Writing the Dead: Death and Writing Strategies in the Western Tradition (review)

250 Reviews and the political situation it is surprising just h o w untarnished is Milton's final preference for a republic, and the old argument that Satan uses republican rhetoric is countered by Norbrook's demonstration that his imagery becomes more monarchist and courtly after his initial rebellion. Marvell is assessed in more familiar ways as one interested in the phenomenon of ambiguity itself, but Norbrook's narrative approach, emphasising that his protagonists could not have fore-known the course of events, helps to explain Marvell's calculated prevarications. For him, 'the English republic is not a static, traditional entity but a project still in process. H e could not have k n o w n h o w soon it was to hit the rocks' (p. 298). H e was simply a different temperament and a different kind of poet from the strongly aligned Wither and Milton. Writing the English Republic is the most consistently pro-republican account so far written of the Commonwealth period and its place in history. Given Norbrook's formidable gifts of dense historical scholarship and finely honed linguistic and stylistic alertness, his o w n revival of parrhesia ('open, bold speech', p. 127), his book lays d o w n a vigorous challenge to those historians and critics w h o assume that 'balance' and 'objectivity' are guaranteed by maintaining conservative positions. R. S. White Department of English The University of Western Australia Petrucci, Armando, Writing the Dead: Death and Writing Strategies in th Western Tradition (Figurae: Reading Medieval Culture), trans. Michael Sullivan, Stanford, Stanford University Press, 1998; cloth; pp. xviii, 163; 64 b / w illustrations; R.R.P. £25.00. [Distributed in Australia by Cambridge University Press.] This book, first published in Italian as Le scritture ultime: ldeologi morte e strategic dello scrivere nella tradizione occidentale (1995), is might call a coffee-table book for academics. It has an interesting subject , funerary epigraphy from Attic Greece to the present in the Western world, and an expressed objective of discovering the links between the kinds of funerary writing a society practises (or does not practise) and 251 the dominant social culture that authorises them. However, given the vast sweep of Petrucci's subject, his book, although well researched, is bound to be somewhat superficial and often partial in the material it surveys. Even so, it brings together some fascinating cultural continuities, especially between the antique world and the various moments in European, and particularly Italian, history w h e n antique funerary writing, or what was then understood to represent it, was revived and reinterpreted. Petrucci is a professor of Latin palaeography, so this book is not surprisingly strongest on continuities and differences across the centuries in kinds of writing using Latin or its vernacular derivatives on funerary monuments and in the written literature of death. O n e of the central questions in the book is about w h o in any society has 'a right to a written death'. Most of the answers, given the book's scope and length (only 164 pages), are predictable enough, and do not probe very far below the surface of the individual societies surveyed. By far the richest evidence is amassed in pursuit of Petrucci's central question posed of the antique world and medieval and modern funerary epigraphy in Italy. Although he includes some discussion of other parts of Europe (principally France, Germany and England), it is small in comparison with the space devoted to Italy. Towards the end of the volume there is an interesting chapter on funerary writing in colonial America. The final chapter is a bit of a squib, necessarily so as the author documents and explains the twentieth-century decline in funerary epigraphy, concluding with a rather limp hope that it m a y revive somehow. Behind Petrucci's history of writing the dead there seems to lie the unquestioned assumption that written grave markers or memorials, on which the verbal text is both clear and central, are superior to those on which other kinds of signs and icons dominate. This is an arguable position , but I would have preferred to have the author present evidence for i t . As...