing, sometimes colluding categories of 'French,' 'Francophone' and 'postcolonial,'" arguing that its "solid historical underpinning, attentive to concrete realities of migration, slavery, technology and commerce, guarantees a materialist viewpoint" (10-11). Marshall's Atlantic intervention into French, Francophone, and Postcolonial Studies is a compelling and timely contribution to the nascent field of French Atlantic Studies.

The project borrows from Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari a theoretical vocabulary of deterritorialization, becomings, lines of flight, and rhizomatic connections. Marshall's engagement with Deleuze and Guattari's philosophical system is, on the whole, rather thin. The principle utility of Deleuze and Guattari's thought for Marshall's project, however, is that it enables him to retain the adjective "French" –the central requirement of the Atlantic interactions that he studies—without reifying the hexagon as the site of essential or originary Frenchness. With the help of Deleuze and Guattari, Marshall envisions a Frenchness whose origin and point of reference are neither the metropolitan center nor the purity of the classical French language. This is a Frenchness that breaks up into "particles of Frenchness," which are able to form rhizomatic and creolized connections with African, indigenous, Anglophone, and Hispanic traditions without, for that matter, becoming any less "French." By supplementing this conception of Frenchness with a materialist concern for the economic inequalities, forced displacements, and violent hierarchies of Atlantic history, Marshall maintains a healthy awareness of the fact that French dispersals are far from being politically neutral processes and that creolization is seldom the fruit of peaceful mixings.

The French Atlantic draws its methodological inspiration from Michel de Certeau's distinction between place and space. For, rather than being a straightforward transatlantic history of the seven sites that Marshall has selected, Marshall's project is that of turning the "places" (les lieux) of Atlantic history into "spaces" (les espaces), by exploring the stories, representations, and images through which Atlantic history has been inhabited, commemorated, distorted, and embellished. The French Atlantic's storied and historically grounded exploration of space is an informative, interesting, and original contribution to Atlantic studies, French studies, and Francophone studies.

Within its broadly interdisciplinary mix of literary criticism, cultural studies, Atlantic history, and critical theory, The French Atlantic nevertheless gives "geographical and historical fact" foundational status (21). Marshall studies cultural texts for the ways in which they figure or disfigure important sites of Atlantic history, failing to explore the performative efficacy of cultural texts in actually producing both geography and historical memory. At its best, however, Marshall's emphasis on the primacy of history performs a crucial contextualization of artistic movements and cultural objects. Through the method of site-specific analysis, he is able to restore a crucial historical, geographical, and material dimension to the literary and cultural works he studies.

The French Atlantic's major weakness is that it tends to sacrifice both depth and direction for breadth. In its rapid movement between depictions of a particular site within a series of different cultural texts, the study seldom provides an in-depth analysis of how place functions in any single work. Within the individual chapters, a rambling parcours through both history and story often takes the place of a more sustained argument. In his invocations of critical theory, Marshall is more likely to use theorists' most famous points to illuminate a historical or cultural example than to critically rework existing theoretical paradigms, much less propose original ones.

The book excels, however, as a virtuosic historical, literary, and cultural journey through space. Each chapter deftly weaves together a range of representations of a specific transatlantic site. As a series of explorations of space, the study is richly textured, engaging, and enjoyable, with an impressively encyclopedic breadth of literary, cultural, and filmic references considered within the context of often surprising historical details. At its best, The French Atlantic allows us to envision familiar and unfamiliar cultural and literary texts in a new way, as a series of reflections on space and the transatlantic histories that inform it.

2010-09-07T09:11:00.001-07:00

Cultures of Plague: Medical Thinking at the End of the Renaissance. By Samuel K. Cohn, Jr.

Oxford: Oxford University Press, January 2010. Cloth: ISBN 978-0199574025, $99. 340 pages.

Review by Scott Hendrix, Carroll University, Wisconsin

Samuel Cohn’s mastery of the history of Renaissance Italy shines through in his latest work focusing on responses to plague—primarily during the years from 1575 to 1578—on the Italian peninsula. This is Cohn’s third book dealing with plague and disease in the West, drawing even more heavily on the social history that informs much of his earlier work than in his past considerations such as The Black Death Transformed: Disease and Culture in Early Renaissance Europe. In the process not only does he deliver a tremendously nuanced account of the impact of plague in Italy, but he certainly puts to rest the idea promoted by scholars such as E. La Croix that from “its first appearances in 1348, writing on plague was caged within intellectual systems devised in antiquity (principally Aristotle and Galen) and modified by Arabic physicians, philosophers, and commentators” remaining more or less fixed until the end of the sixteenth century or later (2). Such a view is rooted in a larger conception of the intellectual stagnation presumably found in pre-modern scientific writings, giving Cohn’s effective demonstration of the vitality and evolving nature of medical writing in the sixteenth century importance beyond the realm of the history of medicine.

One thing that should be noted is that Cohn writes here of “plague,” not just the Black Death that has occupied so much of his work in the past. This is important, for his concern is with the way that epidemic conditions affected the culture and medical thinking on the Italian peninsula during the sixteenth century. Therefore, the precise nature of the illness—or the concatenation of illnesses—that made up these conditions is of little importance to the story that Cohn tells. This point is not immediately obvious, for he spends chapter two raising questions about whether or not the Black Death can be identified with the bubonic plague and the various terms referring to specific plague symptoms used in medieval and Renaissance writings. This chapter seems oddly out of place for someone who is primarily a social historian and the arguments, even if they do manage to cast doubt on the precise nature of the illness that first struck Europe in the 1345, seem tired and shopworn. However, the importance of this discussion becomes clear when the reader moves onto to chapters six through eight, “Plague Disputes, Challenges of the Universals,” “Plague and Poverty,” and “Towards a New Public Health Consciousness in Medicine,” respectively. Through close attention to both narrative primary sources and the slender statistical data available for the period, Cohn is able to demonstrate that while prior to 1400 the plague seemed democratic in its effects, later visitations of illness in Italian cities were clearly most devastating in areas inhabited by the poor. The reason why seems clearly to be tied to the greater filth and crowding found in these areas, but the most significant factor seems to have been contaminated water supplies suggesting that diseases such as cholera and dysentery were the primary killers in the plague of 1575-78, even if Cohn does not name these illnesses.

However, Cohn’s two most important insights in this study deal with the nature of responses to plague. First of all, the rising importance of vernacular literature caused by increasing literacy among urban dwellers can be seen in Renaissance approaches to illness. When town dwellers in Italy began to die in large numbers after 1575 writers of plague literature emerged from a variety of societal ranks, from cobblers to bishops, to express themselves about the illness that preyed upon them. While the more educated among them made reference to authorities such as Aristotle and Galen, none seemed predisposed to either bow before the authority of medical professionals or to succumb to feelings of depression and fear in the face of wide-spread epidemic, as has been suggested by earlier historians such as Lynn Thorndike. Instead, writing in a variety of forms, from narratives such as that of the Venetian notary Rocco Benedetti’s Raguaglio minutissimo del successo della peste di Venetia (1577) to the epic plague poems clustering in Verona celebrating the overcoming of or liberation from illness, individuals with direct experience of the plague provided advice and statistics while discussing causes, all within a general framework of optimism.

Secondly, Cohn illustrates that medical professionals shifted their approach from one that focused on individual patients to a more general consideration of public health concerns. While remedies and discussions of causality that sound odd to modern readers abound in the medical literature of the period, so too do entirely rational discussions of the usefulness of boiling water, personal hygiene, and the link between proper diet and health. This shift made physicians the natural allies of governmental and church officials who put the ideas of these health professionals to work by providing food to the poor—due to a recognition of the relationships between poor nutrition and illness (210)—and cleaner conditions, as well as better education about how to avoid illness. While these Renaissance efforts may have been of limited effectiveness, Cohn’s account makes clear that this was due more to the limited resources at the disposal of pre-modern government and Church officials than to inherent ignorance on their part. Furthermore, the need for coordinated efforts in the face of plague led to increasing competence and reach on the part of both Italian regional governments and the institutions of the Church.

Cohn’s study does leave importance questions unanswered. For example, while he provides numerous charts showing the number of sixteenth-century works dealing with plague and the geographic distribution of authors and points of publication, he provides almost no information on who read these works or how they were read. Relying as he does on the very valuable Edit 16, the census documenting Italian books printed during the sixteenth century, this is understandable and should not be seen as a flaw in his study. However, the impact of the various works Cohn refers to cannot be fully known through a barebones recitation of publication information. For that, an analysis of copies of the texts themselves, including information such as that drawn from marginalia left by readers, would be necessary. Such an approach might make for an interesting future study, but for the present Cohn’s Cultures of Plague provides an intriguing and deeply insightful analysis of the effects of plague on the Italian peninsula during the late Renaissance.

Old Tales/Modern Tellings: Early Medieval Revenants in Science Fiction and Fantasy

2010-09-07T09:04:00.000-07:00

Article by Suanna H. Davis, Houston Baptist University

The retelling of old tales is not simple reiteration. The old tales come instead in variations, which are “repetition with a difference” (Derrida). Modern science fiction and fantasy tales take advantage of older stories to add vividness and verisimilitude through allusions and borrowings. These revenants of earlier stories allow for a single reference to bring to mind a cornucopia of ideas, symbols, and themes already attached to the medieval text. This only happens, however, if the audience of the work has the frame of reference to recognize the stories and their implications; thus the existence of early medieval revenants implies a cultural literacy much more widespread than many academics perceive.

Fantasy frequently takes advantage of the allusion aspects of retelling by setting the story in medieval or seemingly medieval ages (Goodrich 165). Anne McCaffrey’s Dragon series does this. So does William Goldman’s book and its movie adaptation The Princess Bride. More recently J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series has medievalisms within it, as the school is in a castle, and hearkens back to the medieval bestiaries with its collection of unusual pets.

This purposeful medievalism is not the end of the revenants in speculative fiction however. Instead, there are a plethora of textual referents with the most popular medieval revenants involving Arthur, Merlin, and other characters from the Arthurian tales. These, in fact, are so popular that there is a website which deals only with Arthur reinterpretations in comics (Arthur of the Comics Project Blog). Because the Arthurian tradition in science fiction and fantasy is so strong, I am going to ignore it completely. Otherwise you would be reading for hours just for a list of the works involving Arthur in modern popular fiction.

Instead, what I would like to point out is the popularity of ancient stories, which originally appeared in or were primarily popular in Old and Middle English, which have survived and been reintroduced into popular literature. According to Fradenburg, there appears to be a “vast popular knowledge” of medieval works (209), so that even with a non-Arthurian limitation, there are still myriads of texts that refer to earlier English-language literature, perhaps many of which I have not yet read or recognized. The ones I will point out, however, indicate that cultural literacy in the stories of the Western canon remains fairly high, at least among those writing and reading in the speculative fiction genres.

Cultural literacy must be strong within this audience because what use would a reference be if the referent were unintelligible to the readers? True, an archaic reference might add some prideful shine to a story for the author, but it would add nothing to the audience’s experience of the tale. Stories with failed references are usually failed stories. Thus, the fact that these revenants exist in popular literature attests to the continued resonance of these earlier stories in our culture, however they may have been transferred. Some, D’Arcens for example, even argue for a strong resurgence in medievalism, both in academia and in popular culture indicating a growing cultural literacy in terms of medieval history and texts (81).

Beowulf is a popular early source for speculative fiction borrowings. The use of Beowulf in modern science fiction and fantasy tales includes quotes from the poem itself, quotes in Old English, a character identified as Grendel whose story includes a historical discussion of the poem, and nomenclature from the epic. All of the authors discussed, while not mainstream, are successful science fiction and fantasy authors with multiple series in print; they include Christopher Stasheff; Patricia Briggs; Larry Niven, Steven Barnes, and Jerry Pournelle; David Weber; and Eric Flint.

In his book The Oathbound Wizard Christopher Stasheff uses quotes from Beowulf as an incantation for magical conjuring. The main character, Matt, a modern graduate student transported to a parallel and medieval universe, begins to quote from Beowulf during a battle. In this world poetry can be wielded by wizards to create those persons and events described in the poem. Matt invokes Grendel to stop a sorcerer’s magic and after putting Grendel to good use in defeating the sorcerer’s army, sends Grendel away, not to die, but to remain at home, with a slight change in the verse. When the others in Matt’s party asked how he managed to stop the evil warriors, he says, “That’s an old story… and a reasonably long one” (193).

Then he proceeds to tell it to them, though the lines he uses to start the story telling are not poetic, since he does not wish to invoke the horror once again, but a fairy tale beginning: “Once long ago and very far away, a hero named Hrothgar built him a hall, hight Heorot” (193). To this point Grendel had been the invocation, but the tale, as told off page, caused the troupe’s eyes to widen as they “listened to the wondrous tale of the hero Beowulf” (193). By telling the tale of Beowulf, Matt moves the focus away from his recent amazing actions and onto a more traditional warrior hero. Perhaps one would expect such repurposed tale-telling on Stasheff’s part, since he is a literature professor (Her Majesty’s Wizard 343), but as a literature professor one would also expect that he would understand the limitations of his audience’s knowledge of the work, and yet he invokes the fierce monstrousness of Grendel with no revealed explication. The characters in the book hear the story but the readers are expected to already know it.

In her presentation of the Beowulf legend, the next author not only references the Beowulf poem, but offers an explication for the transformation of the Beowulf story from the true tale she relates to the literary epic we recognize today. She is not a literature professor, but studied history in college (Mike Briggs).

Patricia Briggs, in her Alpha and Omega werewolf series, references Grendel as background for the development of the mysterious werewolf leader, giving him a point of origin which is far more real and geographically located than others of his age.

In the book Cry Wolf, Bran, the Alpha werewolf of the North American continent, is trapped by a witch. During this horrible experience the readers are informed that this has happened to Bran before. Centuries earlier his witch-mother had him Changed into a werewolf. After his Change, he lived for years under her thumb and then, when he was able to break free and kill her, he went berserk. For decades, perhaps centuries, Bran as Grendel ravaged the area where he lived, destroying all humans who ventured into his forest. Then, in a slightly Monty Python-esque way, he got better and walked away from his aspect as Grendel in the form of a Welsh bard. In Briggs’s work there is no Beowulf, unless, in a not-yet-released publication, this hero turns out to be Bran’s, and thus Grendel’s, son, who is the one who helped Bran tame the “darkness within.”

Unlike Stasheff’s references to the poem, which are translations, Briggs uses an Old English quote to reference Grendel, “him of eagum stod ligge gelicost leoht unfaeger,” but translates it when a character reasonably asks for its meaning. This is the only use of Old English in the series to date, yet its inclusion argues in favor of cultural literacy in that the language itself is one rarely studied outside of academic circles. In fact the use of the Old English, a visibly foreign language, requires that the readers understand something that my students have trouble with; Old English is not what Shakespeare spoke.

This common misunderstanding of what is meant by Old English will most likely change soon, because Mel Gibson is making a Viking movie starring Leonardo DiCaprio, which is being scripted in Old English and Old Norse (Faraci).

In her novel Briggs describes the changes between her tale and the epic poem by saying that the tale was a compilation; “Grendel owed something to Bran’s time as a beserker, as he did to other stories handed down over the centuries” (Cry Wolf 263). This explanation of why her story differs from the epic poem is a way of arguing for authenticity, which, in a fictional work, is seriously questionable anyway.

Another argument in favor of Beowulf being well-known within American culture comes from an unlikely trio of authors, Niven, Pournelle, and Barnes. Niven was a mathematician before becoming a writer. Pournelle has two Ph. D.s, one in psychology and the other in political science (Reisner). Barnes dropped out of college, with an uncompleted degree in communication arts (Govan).

These three men have a space odyssey, Legacy of Heorot, whch begins with a reference to Hrothgar’s hall in the title and progresses through a metamorphoses of alien life out of their watery home and onto land, becoming carnivorous grendels. The sequel specifically references the Old English poem with its title of Beowulf’s Children and a character in the book is Old Grendel, a mother and one of the carnivorous native life forms which is intelligent and eventually makes contact with the human aliens of the planet.

In David Weber’s Honor Harrington series, Beowulf is a planet, home of the most skilled geneticists in the human universe, and Grendel is the capital city. However, in the co-authored book Torch of Freedom the names also come into play as the characters of the poem. After it is discovered that the planet Beowulf is the target of a planned takeover, a character says, “you're going to see the rage of Beowulf unleashed in the universe” because the people of Beowulf will “finally take down Grendel,” and the response will be immediate “once they learn the monster has a mother after all” (Weber and Flint, chapter 63). In this novel, the genetically manipulative slavers are transformed into Grendel and the secretive cabal, which plans to take over the universe for the genetic purity of all and is the ruling force behind the slavers, is revealed as Grendel’s mother.

In this work we again find non-literature majors wielding Old English tales with a flourish. The authors are Eric Flint who had three years in a Ph. D. program in history before he quit (Flint) and David Weber who owned and operated a PR firm (“About”).

Most of these speculative fiction authors were not English literature specialists, yet their work hearkens very specifically to an Old English tale whose popularity re-emerged with Tolkien’s 1937 article, “Beowulf: The Monster and the Critics.” They reference the poem without retelling the story, assuming that readers will understand the reference. This assumption indicates an expectation of cultural literacy at least in knowing the broad outlines of the tale of Beowulf.

Though Beowulf is a major literary poem which is frequently referenced in science fiction and fantasy literature, there are other early revenants, even Old English revenants.

For example, in one of the 1634 series, Eric Flint, with his coauthor Virginia DeMarce, references Judith. In this section of The Ram Rebellion there is the tale of a woman taken unwillingly into a sexual relationship and her willingness to kill the man who forced her into this situation. The text specifically identifies this female character with “Judith with the head of Holofernes” (691). (I recognize that this is possibly a misidentification of the deuterocanonical book of Judith and there is some justification for that argument, since the Judith of the story offers to pierce his brain with a spike, which is what Jael did to Sisera in the Old Testament book of Judges (4). In that case, this is an argument against biblical literacy since the two stories are conflated.)

Medieval legends also offer fodder for science fiction and fantasy stories. These can range from tales which were written down in the middle ages to those which were said to have taken place during the medieval era.

Two tales which were originally written down in the 1260 text Golden Legend appear in Gordon R. Dickson’s Dragon and the George series. The first is the story of St. George and the dragon while the second is the story of the flight of the biblical Jesus and his family to Egypt.

In The Dragon and the George humans are called Georges in honor of the Knight of the Red Cross, as preserved in the 1260 Golden Legend. The main character is transformed into a dragon and finds out what dragons think of the Georges, making alliances with them along the way.

The other medieval revenant used in this series by Dickson is the retelling of the flight of the Christ child and his family to Egypt, where they are met by dragons. This story, which can be found in Pseudo-Matthew chapter 18, was popularized in Golden Legend and is used to great effect in The Earl, the Troll, and the Dragon.

The same book uses the story of Wenceslas, an early king of Bohemia, to allow an atheist to properly celebrate a medieval Christmas. The main character is called upon to sing a Christian Christmas carol and, not wanting to offend, chooses “Good King Wenceslas” which is reproduced in its entirety in the novel.

The tales of Wenceslas include an accompanying legend that says he sleeps with a group of knights in the mountain ready to come out at need to protect the homeland. This tale has also been associated with Charlemagne and it is the Charlemagne version that Christopher Stasheff uses in his book The Oathbound Wizard. The series takes place in an alternate universe just a few generations past Charlemagne, and in this novel, Charlemagne and his knights are waiting in a mountain cave to awaken at need. In fact, they rouse a bit from their slumbers when Charlemagne’s heir brings the main character for training in the knightly virtues.

The same series also includes popular medieval tale of Prester John, a legendary Christian king who ruled a kingdom in the East. In The Feline Wizard Prester John is a much-sought-after king who rules a very enlightened and isolated kingdom.

In the first book in this series, Christopher Stasheff said he intended to present Catholicism as it was believed in medieval Europe (Her Majesty’s Wizard 343). Thus there is a purposeful medievalism in the novels which allows for the invocation of earlier tales. But the appearance of the literary revenants argues that Stasheff, at least, believes that his audience will already be familiar with the tales.

The multiplicity of revenants from early medieval works, of which those mentioned are but a handful, indicates that there is an expectation of cultural literacy regarding these texts. Certainly the multiple variations of Beowulf indicate that its influence goes far beyond the English literature classroom. Perhaps Stasheff, as an English academic, assumes a far greater cultural literacy than the average author, but even authors outside of academia reference and engage with early medieval texts, thus reintegrating them into popular culture and reinforcing their importance.

Works Cited

“About David Weber.” Press Release: Baen.com. 3 March 2000. Web. 14 December 2009.

Briggs, Mike. “The Obligatory Biography.” Patricia Briggs.com. 2005. Web. 2 February 2010.

Briggs, Patricia. Cry Wolf: An Alpha and Omega Novel. New York: Penguin Group, 2008. Print.

D’Arcens, Louise. “Deconstruction and the Medieval Indefinite Article: The Undecidable Medievalism of Brian Helgeland’s A Knight’s Tale.” Parergon 25.2, 80-98. 2008. Web. 14 December 2009.

Dickson, Gordon R. The Dragon, the Earl, and the Troll. New York: Ace, 1994. Print.

Faraci, David. “Move Over Thor, Mel Gibson is Going Old Norse.” The Wolfman. 17 January 2010. Web. 19 January 2010.

Flint, Eric. “Biography.” Eric Flint’s Place on the Web. 13 March 2006. Web. 12 December 2009.

Flint, Eric and Virginia DeMarce. 1634: The Ram Rebellion. Wake Forest, NC: Baen Books, 2007.

Fradenburg, Louise Olga. “’So That We May Speak of Them’: Enjoying the Middle Ages.” New Literary History 28.2, 205-230. 1977. Web. 13 December 2009.

Goodrich, Peter. “Magical Medievalisms and the Fairy Tale in Susan Cooper’s The Dark is Rising Sequence.” The Lion and the Unicorn, 12.2, 165-177. December 1988. Web. 2 January 2010.

Govan, Sandra Y. “Steven Barnes.” About.com: African-American Literature. 2010. Web. 2 February 2010.

Niven, Larry, Jerry Pournelle, and Steven Barnes. Beowulf’s Children. New York: Tor Books, 2009. Print.

---. The Legacy of Heorot. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987. Print.

Reisner, Ivy. “Inferno.” SFSite Reviews. 2009. Web. 12 January 2010.

Stasheff, Christopher. The Feline Wizard. New York: Del Rey, 2000. Print.

---. Her Majesty’s Wizard. New York: Del Rey, 1986. Print.

---. The Oathbound Wizard. New York: Del Rey, 2004. Print.

Weber, David and Eric Flint. Torch of Freedom. Wake Forest, NC: Baen Books, 2009. Ebook.

2010-07-29T12:35:00.001-07:00

Designing the Modern Interior: From the Victorians to Today. Edited by Penny Sparke, Anne Massey, Trevor Keeble, and Brenda Martin.

Oxford and New York: Berg, June 2009. Cloth: ISBN 978-1847882882, $150; paper: ISBN 978-1847882875, $49.95. 320 pages.

Review by Paul Ranogajec, City University of New York

Modernity, domesticity, privacy, identity, taste, class, consumption—these are key among the major issues that any discussion of interior space is bound to elicit. Designing the Modern Interior engages these and many other issues; indeed, among its strengths is the breadth of its coverage thematically and also geographically. Despite its professed aims, it does not radically alter the design history field’s focus on the domestic interior as the site for modernity’s encounter with interiority—in fact, eleven of the seventeen essays deal specifically with house interiors, and only one (on Hans Scharoun’s Philharmonie) deals with an unambiguously public building. Even more, the editors state that one of their chief aims was to treat interior spaces globally, yet over half of the essays deal with one or another of just three Western nations (Britain, Germany, or the United States), and the book’s reach does not extend to Latin America, Africa, or the Middle East. Overall, despite these relative limitations, the volume is a welcome step in the direction of expanding design history’s geographic and theoretical boundaries. The essays, individually and as a whole, can be taken as both models and foundations for further interdisciplinary and more rigorously theoretical work.

Penny Sparke’s introductory essay is a useful summary of the themes outlined above and serves as an introduction to the organization of the book. It could easily serve, as well, as an overview for an undergraduate course on modern interior design history—even a more general cultural history course that touches upon the themes of domesticity, the private realm, and design—because it offers readers a coherent preface to more in-depth study by laying out the terrain of contemporary scholarship and its theoretical concerns. The book as a whole exemplifies this quality of broad reader appeal: it is organized chronologically into four sections (each prefaced by summary introductions) that trace the rise of the interface between interior spaces and the experiences and ideas of modernity, well-suited to a variety of undergraduate and graduate courses in modern design and architectural history.

One of the most promising aspects of the collection is its emphasis on popular and non-modernist design. The editors have included a number of essays that move decisively beyond the modernist-dominated discourse—largely borrowed from conventional architectural history in the mid-twentieth century—as described by the introductory essay for part one by Emma Ferry. As she notes, the study of interiors is now marked by increasing interest in the multifarious contexts of design, moving beyond the appeal to aesthetics or the modernist obsession with technology and authenticity (yet not shying from the ambiguities and problems inherent with such concepts). In reflecting on the essays in the volume, Ferry rightly notes how the volume’s studies benefit from interdisciplinary theoretical perspectives that engage a fascination “with an era of high imperialism, emerging nationhoods, religious revivals and crises of faith, contested gender and class politics and public debates on sexuality” (19). Explorations of the ideological basis of interior design are not lacking among the pages of this volume, and this fact is one of its major contributions. One of the perhaps unintended uses of the book is therefore as an anchor for young scholars in particular—as reference, certainly, but also, in the case of many of the mostly well-written and lucid essays, as methodological and theoretical models. Fiona Fisher’s essay on “public houses” in late Victorian London encapsulates these concerns when she writes of interior spaces as “highly controlled, yet permissive of new forms of social activity,” which can be considered “as sites that express tensions between social autonomy and regulation that are characteristic of modernity and which represent concerns for social status and identity that are a distinguishing feature of consumer culture” (51).

Parts one and two are perhaps the most provocative in the volume. Comprising eight of the book’s seventeen chapters, the essays in these first two sections traverse the highly complex and contested period from 1870 to 1940. The essays explore the continued vitality of popular, historicist design and its confrontation with the formulation and institutionalization of modernism. With a broad-mindedness and diversity of perspectives, these essays negotiate this critical period in the development of modern architecture and design—a period of intense eclecticism alongside the emerging forms of modernism. Fisher’s essay on the negotiation of class and identity in the public houses of London and Christopher Reed’s essay on the “Amusing Style” as championed by the magazine Vogue are both especially rewarding for the ways in which they explore, to use Reed’s words, “the productive diversity of modernisms that flourished in the twenties” (90). The plural in the term “modernisms” underscores the volume’s general sympathy to a wider understanding of modernism itself and to a broader conception of the design possibilities available under the conditions of modernity, thus eschewing the long-held modernist bias against eclecticism or historicism.

The two later sections also contain provocative essays covering the post-World War II period. Especially instructive are chapters thirteen and fourteen—an essay by Anne Massey on British nationalism and the design of ocean liners, and one by David Crowley on the ruined house designs of two mid-century artists (from Russia and Germany) that explore “the condition of the house in fragments—decayed and riddled with spatial and temporal uncertainties” (234). Chapter fifteen by Sarah Chaplin also merits special mention for its discussion of the production of popular and transgressive social practices in the distinctively postmodern Japanese “Love Hotel.” These essays dramatically expand the discourse on interiors and design beyond the traditional boundaries of home and bourgeois commercial structures and give indications of future research avenues.

Although the volume is by no means stingy when it comes to illustrations (there are 77), all of them are in black and white, and some are of lackluster quality (for instance, many of the photos in chapter six). Nonetheless, the essays are generally models of concision and clarity—most of the essays are seven to ten pages inclusive of illustrations. As an introduction to and expansion of the field of modern design and interiors history, the volume is a welcome addition to the literature.

2010-07-29T12:33:00.001-07:00

Supernatural Fiction in Early Modern Drama and Culture. By Ryan Curtis Friesen.

Portland, OR: Sussex Academic Press, January 2010. Cloth: ISBN 978-1845193294, $74.95. 249 pages.

Review by Suanna H. Davis, Houston Baptist University

Friesen offers an incredibly well-written introduction to the supernatural in the early modern era (1510-1625). His presentation begins with purportedly non-fiction works, starting with a discussion of Agrippa’s Three Books of Occult Philosophy, moving onto Bruno’s work, then presenting the sixteenth-century pamphlets on witch trials, and offering commentary on Dee’s angelic interpretations. The second half of the book looks at magic within Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, Shakespeare’s Macbeth, Middleton’s The Witch, multiple of Jonson’s dramas, and Shakespeare’s The Tempest.

Overall the work is detailed, offering insight into the works discussed as well as presenting that insight in its scholarly context. References for each chapter range from twenty-three to one hundred forty.

A quirk of the book is the author’s insistence that readers must not believe in magic. It is a bit eccentric to think that scholars reading in this field would believe in magic, though perhaps the title of the work would attract dabblers in the occult arts. In addition, even if one were a believer in magic, Friesen offers no reasons why this would corrupt one’s understanding of either his book or the texts which he examines within it. However, his discussion of how to refer to those who were thought to be magic users in his introduction is an interesting lexical discussion.

The text offers an introduction to the discussion of magic that is accessible to all levels of knowledge. While there are references to antecedent authors and texts (Nicholas Cusanos inspired Bruno, for instance), most of the discussion is developed in the book so that no prior knowledge is necessary for understanding. Despite its accessibility, the book offers an expert in the field an interesting development angle, in terms of the fictionality of the texts examined.

The fact that an examination of historical and philosophical treatises comprises the first two chapters of a book entitled Supernatural Fiction is surprising, but Friesen makes them work. He argues that Agrippa was simply presenting what others had argued and that Bruno used his philosophical description of magic to create a fairly modern worldview. Therefore, neither of these authors wrote a truthful argument for magic.

The texts the book covers are introduced in historical and cultural context. Friesen details their creation and their cultural and literary impact. He presents the works which they grew out of and the stream of literature in which they were read. Each chapter can be read alone without significantly reducing its efficacy.

The explication of all the precedents is sometimes developed in a way that a careless reader might misunderstand. In his discussion of Agrippa, Friesen mentions Simon Magus and his appearance in the biblical book of Acts as well as in pseudo-Clementine. He also discusses Simon’s argument with Peter and his ability to fly as “biblical legend.” This story, however, is not in the Bible. While referencing the story as biblical legend may be factually accurate—it does refer to a biblical person and it is a legend—it could easily mislead readers to assume that the story is in the Bible; therefore, careful reading is required.

The book presents a fascinating discussion of the witch trials and the actuality of witches, mentioning that most of those tried as witches in the sixteenth century were married women, while about fifteen percent were men. Friesen compares this to the modern stereotype of witches as old crones. He also discusses the number of admitted witches, presenting various scholarly arguments focusing on the idea that these confessions were a means of creating agency for the accused.

Friesen’s presentation, generally objective and even-handed, suffers slightly in his chapter on Dee. While Dee was clearly a scholar in his time, owning almost ten times as many books as the library at Cambridge, his occult practices, including the writing and translations of mediums’ purported messages from angels is presented by Friesen as a clear example of cunning ambition. However, facts which Friesen includes mitigate this view. Why would someone who was blatantly manipulating people follow his own false prophecies and move his entire family away from their home in England and establish them in Poland? Why would someone who was inventing futures not be careful to create prophecies that would not be fulfilled in his lifetime? And, finally, why would someone whose investigation into angelic discussions was the result of a desire for prestige hide away from the court that could have promoted his ambition? Despite the questions that his own presentation raises, Friesen argues for Dee’s duplicity in the creation of the angelic conversations.

As Friesen moves into the unarguably fictional texts, the discussion of magic adds a measure of literary analysis. The themes, archetypes, and characterizations of both magic and magic users are described, analyzed, and contextualized. For example, in the final chapter Friesen presents scholarly arguments about Prospero’s magic. He gives the main lines of argument and then evaluates the play according to his reading of Prospero’s use and renunciation of magic, presenting Ariel as dramatized magic and Caliban as the inheritor of a wholly negative rough magic who eventually becomes responsible for himself.

The book provides a fascinating glimpse into the early modern view of magic, through historical and philosophical treatises, pamphlets, diaries and transcriptions of séances, and contemporary dramas. The variety of texts examined makes this work particularly intriguing.

2009-11-29T15:59:00.000-08:00

Composing the Citizen: Music as Public Utility in Third Republic France.

By Jann Pasler.

Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, July 2009. Cloth: ISBN 978-0-520-25740-5, $60.00. 817 pages.

Review by Reba Wissner, Brandeis University

There is no better summary of Jann Pasler’s Composing the Citizen than the one she herself writes: “In Composing the Citizen, I investigate how French citizens thought music could contribute to the formulation and health of their democracy, and why they embraced musical progress as emblematic of national progress. I explore the musical education they envisaged, from thinking a child’s first intellectual efforts should involve singing to devoting a significant place to music in the Universal Exhibitions. I examine the shifting beliefs and conditions that led to and then mitigated the pervasiveness of republican ideology in French culture” (31). Pasler examines the roots, implications, and consequences of music as public utility in Third Republic France (1870-1940), “a time when politicians intent on creating a lasting democracy in France saw music as integral to the public good—a way to imagine the future voice diverse aspirations, and discover shared values,” examining social practices across cultures through the lens of music’s usefulness (xii).
The author’s main argument is that “music, musical instruments, performing situations, and images of these—often associated with race, ethnicity, class, gender, and culture—helped people become aware of their positions in the debates about identity and nation” (645). She argues throughout that music helped to form a commonality and establishment of a national identity within French society, through its “public utility,” since “generally speaking, in France, the useful in music is what links sound to society, music to the community” (83). The study is motivated by the author’s personal interest as a woman of French descent who spent a great deal of time working in the French archives, a biographical aspect which I feel is useful in order to understand the incorporation of the fruits of her copious research.

Pasler’s book is an in-depth explanation of utilité publique and the government’s role in it, identifying that “the idea that the social utility of goods and services should take priority over their personal utility, provides a key to understanding French notions of government up to the present” (70). The study includes plentiful discussion of French history, politics, law, and philosophy, to place the concept of utilité publique within proper context, while outlining music and the establishment of community, as well as the types of music important in the revolutionary tradition and the challenges presented to composers to write such music. There is a heavy emphasis on French conceptions of both moral and musical progress, as well as the author’s notion of composing the citizen. Music as resistance is also an important component of the book, including an appropriation of music’s utility for non-republican purposes. The role of Wagner’s music for this purpose is examined in detail, but the book also concentrates on the role of composers such as Delibes, Saint-Saens, Massenet, Satie- composers that we don’t typically equate with music and political activism. The role of opera, its prohibitions and characteristics, are discussed at length, as well as the use of older—or as she deems them, “ancient”—forms of music in modern compositions is also discussed at length. In total, the book serves as a gateway to the author’s next books, providing an introduction to their subjects and as a result examines on a broad basis “how, through their music, the French, particularly at the end of the century, engaged with identity from the perspective of race, class, and gender” (645) and focusing on what music has done and what the Third Republic has shown us. Pasler concludes the book by connecting her research of this period to its applications in modern France and our globally interconnected, finance-driven world.

Pasler’s study is divided into four parts consisting of twelve chapters plus an introduction and coda, and three appendices. Part I: Forming Public Spirit and Useful Citizens, Part II: Shaping Judgment and National Taste, Part III: Instituting Republican Culture, and Part IV: Shifting Notions of Utility: Between the Nation and the Self, together create a chronological study of the use of music in France during this seventy-year span. Quotes of varying size are interwoven throughout the work and in between the pictures and musical examples. Both the abundant illustrations and musical examples featured throughout the book are helpful to the reader, though it is not necessary for the reader to be able to read music for the author’s point to be clearly understood. Each of the appendices contain the important political and musical events in the Early Third Republic, as well as the music’s varying appearances in publications of the day.

The book is dense and sometimes seems quite convoluted in terms of information. The reader may feel bogged down, because it seems as if the author included every single primary source and piece of evidence, which has both its plusses and minuses. Pasler uses specific pieces of music to illustrate points and as case studies throughout the book and talks a lot throughout the book about public policy in France. The chapters are long, often encompassing many different topics, making them sometimes difficult to follow the author’s train of thought. The book includes little analysis of the implications of the conception of music among the presentation of an ample amount of facts. The writing is clear but definitely not concise.

While the book falls into the area of music, readers interested in history, public policy, and philosophy will find much to grab onto. There is no other book like it that has been published in the field of musicology, and Pasler’s study gives the reader a glimpse into the musical life in a single part of Europe that has largely been ignored for the time period that the book covers. As an interdisciplinary work, Jann Pasler’s Composing the Citizen is a model for contemporary scholarship.

2009-10-19T11:26:00.000-07:00

The Medieval Cook.

By Bridget Ann Henisch.

Rochester, NY: Boydell Press, February 2009. Paper: ISBN 978-1843834380, $47.95. 200 pages.

Review by Stephanie Plummer, Bowling Green State University

Medieval foodways, as shown in popular film or understood in the popular imagination, rely on motifs of abundance and lack. Regardless of the historical accuracy in film, or its scarcity, what is frequently missing in these images is an interpretive framework for understanding what it meant to eat in the medieval period. Foodways scholars, anthropologists, and cultural analysts have worked to build such a framework, providing useful ways to approach what might otherwise be a forgotten force in the progression of history. In particular, the anthropologist Sidney Mintz and American Studies professor Warren Belasco, among others, have worked to outline the power, hierarchy, and cultural markers present in our understanding of taste and even our daily meals.

Although food studies has made great strides toward creating unified theories about food, this scholarship has tended toward an analysis of a particular contemporary culture, as part of far-thrown anthropological fieldwork or consumerist critique. Bridget Ann Henisch, in her fourth book, The Medieval Cook, departs from the tendency toward exoticizing food or focusing on a single food item while reinforcing the previous work of foodways scholars to link social and economic class with food consumption. As Henisch states in her preface, the goal of The Medieval Cook is to illuminate the context of medieval kitchens and dining rooms, and the individuals who participated in those activities. The Medieval Cook examines much of Western Europe beginning roughly with the Norman Conquest and extending into the early 1500s. Thus, The Medieval Cook pieces together the literature, art, and visual culture of the medieval period to construct an image of chefs and cooks, abundance and lack, banquet halls and cottage hearths.

In this way, Henisch eschews heavy-handed analysis while clearly outlining in six chapters the borders that marked the medieval “haves” from the “have-nots.” Chapters such as “Fast Food and Fine Catering” discuss those areas of medieval life, the market stalls, taverns, guest houses, bakeries and butcher shops, which betrayed one’s class, position, and to some medieval Europeans, one’s questionable moral character. The final chapter, “On the Edge: the Cook in Art,” deviates from the general purpose of the other chapters by discussing works of art that feature medieval kitchen workers or specific medieval foods, such as pancakes. This chapter is less about the general mood and activities of people in the middle ages and more about the visual culture which remains from that time. Nonetheless, this chapter describes the visual, medieval context of the culinary arts; thus, it fits well into the overall goal of The Medieval Cook. In this chapter Henisch also outlines The Medieval Cook’s conclusions, that medieval cookery was not entirely appreciated as an art, that food’s central position in daily life meant it could not be excluded from art and literature and that medieval cooks knew the difficult work of improvisation. That this chapter includes the author’s end remarks is not entirely clear until the last few pages of the chapter. As a result, Henisch’s condensed conclusions leave the reader wanting more guidance about the book’s overall meaning.

Henisch has charged herself with no small task considering the challenges inherent in gathering information recorded over the six centuries discussed in The Medieval Cook. Illiteracy, most common among the lowest economic strata and those also most likely to be household workers in the medieval period, means that a picture of medieval cookery could only ever be partial. Furthermore, dealing with delicate and potentially deteriorating documents certainly must have been a challenge in achieving a complete image of medieval foodways. Even determining the medieval period’s beginning and end dates could be difficult given the contentiousness which surrounds academic definitions of exactly when and where medieval society was situated.

Although The Medieval Cook might have benefited from addressing issues such as time frame or regional difference more closely, Henisch provides readers with a vivid description of food and preparation methods, subjects which can be especially difficult to transmit to readers. Furthermore, it is clear from the vivid language in The Medieval Cook that Henisch enjoys writing about food. This may be the reason that several recipes for medieval fare appear in The Medieval Cook for the adventurous food lover to try out. Additionally, the descriptiveness and excitement in her writing transforms what could potentially be a dry subject into a lush treat for readers. Despite The Medieval Cook’s accessibility, some excerpts taken from medieval literature could prove a stumbling block for readers unfamiliar with Middle English. Henisch combats this in some areas by providing a direct, modern translation, while keeping these excerpts to a minimum and often using their presence to enhance the drama and tension which surrounded medieval household management.

What is given to the reader, then, is a fair opportunity to scrutinize for him or herself the management of medieval kitchens and foodways or at the very least, the way these things were represented by medieval artisans and writers. As a result, The Medieval Cook may be of interest to chefs, home cooks, and those interested in history or the culinary arts. However, the conclusions and research in The Medieval Cook would also be helpful to art historians, literary scholars, medievalists, cultural anthropologists, and popular culture scholars. In particular, Henisch’s research adds to a large body of work on the interaction between foodways and social and economic class, while giving readers a rather comprehensive description of the jobs, dishes, ingredients, and utensils present in medieval kitchens.

2009-08-11T13:01:00.000-07:00

Francesca Caccini at the Medici Court: Music and the Circulation of Power

By Suzanne G. Cusick. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, July 2009. Cloth with CD: ISBN 9780226132129, $60. 488 pages.

Review by Reba Wissner, Brandeis University

Francesca Caccini was one of the most prolific female composers and performers of the seventeenth century, and recently, musicologists and interdisciplinarians have generated an extensive body of literature on the role of women in early modern Europe, mainly in Italy. Suzanne G. Cusick’s study of the composer eloquently situates itself within that realm. This, Cusick’s first book, has been long awaited. A scholar known for her enlightening and engaging articles on subjects such as feminist perspectives on early music and the use of music as torture in terrorist containment camps, it is high time for a book by this talented scholar. Additionally, hers is the first extended and in-depth study of one of the most influential female Italian musicians of the Baroque. Cusick deliberately avoids the technical language that pervades most musicological scholarship while still conveying her ideas and analysis of Caccini, her role as a female in a predominantly male world, and her compositions. The author’s copious research brings to light a new side of Caccini that has been neglected far too long; she is portrayed not just as the daughter of famed composer Giulio Caccini, but as a composer, performer, and teacher in her own right, no longer studied in the shadow of her father. Cusick’s study illuminates the life of Francesca Caccini, placing her life within the context of family dynamics, societal norms, and economic implications.

The reader will immediately respect the clarity of Cusick’s prose, as well as her meticulous attention to detail. The book contains a CD to accompany and complement the study. There is plentiful incorporation of musical examples to demonstrate specific musico-textual instances in the music that are of the utmost value to those who can read music, but do not make understanding the book difficult for those who cannot. The book discusses and places into context the role of the professional musician, and Cusick frames her study with contemporaneous events in Florence during Caccini’s compositional activity. The book is organized into twelve chapters with three appendices including Francesca Caccini’s known performances and compositions. Cusick’s meticulousness has been extended into her careful transcriptions of Caccini’s extant letters, also found in an appendix.

Cusick’s desire to examine music “as a set of actions rather than as a set of works” (xxii) forms the basis of her study, and she succeeds brilliantly. The author confesses that the personal nature of this endeavor was spurred through observing and experiencing the effects of misogyny both in the classroom and in academia as a whole, but she confines this narrative only to the introduction, thus allowing the book to be focused on her research. Chapter 1 chronicles the birth and early life of Francesca, noting the special influence that her father and his music had on her and hers. Chapter 2 discusses Francesca under the employ of Christina de Lorraine, depicting Francesca as a commodity. Chapter 3 gives an in-depth look at the court of Christina de Lorraine and the environment in which Francesca worked. Chapter 4 discusses Francesca’s early service to the Medici Court as both composer and performer of court spectacle. Chapter 5 discusses Francesca’s home and the work ethic to which she subscribed. Chapters 6-8 introduce her first masterpiece of music, her first book of madrigals (Primo libro delle musiche, 1618), its contents, and the circumstances by which the pieces were composed. Cusick also analyzes the secular songs, some of which incorporate Marian tunes, in the first half of the book, in terms of their dialogic relationship to one another and the anxiety of voice that they express. She also outlines the second half of the first book of madrigals, but here instead of a collection of secular songs, we now have songs that while not sacred, are rooted in the sacred and sometimes liturgical tradition, such as psalms. Unlike those songs contained in the first half of the book, those in second half are not gendered. While Cusick proposes that the songs in the first book of madrigals are gendered, I question whether or not Caccini herself intended for such a reading of her music. Chapters 9-10 examine the circumstances surrounding the composition and performance of Francesca’s opera, La liberazione di Ruggiero, the only entertainment Francesca wrote to survive nearly whole. Cusick situates La liberazione di Ruggiero in relation to Maria Magdalena d’Austria’s regency and its relation to her political agenda. Chapter 11 discusses Francesca’s life post-Liberazione and the culmination of her public career after becoming widowed. Chapter 12 discusses life in Christina’s court after Francesca, as well as Christina’s interest in the Monastero di Santa Croce. Francesca’s life during the 1630s is also examined in this context, as well as her life after her patron’s death.

The major criticism of this text is the incorporation of sometimes seemingly trivial or supplementary information, for example the first part of Chapter 12. Additionally, Cusick’s book does not contain any particular argument, but rather is more of a contextual biography than a thought-provoking study. While Cusick’s explanation of the history of Christina and the Medici Court is both interesting and necessary, and she deals conscientiously with the dearth of archival materials available to her, there are some instances, mainly in Chapter 3, where I feel such copious detail seems at times both unnecessary and irrelevant and as a result detracts from the book’s purpose.

Suzanne Cusick’s groundbreaking study represents an important addition to recent musicological scholarship on the lives of female composers, particularly those of the seventeenth century; a field that only recently has been burgeoning. This book will be of interest to readers interested in music history, cultural studies, and the role of women in early modern Italy. By examining the historical and cultural elements, the author brings new, exciting, invigorating, and much-needed in-depth analysis, and provides a more accurate portrayal of the composer and her works than has been seen before.

2009-07-16T15:13:00.000-07:00

Holy Motherhood: Gender, Dynasty and Visual Culture in the Later Middle Ages

By Elizabeth L’Estrange. Manchester: Manchester University Press, October 2008. Cloth: ISBN 978-0719075438, $84. 320 pages.

Review by Kerr Houston, Maryland Institute College of Art

Elizabeth L’Estrange’s Holy Motherhood is an ambitious book that is built around several telescoping aims. Most basically, it involves an attempt to describe some of the ways in which images of saintly mothers and birth narratives in a group of manuscripts associated with the fifteenth-century houses of Anjou and Brittany may have been perceived by the aristocrats who owned the texts. More broadly, but relatedly, the book also argues for the general value of a specific interpretive strategy: in accenting what she calls the “situational eye,” L’Estrange emphasizes a mode of inquiry in which viewers’ experiences and what we might call their cultural equipment are seen as critical in informing their relationship to images. And, more broadly still, L’Estrange also sees her book as forging an alternative to essentialist interpretations of images used by women, and to recent readings of female imagery as either empowering or victimizing. Given such aims, Holy Motherhood is certainly a provocative book. But its reach, I think, exceeds its grasp, and I’ll try to show why.

First things first. Hoping to define the ways in which a group of aristocrats might have seen the manuscripts that they owned (the Fitzwilliam Hours is the best-known of them), L’Estrange spends most of the first half of her book investigating fifteenth-century views of, and practices related to, birth. She acknowledges the popularity of Saint Anne, the belatedly fertile matriarch who has also proven a fertile subject of academic inquiry over the past 25 years. She looks at medical treatises, and she argues that a range of birth-related prayers, amulets, and spells “would have been known by a wide variety of people” (55). And she argues that aristocrats familiar with the lying-in (a period of post-delivery recuperation) were attuned to a range of details, from the quality of cloths used to decorate the birthing room to the temporary inversion of gender relations that stemmed from the attention given to recovering mothers. At the least, then, the first half of the book thus offers a neat overview of some of the practices associated with birth in the later Middle Ages.

Any larger payoff, though, is only partial. L’Estrange argues that the responses of fifteenth-century readers to birth-related images were informed by a familiarity with these practices and by their own personal experiences and ambitions. But when she tries, in the second half of her book, to outline the reactions of individual readers to specific manuscript paintings, the speculative nature of such a venture is clear. Repeatedly, L’Estrange is forced to employ tentative phrasings, as when she writes that “it is possible to suggest” (218) that a later reader saw evidence divine intervention in the Fitzwilliam Hours. Given such qualified language, the notion of a situational eye sometimes feels more like a pretext for simple speculation than a lens through which actual historical practices are thrown into focus.

Even when she does root her analysis in hard historical fact, L’Estrange never fully resolves a nagging tension between the asserted relevance of individual experiences and the obvious relevance of larger cultural patterns. She usually offers biographical details regarding each reader, as if to indicate the possibility of a specifically personal reaction to the texts. But her assertions regarding the responses of readers are quite generic: fifteenth-century viewers, we learn, would have seen the images in relation to a common social pressure to produce male offspring, or a general familiarity with the fine cloths available to the aristocracy. And, oddly, L’Estrange also offers several extended Italian parallels, thus implicitly advancing transalpine similarities. Were the cognitive habits of fourteenth-century Paduans really comparable to those of fifteenth-century Angevins? Both the structure and the subtitle of L’Estrange’s book imply that they were, and point to an implicitly pan-European late medieval eye. Such a move is not, it’s worth pointing out, unusual in contemporary scholarship, and titles frequently exaggerate the scopes of studies. But in a book that wants to establish a new mode of art-historical analysis, a cavalier attitude towards the relative value of sources is surprising, and result in a diluted situational eye, which comes across as broadly collective.

Of course, all historical accounts have to come down somewhere on the spectrum between individuality and collectivity. But nothing in this book necessitates, as L’Estrange seems to think it does, a newly minted methodological term. Decades ago, Hans Robert Jauss famously argued that texts exist within a “horizon of expectations,” and L’Estrange’s manuscripts are no different. Similarly, her aristocrats form what Stanley Fish would call a general interpretive community. L’Estrange never mentions these well-known concepts, but she could: instead of trying to blaze a trail by herself, she might recognize that the forest was largely cleared decades ago.

L’Estrange’s arguments are also weakened by shaky readings of certain images in the manuscripts and by a selective presentation of evidence. Pamela Sheingorn has detailed, in another review of the book, several instances in which L’Estrange seems to misconstrue specific figures, or to ignore the likely understood meanings of narratives. L’Estrange might reply that, from her point of view, the meaning of an image is never fixed; rather, it depends on the cognitive habits of the viewer. But, if so, why are so many prominent aspects of the images simply left undiscussed? Surely some of the fifteenth-century readers of the Fitzwilliam Hours might have been struck by the fact that the paintings of birthing consistently unfold against a backdrop of utterly contemporary sexpartite rib vaults and late-Gothic interior architecture. Moreover, why limit the list of a viewer’s relevant experiences to marriages and births? Once we begin to speculate about the responses of historical viewers, any topic is potentially in play, and any reading that simply refuses to treat potential bands of evidence is by definition only partial.

A volume that tries, like this one, to do too much is guilty of a small sin, but it still manages to provoke useful questions about the fifteenth century and about modern scholarship.

2009-05-28T11:39:00.001-07:00

The Madonna of Humility: Development, Dissemination and Reception, c. 1340-1400

By Beth Williamson

New York: Boydell Press, February 2009. Cloth: ISBN 978-1-84383-419-9, $95. 195 pages.

Review by Denis V. Vovchenko, Northeastern State University

Beth Williamson seeks to completely revise the historiography of the group of images known as the Madonna of Humility – a composition of the Virgin seated on the ground, with the Christ-child seated on her lap, dating back to 1340s. She set it as her goal “to show that the old orthodoxies about its origins, its development, its dissemination and its meaning are all too simplistic” (12). While not claiming to come up with a single definitive interpretation, she attempts to point to “a multiplicity of possibilities.” To do that, she challenges the prevalent approach of a search for a prototype as devaluing local variations of the same theme as more or less imperfect reproductions. Specifically, she argues that the way to recover local agency is to go beyond the obsession with tracing “cultural influence” in favor of “cultural translation” into “vernacular” forms (2-5). With this goal mind, Beth Williamson attempts to contribute to “New Art History” and “Marxist Art History.” For Dr. Williamson, this approach means examining cultural and social contexts where the image was produced. At the same time, her study of the Madonna of Humility is supposed to encourage the use of visual evidence to shed light on the formation of social and religious identities.

All those ambitious attacks on the edifice of traditional scholarship are organized into eight chapters divided into three parts in accordance with the subtitle – development of the image in historiography and in its historical place of origin, dissemination from Avignon through Italy to Bohemia, and reception of the image with its different meanings.

In the first chapter, “The Madonna of Humility: Descriptions and Definitions,” Williamson discusses the shortcomings in the existing historiography of this image type. They include the relationship between the inscription and the image, the common etymological connection of “humus” (ground) and “humilitas” (humility), or the linkage between occasional suckling motif to humility because the practice of breastfeeding was associated with low classes in society. The biggest problem is in the question of the origins of the image. The author suggests that all the iconographical elements of the image cannot be traced to any single narrative image such as the Nativity, Annunciation, Crucifixion, or Woman of the Apocalypse in Spanish Apocalypse manuscripts.

After undermining the strongholds of the entrenched tradition in their entirety, in the remaining seven chapters she launches separate assaults on each one of them, starting with the earliest appearance of the theme in Chapter 2, “The Madonna of Humility in Avignon.” While she agrees with many commentators that Simone Martini was the most likely author of the image, she complicates the conventional account of an Italian Renaissance genius providing a model for subsequent mediocre imitators. Since Tuscan versions of the Madonna of Humility did not typically feature Apocalyptic motifs, Dr. Williamson argues that the original image must have been closely related to the fresco in the Papal Palace in Avignon (c. 1341). She strongly urges the reader to consider the possibility that that image did not spring from the mind of Simone Martini independently of the environment but rather was inspired by the French cultural milieu. In particular, she turns our attention to the Metz manuscript illustrations that contained the elements of the Madonna of Humility – the suckling or Lactans motif, the Apocalyptic symbols, and elements recalling the Annunciation (56). In addition to questioning the supremacy of the artist genius, this longest chapter challenges two more entrenched art history assumptions. It suggests that Europe beyond the Alps was not simply a recipient of new ideas from “a progressive Italian center” and that as an artistic medium, manuscript illustrations should not be automatically considered as less dynamic and innovative than panel and fresco paintings.

In chapter 3, “Early Appearances of the Image,” Williamson proposes to examine the early spread of the Madonna of Humility not in terms of style, composition, or personal influences of Simone Martini, or other Avignon artists on their counterparts in Southern Italy, but rather by focusing on how the preferences of local patrons might have shaped the variations made by the artists. Thus, the author draws our attention to pre-existing connections between the papal court at Avignon and the French-ruled Kingdom of Naples that could have made local patrons aware of the Northern European sources of the image. She also attempts to rescue local agency by stressing a receptive devotional climate. Based on the depiction of kneeling devotees beneath the image in the church of S. Pietro a Majella in Naples, she points to the flails in the hands of some of them and suggests that the church was associated with a local flagellant confraternity.

While offering “no definitive answer” again, in chapter 4, Williamson similarly emphasizes patronage networks as she traces the spread of the theme to Bohemia in 1360s. This methodology is not really revisionist art history as such, but it has never been used to analyze this specific group of images. In particular, the author mentions artists and patrons affiliated with Italian and Bohemian branches of the Dominican Order, but even more so, personal and familial connections of King Charles IV to France and Italy.

In contrast to the very pronounced interest in Apocalyptic themes in Naples and Prague, in Central Italy there was a strong tradition of the suckling or nursing motifs in art (chapter 5). The Sienese had long considered themselves a second Rome, and their civic emblem featured the she-wolf suckling Romulus and Remus. Also, the Virgin was considered the queen and the mother of the city, which made the image of the Virgin Lactans popular even before the transmission of the Madonna of Humility from Avignon. This tradition goes at least some way toward explaining the absence of Apocalyptic symbols in Central Italy. In this chapter, the author makes the strongest case to suggest how variations on the theme could depend on the local context.

In the last part of the book, “Reception,” the author seeks to challenge the existing interpretations of the meaning of the Madonna of Humility to late-medieval viewers. In the opening of that part, chapter 6, “Image and Reality,” stands out for two reasons. Unlike previous chapters, it relies not on the visual evidence but on an impressive body of primary and secondary textual sources. Also, it engages with the much broader context of late medieval social history as it questions the dominant historiographical view that the suckling motif was crucial to the perception of the Virgin’s humility. Williamson argues that while wet-nursing was indeed becoming a widespread practice among upper classes in Florence and elsewhere, breastfeeding should not be seen as socially degrading and humiliating. Instead, she points to a common medical belief that pregnancy resulted in poorer quality breast milk. Thus, hiring wet-nurses was a way to avoid having to stop conjugal relations after birth. Seen in this light, the suckling Virgin motif stood not for humility but rather for purity “because of the link between sexual continence and effective or safe breastfeeding” (147). Shifting back to the interpretation of visual aspects, in chapter 7 Williamson further questions the meaning of humility associated with the image. She argues that in all locations under consideration the image had funerary and devotional functions and emphasized the role of the Madonna as an intercessor and a co-redeemer of the deceased and penitents.

What is left of humility? Not much, after Williamson cautions against treating the inscription “Our Madonna of Humility” as a title describing a category of images; rather, she suggests, we should see the inscription as “an epithet relating to the Virgin and her qualities” (173). The traditional view considered the posture of the Virgin seated on the ground as crucial to the idea of humility seemingly supported by the medieval etymology linking “humus” (ground) and “humilitas” (humility). Williamson reminds the reader that not all examples of the image have inscriptions, and that they usually feature visual references to the Annunciation. The author argues that to the late medieval viewer that episode signified humility as a reminder of when the Virgin humbly accepted her destiny to become the Mother of God (174). As in other chapters, this specific argument may have broader implications and in this case encourage reassessment of the connection between image and inscription elsewhere.

Overall, Williamson succeeds in pointing to “a multiplicity of possibilities” of interpretation and questioning established historiography. Her argument can not amount to a full-scale revision because the evidence is often circumstantial and conjectural. Nevertheless, in its engagement with fresh methodology and diverse visual and textual sources, the book will be interesting to art historians generally and medievalists specifically. A general reader may find the book dense in places unless one’s fascination with devotional practices is used to overcoming the challenges of academic texts.

2008-11-16T14:52:00.000-08:00

White People, Indians, and Highlanders: Tribal Peoples and Colonial Encounters in Scotland and America. By Colin G. Calloway. New York: Oxford University Press, July 2008. Cloth: ISBN 978-0-19-534012-9, $35.00. 392 pages.
Review by Andrew K. Frank, Florida State University
from SJC post 2 (10/13/08)

In White People, Indians, and Highlanders, Colin Calloway explores the parallels and contrasts between the experiences of Highland Scots and Native Americans as the cultures encountered and engaged in acts of British colonialism and market capitalism. Much of the volume betrays a single thesis and instead emphasizes the complexities and ironies of their parallel histories. At the same time, though, Calloway effectively demonstrates how the histories of Highlands Scots and Native Americans were both transformed, albeit differently, as “capitalism displaced tribalism” (176).Calloway carefully delineates the cultural distinctions between Scots and Natives while impressively demonstrating how outsiders frequently perceived similarities. These resemblances often reflected cultural and social realities as much as they were intellectual creations of English colonizers. As much as the different cultures understood and controlled land differently and had contrasting clan and kinship structures, they both had warrior traditions, clan-based kinship networks, ties to the soil, oral and storytelling traditions, a belief that leaders should act for the good of their people, and an ethos emphasizing that individuals should share rather than accumulate wealth. At the same time, English society also believed them both to be lazy, barbarous, savage, and in need of civilization. These perceived and real similarities magnified as the two peoples intermingled and intermarried on the American frontier.Most of the volume, however, eschews cultural comparisons and explores how the cultures’ histories shaped and were related to one another—how “on both sides of the Atlantic, tribal peoples scrambled to adjust to new colonial relationships, structures, and economic orders” (11). The result is a messy set of connections that defy easy characterization, and a reminder that Native American history is not as distinct as it is often portrayed. Similarly, Calloway uses the insights of whiteness studies to remind us that Highland Scots once occupied a place outside of the “civilized” English norm.Calloway divides the volume into thematic chapters that impressively tie together but are equally effective as distinct entities. Calloway begins the volume with a chapter on conquest and colonization that epitomizes the interpretive tensions within the volume. As much as the English government brutally sought to pacify Natives and impose “civilization” with the same policies they used in the British Isles, the histories of the two peoples differed markedly. Scottish soldiers frequently imposed the will of the English crown and eventually the United States government. Similar histories, as Calloway repeatedly states, did not necessarily create alliances.The next two chapters build on the themes of conquest and colonization. One explores how Scots and Indians confronted the Industrial Revolution with comparable concerns for balancing innovation and tradition. Scots and Natives became part of the Atlantic economy, with often-disruptive “repercussions on social and political structures” (55). Chapter three demonstrates how ethnocentric English reformers sought to make Englishmen and women out of various tribal peoples. Although the English often held similar stereotypes of Scots and Natives, the so-called civilizing efforts often had quite different results. As Highland Scots increasingly embraced English norms, they often took on the role of introducing and enforcing cultural changes within more resistant Native societies. In short, Calloway shows how Scots and Natives underwent similar structural changes while emphasizing their different manifestations.The next three chapters explore the various ways in which Highland Scots and Native Americans met, merged, and competed on the American frontier. One chapter explores the ways in which Scottish soldiers and Native warriors united as allies and clashed as enemies. Another details the Scottish dominance of the fur trade, emphasizing how Native hunters and Scottish traders had complex and competing purposes and understandings of the trade. Once again, a joint experience did not result in a truly shared history. Chapter six builds on this chapter by examining the intercultural families that formed and the cultural mixing that occurred within Indian villages.The final three chapters detail the great divergence that occurred between Highland Scots and Natives. Chapter seven, perhaps the volume’s most insightful, details the parallels of the Scottish clearances and the various removals in Native society. For similar reasons and in similar contexts, both peoples saw themselves displaced in the name of progress and capitalism. The shared histories did not necessarily create sympathy, as many Highlanders whose families suffered from the clearances helped expel Natives (many of whom had Scottish relatives) from their homelands. After a chapter that explores the ways in which Scottish settlers tried to use Native lands to insure their own economic and cultural survival, Calloway demonstrates how the act of mythmaking allowed Natives and Scots came to occupy different places in the British Empire and history. In this way, Scots largely became an accepted and distinct part of the British Empire, while Natives were presumed to be disappearing in the face of American development. Finally, in the epilogue, Calloway explores the parallel ways in which Scottish and Native identities and heritages are performed, transformed, and embraced in the modern world.Because the volume covers a tremendous geographic and chronological scope, the volume occasionally lacks a sense of time and place. Some comparisons cross centuries, and distinctions within Native society are frequently and perhaps necessarily blurred. Despite this minor caveat, White People, Indians, and Highlanders deserves a readership interested in colonialism and ethnic identities on both sides of the Atlantic. With brilliant insights from the literatures and experiences of both Scottish and Native American studies, Calloway demonstrates the value of placing Native American and Scottish history in a much wider context than they normally appear.

2008-10-13T20:10:00.001-07:00

Anglophilia: Deference, Devotion, and Antebellum America. By Elisa Tamarkin. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, July 2008. Cloth: ISBN 978-0-226-78944-6 $35.00. 384 pages.
Review by Brian Cowlishaw, Northeastern State University, Oklahoma

Elisa Tamarkin’s Anglophilia is in every respect a model of scholarship. The book’s argument is original, persuasive, engaging, and frequently comic; the scholarship, Herculean (after 324 pages of regular text appear 60 pages of notes, none of them superfluous); the prose, both erudite and readable. If there is a flaw to be found, it is that the argument at times seems repetitive. Arguably, though, that is not actually a flaw, for to persuade readers of the accuracy of her counterintuitive argument, Tamarkin must repeat and emphasize her interpretations a certain amount.Anglophilia’s ingenious—and utterly persuasive—argument is that antebellum Americans formed a sense of national and individual identity by means of deference and devotion to all things British (or, at least, “British”). Whereas late-eighteenth-century Americans felt forced to define themselves by means of perceived differences from Brits, by mid-nineteenth century, a few generations later, that compulsion had largely dissipated.Each of Tamarkin’s four chapters examines a different aspect or manifestation of the process of American identity-formation through reverence for Britishness. Chapter One, “Monarch-Love; or, How the Prince of Wales Saved the Union,” shows how public displays of adoration for British royalty helped Americans feel American. In particular, the chapter parses American newspaper and magazine coverage of Queen Victoria’s coronation in 1838, and more so, responses to Prince Albert’s weeks-long visit to America virtually on the eve of the Civil War. Amazingly, “on November 3, 1860, South Carolina had committed to secede if Lincoln won, other states planned to follow, Lincoln’s winning was assured, Wall Street was in a panic, and the Prince of Wales was on the cover of Harper’s for the fifth time in six weeks” (5). Facing imminent internecine war, Americans sought a sense of unity in British royalty: all Americans, of all classes, colors, and occupations, could join in finding Albert (and Victoria) inexhaustibly fascinating. Brits, compelled by duty to obey and venerate royalty, allegedly found it difficult to do so. Americans, free to bestow love as they chose, loved royalty precisely because they did not have to.Chapter Two, “Imperial Nostalgia: American Elegies for British Empire,” examines nineteenth-century histories, documents, and archives of the Revolutionary War that, perhaps contrary to expectation, show deep admiration for the British, the “enemy.” Pro-British accounts trickled out into the public gradually through the nineteenth century, as cultural pressure to demonize the redcoats receded. With such materials increasingly available, Americans tended more to wax nostalgic about the British, even about the Revolutionary War. In American popular imagination, the conflict came to resemble a friendly sports rivalry with an especially civilized opponent, more than a war. Some Americans even expressed the regret that there had been a war, and that the revolutionaries had won it; would British rule not have proved better, they argued, than the heathenish lawlessness that led to the Civil War?Chapter Three, “Freedom and Deference: Society, Antislavery, and Black Intellectualism,” makes the surprising—but, again, very persuasive—claim that the Abolitionist movement in America defined itself in significant part through Anglophilia. In practical terms, the British offered a model in having abolished slavery nearly fifty years before America finally did. But more subtly and surprisingly, both white and black Abolitionists modeled themselves after “English English” (178)—after what they perceived to be essentially English characteristics such as cultural refinement, intellectual freedom, love of literature, rich historical tradition, and racial tolerance. Black Americans, especially, found that in England they were free from having to discuss Abolition all the time, and were treated fairly and kindly. There, they could indulge all their best, most civilized impulses; they could be as refined as they wished, without the violence, hindrances, and prejudices they constantly experienced in America.Chapter Four, “The Anglophile Academy,” makes the less surprising claim that American universities, Harvard most of all, modeled themselves explicitly after English models. Although this may not be shocking news, Tamarkin brings a wealth of fascinating, telling details to bear in showing how the process worked. For example, she reports that one prominent professor in particular, James Russell Lowell, actually taught and required his students to speak with an English accent. “Harvard Indifference,” or the affectation of chronic boredom, excessive alcohol consumption, a tendency to play practical jokes on classmates, and aversion to (at least publicly) applying oneself to academic effort—in short, the time-honored, still-endemic undergraduate attitude—actually has Anglophilic roots, Tamarkin argues. Professors and students then and now prefer to imagine the university as a special place where deeper—read: “English”—things such as literature, art, and Great Ideas matter more than petty political questions and laborious striving. As in England, American imagination has it, the university offers a unique space to slow down, escape the hectic, striving “real world,” and think profoundly; “Harvard Indifference” is the carefully cultivated proper attitude in which to do so.Throughout the book, Tamarkin reproduces numerous, varied art works to make her ingenious case. There are magazine covers, cartoons, oil paintings, playing cards, and advertisements, among other artifacts. Her archival research is impressive, revealing, and intriguing.Anglophilia will appeal powerfully to several groups of scholars. Americanists, especially those studying the antebellum years, will appreciate its voluminous original scholarship. Victorianists will appreciate this detailed account of American views of their subject. And really, anyone who has ever wondered, for instance, why Americans still gawk so lovingly at Buckingham Palace, and pine so sadly for Diana, “the People’s Princess,” will admire this compelling work of scholarship.