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Reviews ^oy The Vendome windows are closely akin to those of Evron and SaintPere de Chartres, and the Chatillon family were patrons at Evron also. Lillich is thefirstscholar to study the Evron glass, and she identifies three distinct campaigns, working with the Master of the Pilgrim of Evron and the Master of the Soaring Canopies, both of w h o m worked at Vendome. Saint-Pere de Chartres completes the survey of western stained glass and is a fitting subjecttoconclude such an exciting and audioritative survey. The armor of light is a demanding book to read, but very rewarding to those who persevere. The illustrations, both photographs and line drawings, are very clear and informative. Lillich's references also are very specific, which assists the non-specialist reader considerably. Carole Cusack School of studies in Religion University of Sydney Manley, Lawrence, Literature and culture in Early Modern London, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1995; cloth; pp. xvi, 603; 19 plates; R.R.P. AUS$115.00 This capacious book analyses a wide range of texts from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in relation to the material context of a developing metropolis. Manley writes that London ' . . . was undergoing rapid growth and change, offering new possibilities for exchange and combination, producing signs, symbols, civic habits, and systems of order' (p. 2). The premise is not new. M u c h literary scholarship associated with the new historicism and cultural materialism has worked within such parameters. But no previous study has attempted the breadth of Manley's research into the literature of London. The predominant quality of the book is its impeccablyreferencedsurvey of cluttered textual and critical terrain. In his approach to this material, Manley focuses on the cultural contingency of literary forms. His central concern, informed by structural linguistics and literary formalism, is with '... the systemic relationships of literary genres and on the myths, motifs, and mental structures that sustain these genres and change with them' (p. 11). Similar motivations have underpinned other recent studies, such as Nigel Smith's Literature and revolution in England 1640-1660 (1994) and Rosemary Kegl's The rhetoric ofconcealment:figuringgender and class in Renaissance literature (1994). This apparent confluence of interest furthers an important movement in 270 Reviews historicisttextualstudies. Manley argues that the new historicism '... with its anecdotal manner and its dialectic of subversion and containment, has usefully estranged the culture of the early m o d e m period, but at the cost of failing to account for the long-term changes diat cultural activity effects' (p. 13). In this book, formal developments are thereby seen to participate in an emergent project 'to articulate urbane mentalities of settlement', and shape 'London as a mental fact in the national consciousness' (p. 16). Manley's conception of change embraces the shift from feudalism to capitalism, a sociological concern with 'behavioural urbanization', and a slighdy vague 'conflict between order and reform, between the radical concentration of power and the radical distribution of justice' (p. 17). This rather schematic method of contextualization will disappoint many historians. Some readers may also find tendentious his reliance in various chapters on analytical models proposed by particular anthropologists or sociologists, including studies which have in many respects been superseded. He draws, for instance, on the urban sociologists Robert Park and Georg Simmel, but does not mention subsequent work by geographers and social theorists such as David Harvey, Henri Lefebvre and Manuel Castells. Nonetheless, Manley's sophisticatedtextualinterpretation ensures that his models of historical development rarely become oppressive. This is a book constandy alert to the complexities and tensions of cultural change. The organization of material combines a desire to study particular literary forms with a commitment to charting a progression from the uncertain urban vision of Sir Thomas More's Utopia to the assured urbane modes of the mid-seventeenth century. The weighty middle sections consider texts from the turbulent decades between 1580 and 1620. The fine analysis of a range of pamphlets, satire, pageants, plays, and urban descriptions substantiates his claim that ' . . . it is in this period that die most genuinely innovative techniques of sedentarism were developed' (pp. 18-19). Manley is an excellent reader, who uses the formalist framework to develop important insights...

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