The Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy (review)

134 Reviews posthumous elegies on Philip Sidney which praised a generosity which in life his lack of court office or power prevented! The third earl of Pembroke's high office made him a focus for patronage seekers. Though many failed, Brennan argues that Pembroke was personally involved with the literary world. At least once he read a work dedicated to him before publication. He regularly gave Ben Jonson money to buy books. So, certainly, he deserved the wide variety of works hopefully dedicated to him. Although too many writers were chasing too few rewards, Pembroke was worth trying. The evaluation of Pembroke's political position is less successful, offering litde that is new and overemphasising his Wiltshire influence. He was a court peer and this was his attraction, as Brennan does recognise. The material on Mary Herbert and other women as patrons might have been extended, so also Brennan's discussion of the successes and failures of patronage. Nevertheless, those interested in works dedicated to the Pembroke family will find much useful material. Alison Wall Department of History University of Sydney. The Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy, ed. C. B. Schmitt and Q. Skinner, Cambridge, 1988; pp. xiii, 968; R.R.P., A U S $180.00. This book is perhaps best approached through its Introduction and then through its superb index. Each chapter, though certainly readable in its ownright,is subordinated to the purpose of creating an extremely valuable work of reference. It has clearly involved a prodigious amount of work and it is to be regretted that Charles Schmitt did not live to see it through the press. As the Introduction makes clear, the book is organised according to the intellectual domains that constituted Renaissance philosophy rather than according to schools, movements, individuals, or the delineations of modern professional philosophy (see also chap. 3). Philosophy, then, must be taken in a very broad sense, although the Introduction also refers to it as a 'discipline' and claims that the volume as a whole should not be seen as an interdisciplinary survey of the Renaissance. Yet the very porosity of Renaissance philosophy as it is displayed here compromises the notion of a discipline; as on occasion the more neoteric shadow of professional philosophy, qua discipline, compromises the editors' historical intentions. The introductory claim and its tensions captures in microcosm the familiar methodological problems of trying to write a history of philosophy that does not become either a form of retrospective philosophy, or an account of nothing in particular. But if the tendency here is to the latter, this does give the book an enhanced coverage, important in a work of reference. By and large, the Reviews 135 organisation into domains avoids the assimilation of Renaissance philosophy to contemporary issues. There is attention given to magic and astrology, alchemy and natural philosophy (both new and old) as well as to logic, metaphysics and epistemology (albeit with this last sounding a little post-Kantian). Such a range, however, is hardly mono-disciplinarian. At the same time there is the puzzling absence of the philosophy of law, though its significance can be chased with ease through the Index. There is also a chapter on psychology which its authors (Park and Kessler) seem to accept as a necessary nod in the direction of modem philosophical concerns. Part Eleven marks a change by focussing on 'Problems of Knowledge and Action'. This constitutes a shift from formal to material objects of discourse, as it were, one which seems to entail some interdisciplinary enquiry. The following part is concerned with philosophy and the humanistic disciplines, rhetoric, poetics and historical theory. Rhetoric was about nothing if it was not about knowledge and action. So, in one way, a discriminate notion of philosophy seems rescued by opposing it to rhetoric; in another way, the difference between them seems uncertain. The impression of a coalescence of rhetoric and philosophy is re-inforced if one turns to the Index in which Valla and Montaigne loom so large as figures who helped change an agenda of philosophical debate. Yet in which sense is either a philosopher? Such qualms should be kept well in proportion. Overall, considering historiographical criteria of judgement, the organisation...