The Occult Philosophy in the Elizabethan Age (review)

302 Short Notices His strengths are the discussion of leadership and succession, and the marshalling of statistical information. A series of essays on themes in Byzantine history might prove the ideal format for concisely illuminating the general reader. Max Staples School of Humanities Charles Sturt University Yates, Frances A., The Occult Philosophy in the Elizabethan Age, London and N e w York, Routledge, 2001; paper; pp. xi, 255; R R P US$14.95, £9.99; ISBN 0415254094. How times have changed in the interpretation of Renaissance occult thought! This paperback reissue ofFrances Yates' classic 1979 study, which itself distilled her previous books on the occult Renaissance in England and Europe, reminds us ofthe speculative strengths and concomitant weaknesses of her approach. Her willingness to triangulate across vast areas of Renaissance thought, felicitously interweaving previously unrelated evidence, produced illuminating readings of salient literature from the period, later silently acquired by more famous literary scholars. Yet this may explain the historical ineptness which has subsequently infected literary studies ofRenaissance occultism. For Yates's 'daring arguments', as she called them, reduced the Elizabethan Renaissance philosophy to a narrowly defined occult philosophy of Hermeticism and Christian Cabala, wrapped closely around a Neoplatonic core. Intermittently aware of accretions to this synthesis by Reuchlin, Giorgi and Agrippa, she yet persisted in presenting essentially unchanged its visions of imperial, magical reform, avidly pursued through the works of Spenser, Chapman and Shakespeare. N o wonder this book carries lavish praise from two other purveyors of the reductionist method, Christopher Hill and Hugh Trevor-Roper. Yet what we gain in interpretative clarity w e lose in historical sensitivity, as we find at the heart of this book in her interpretation of John Dee's imperial visions, for Yates the cynosure of the Elizabethan Renaissance. Dee the HermeticCabalistic magus, the inspired Saturnian melancholic and angel conjuror becomes at once the poster-child for apocalyptic magisterial reform of a decayed world and the butt of Marlowe's and Jonson's sneering dismissal of these naive airy fantasies. W e need to be reminded ofthe opposition to magical notions of reform, given the weakness in more recent scholarship for taking Dee at his own Short Notices 303 estimation. Yet Yates's account of the formation of Dee's ideas again assumes his wholesale acceptance of a ready-formed occult philosophy, rather than the complex, hesitant intellectual odyssey by which he travelled from exhausted Aristotelian orthodoxy, through selective responses to occult signs, towards a new world order. The methodological problems raised by her impatience with contextualising these ideas, in favour of obsessively reiterating their components, appear in the strongest parts ofthis book, where momentarily Yates places both the occult philosophy and its manifestations in Elizabethan literature into political context. Then even the most innocent student reader might become aware ofthe historical crudity in drawing a rhumb line from Pico della Mirandola to The Tempest, without considering the wide ocean of events in which all those strange creatures swam. Glyn Parry Department ofHistory Victoria University of Wellington Zettersten, Arne, and Bernhard Diensberg, eds., The English Text of the Ancren Riwle: The 'Vernon'Text (Early English Text Society O.S. 310), Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2000; cloth; pp. xxx, 130; R R P £30.00; ISBN 0197223141. In 1976, Arne Zettersten edited the text of Ancrene Riwle from Cambridge, Magdalen College M S Pepys 2498 for the Early English Text Society, as part of a series ofdiplomatic transcriptions of the text in English, French and Latin. This edition of the text as it appears in the Vernon manuscript (Oxford, Bodleian Library M S Eng. poet. a. I) is thefinalvolume ofthe sequence. In the introduction to this edition, based on materials supplied by the editors, H. L. Spencer discusses the context for the inclusion of the thirteenthcentury Ancrene Riwle in the manuscript, produced in the second half of the fourteenth century in the West Midlands, along with other religious texts in the vernacular. Spencer argues that the presence ofthe text is witness to the continued popularity of Ancrene Riwle in the fourteenth century and its status as a safe and orthodox text, suitable for audiences that included female religious. Spencer also briefly introduces the complex...