The House of Death: Messages from The English Renaissance by Arnold Stein (review)

98Rocky Mountain Review Section four labors under the same problem as the previous division. No doubt, teaching French, German, and Spanish for business is a serious concern , but with the ever-growing influence of the Asian countries, particularly Japan, it appears incomprehensible how this gap could occur. Sections five and six, even though at times stating the obvious, represent a useful review and plan for the future to remedy what Hayden in the preface describes: "We are, to put it quite simply, a people who have not been conditioned or trained to believe that an awareness of the world beyond our borders is all that important" (xi). Thus, while this study shows some startling shortcomings it, nevertheless, can function as a catalyst. Starr in the conclusion potentially opens the door to a more optimistic future as to the isolation of Americans from foreign languages as well as to the frightening trade imbalance of this country: "many of the apparent gains of recent years remain in the realm of hopes and are as yet unfulfilled. The likelihood of their fulfillment will depend heavily on the level of American involvement with international trade, which will be as much a cause as an effect of educational reform" (246). WOLFF A. VON SCHMIDT University of Utah ARNOLD STEIN. The House ofDeath: Messagesfrom The English Renaissance. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986. 300 p. Rich songs of death and dying from Renaissance writers have sounded even to the rocky hollows of twentieth-century literature. From Hemingway's moving use of Donne's Meditation XVII in the epigraph of For Whom the Bell Tolls to the title of William Styron's novel Lie Down in Darkness, drawn from Sir Thomas Browne's Urn Burial, numerous Renaissance cadences have made their dying fall in the imagination of both readers and writers in the twentieth century. The late sixteenth and the entire seventeenth centuries in England were times when the familiar tropes and attitudes of the ars moriendi tradition, in interaction with new and vital changes in culture, resulted in some of the most poignant and elegiac moments in the history of literature. Arnold Stein, attuned especially to the voices of seventeenthcentury poets, has written a study entitled The House ofDeath thatjustly privileges what he calls "messages from the English Renaissance." Quotations abound from Donne, Browne, Marvell, Shakespeare, and others. Stein's book is mature and wise, according to John Hollander's comment on the cover an embodiment of the "essential relationship of knowledge and acuteness to wisdom." Like Philippe Aries in The Hour of Our Death, Stein moves his study along a way that is never merely scholarly, but is deeply human in its focus. He probes the commonplaces of an age where the common and the traditional still seemed to embody truth — not simply the safe, the dull, and the familiar. Stein begins his book, for instance, with this statement: "People think about death and their own death, and they necessarily use familiar materials and habits of thinking on the subject. This truism is a foundation of everything that will follow. ... By the sixteenth century poets had available from the history of thinking about death a rich vocabulary of feeling and representation and a literature to draw upon" (3). Book Reviews99 Close as the work remains to vivid passages from the literature of the time, the conservative nature of the tradition allows for the exploration of several issues in the history of ideas. Stein indeed structures the book so that the first section deals with a cultural sub-text, what scholars used to call background. The first chapter, for instance, is entitled "What Renaissance Poets Would Have Known." In it he presents a general discussion of some of the scholarly assumptions that were opened by Sister Mary Catherine O'Connor in her early history of the ars moriendi and Nancy Lee Beaty in her study of the ars moriendi in England. Equally important to his discussion is Louis Martz's Poetry of Meditation. The upshot of Stein's use of these major works is to point out the centrality of preparation for death to Renaissance English thinking . Stein underlines, however, an insight that is especially important...