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264 Short notices Kagan, Richard L., Lucrecia's Dreams: Politics and Prophecy in Sixteenth- . Century Spain, Berkeley/Los Angeles/London, University of California Press, rpt. 1995; paper; pp. xiii, 229; R.R.P. US$13.00. Lucrecia's Dreams examines political, social and religious dissent in late sixteenth-century Spain through the prophetic career of Lucrecia de Le6n, a young w o m a n whose dreams about the demise of Spain attracted neighbourhood interest, then the attention of respected theologians and nobles, and finally the ire of the secular authorities and the Inquisition. Richard Kagan uses the records of the Inquisition, which include the transcripts of over . four hundred of Lucrecia's dreams, to write a microhistorical account of Lucrecia's milieu and how it intersected with controversial political activities of her day. Meticulously researched, Kagan's study draws upon his broader knowledge of Spanish history to analyse the meaning of Lucrecia's career and her trial. Focussing on the issues which most disturbed the Inquisition, Kagan assesses the political content of Lucrecia's dreams in conjunction with evidence of mounting popular opposition to the policies of Philip II at the time of the Spanish war in the Netherlands and the Armada. Yet he also seeks to unravel the mystery of Lucrecia herself. W a s she, as she successfully argued at her final trial, the innocent puppet of clerics Alonso de Mendoza and Lucas de Allende, the men responsible for transcribing her nocturnal visions? Or was she well aware of the power she could achieve as a prophet? Although he prevaricates on this point for much of the book, Kagan ultimately suggests the latter, presenting Lucrecia as a highly intelligent woman who, understanding the limitations of her gender, chose the only path open to w o m e n who had political aspirations, that of spiritual seer. Perhaps the most disappointing aspect of the study is its failure to offer more than the odd reference to Freud and psychohistory, currently enjoying a revival in the work of Lyndal Roper on early m o d e m German witchcraft. Kagan justifies this by arguing that in her day Lucrecia's dreams were taken as seditious threats to the established order, rather than as insights into her personality and psyche. Yet the complex relationships Lucrecia had with both her parents, and with Mendoza, who became a surrogate father to her, demand further investigation. Thus, while Kagan successfully explains Short notices 265 Lucrecia's place in sixteenth-century Spanish politics and society, her motives, like herfinalfate, remain unclear. Claire Walker Department of History University of Newcastle Mullaney, Steven, The Place of the Stage: License, Play, and Power in Renaissance England, Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 1995; paper; pp. xiii, 178; 1figure;R.R.P. US$16.95. First published by the University of Chicago Press in 1988, Mullaney's study reads the Elizabethan stage as positioned on the periphery of English culture in such a way as both to confirm the dominance of particular ideologies at one level, and at another to challenge these by disturbing their premises and assumptions: 'Lodged on the margins of culture at a time when those margins were especially rich and polyvalent, the Elizabethan popular stage enjoyed a unique and complex ideological perspective—or rather, a complex choice of perspectives. A n emergent cultural formation, it also relied greatly upon those residual pastimes and practices that served as the conditions of its own emergence or possibility.' (p. 131). Mullaney's N e w Historicist approach enables him to uncover suggestive parallels and convergences: for instance, the connection between the Liberties girdling London, where much theatre of the time took place, and the lazar houses which likewise occupied a margin of the city and provided a boundary by which the city could be defined; or the relationship between the rhetorical figure of amphibology (ambiguity) and the social and political phenomenon of treason. However, in the interests of making arresting connections between text and social reality, Mullaney omits or neglects a range of other factors that render much more complex the relation of the Elizabethan stage to the culture from which it emerged. Such factors, as Douglas...

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