Texts and Cultural Change in Early Modern England (review)

184 Reviews and the schools, the 'both-and' and the 'either/or'. Perhaps the pace and flow of the writing tends to carry us forward against our better judgement. But here the footnotes and references point to hypertextual checks and balances. Not only that, they open up (for m e , at least) new and fascinating leads—from Jane Gallop on Pedagogy to the literature of medieval Castilian. Moreover, such simplification can be excused so long as it does not vitiate the main argument. After all, it was Abelard w h o said, in a passage not quoted by Brown: 'sometimes a writer sacrifices perfect accuracy in the interest of a clear general statement' (Preface, Sic et Non). Sabina Flanagan Department ofHistory University ofMelbourne Brown, Cedric C. and Arthur F. Marotti, ed., Texts and Cultural Change in Early Modern England (Early M o d e r n Literature in History), Basingstoke, Macmillan and N e w York, St. Martin's Press, 1997; cloth; pp. x, 254. When travelling in foreign parts an accurate map and a decent phrase book can help us to orient ourselves and to ask useful questions, and we can usually see more if w e travel lightly. Several essays in this collection break all these rules and, encumbered by excessive theoretical baggage, bewildered by their limited grasp of the language and disoriented by their ignorance of the landscape, endure a torrid time in the foreign country that was Early Modern England. Their failure is all the more apparent because Cedric Brown and Arthur Marotti introduce this eclectic collection of tourists as 'practising the kind of sociological bibliography D. F. Mackenzie has advocated' or the detailed local reading Leah Marcus has encouraged, based furthermore on the historical specificity of archival research, dubbed 'the new erudition'. With the honourable exception of Richard Dutton's essay on 'The Birth of the Author', few of these essays match up to this description, or if they do then historians and literary scholars really are speaking a different language. Dutton shows a subtle awareness of the conflict between the Reviews 185 corporate ethos of theatrical companies and the individualism of gentleman amateur poets, which underlies the contrasting publishing strategies of Shakespeare and Jonson and reveals the latter's novelty in taking pride in his 'laborious' play-writing. To a lesser extent Cedric Brown carefully historicises the versions of Milton's Lycidas, but overall this collection fails to live up to the claims of its editors. Janel Mueller, for example, spends twenty pages detailing her personal struggle with the cumbersome theoretical luggage of gender, class and race before rather shamefacedly falling back on religion to explain the differences between John Fisher and Katherine Parr's usage of the metaphor of 'the Book of the Crucifix'. Marotti lacks proof for his case that the printed accounts of the mission of E d m u n d Campion and Robert Persons assimilated some of the power associated with the martyred Campion's relics, even for Protestants, because he relies on wellread narrative rather than archival analysis, and even that narrative is dated on issues such as Protestant thinking on the Elect Nation. Pamela Neville-Singleton also relies on a largely familiar narrative for her explanation of the 'censorship' of Hakluyt's Principall Navigations, butherdiscovery ofapreviouslyunknown Archbishop ofCanterbury, George Whitgift, raises doubts about precisely which country she is describing. Certainly her weak and simplistic account of the political pressures that conditioned the state of Hakluyt's text does not resemble Elizabethan England, which m a y explain the disjunction between the body of her essay anditsconclusionthat 'reader demand' required the inclusion ofsome matter. Nor, despite her claims to forensicbibliography, does she accurately identify thecopies thatshe claims supporther case. Peter Lindenbaum fares nobetter with his attempt to prove that the declining occurrence of marginalia in the Folger copies of Sidney's Arcadia reflects its transition from a bearer of High Renaissance cultural values into a middle-class novel. Apart from doubts aboutthevalidity ofhis sample the logic ofhisclaim thatpublishers responded tosuch reader demand in reformatting theArcadia seems questionable in the lightofmarketforces, givenSasha Roberts' point (p. 131) thatreader diversity seemed evident to contemporaries. Lori Humphrey N e w c o...