The expense of spirit: love and sexuality in English Renaissance drama (review)

256 Short notices and also to enter into discussion on works (Chr6tien de Troyes, the Vulgate Cycle, Robert de Boron) entrusted to other contributors in the earlier volume. This is not a revised or updated edition, but the reprinting offers a good opportunity for a first-time buyer. Jennifer Strauss Department of English Monash University Moote, A. Lloyd, Louis XIII, the just, Berkeley/Los Angeles/London, University of California Press, 1991; paper; pp. xiv, 401; 16 plates; 5 maps; R.R.P. US$14.95. Professor Moote's 'political' biography' of Louis XIII was published in 1989 and has now been reissued in paperback with the obtigatory chorus of cover endorsements and extracts from favourable reviews. Even without these it is possible to recognize in it a highly serious contribution to the debate about a reign that continues to fascinate historians. Moote's introduction 'Interpreting Louis XIII' sets out the problems he faced, not least a residual bad conscience vis-d-vis the anti-biographical tradition associated with the Annales tendency. However, historical biography is now all the rage, as Roland Mousnier's L'Homme rouge ou la vie du cardinal de Richelieu (1585-1642) (Paris, 1992) demonstrates. Louis XIH's childhood, as documented in particular by the Journal of his physician H6roard, has proved to be antiresistiblebait in recent decades for specialists in psychohistory, Moote tries to distance his own interpretations from the excesses of that school. Nonetheless, evidence drawn from his subject's early life bulks large in his attempt to establish Louis XIII as the ultimate source of the policies followed by his government The conclusion teeters on the brink of imagining 'Louis XIII without Richelieu'. Would that have bothered Lucien Febvre? In the end the contextual aspects of the book and its attention to notions and representatives of 'justice' may prove to be its most enduring legacy to the study of the period. Wallace Kirsop Department of Romance Languages Monash University Rose, Mary Beth, The expense of spirit: love and sexuality in English Renaissance drama, rpt Ithaca and London, Cornell University Press, 1991; paper; pp. xi, 239; R.R.P. US$13.15 Originally pubUshed in 1988, Rose's study draws together usefully a wide range of literary, historical and sociological scholarship in an examination not only of the ways that love and sexuality were represented in the drama of the English Renaissance, but also how particular genres and their treatments of these Short notices 257 topics were historicaUy and socially conditioned. Rose identifies a shift from an older, more conservative tradition which dualistically idealized or degraded women, to a developing Protestant view which saw women as active and often equal participants in love relationships, and especially in marriage. Though she touches briefly on the—perhaps to us—more marginal relations of incest and homosexuality, Rose's focus rests almost exclusively on heterosexual, exogamic relations. This is somewhat curious, given,firstthereiterationof the theme of incest in the drama of the period, and, secondly, the homoeroticism which must have been occasioned by the spectacle of boy actors playing the parts of women in love with men. Indeed, given the attention in her second chapter to femalemale disguise and the Hie Mulier/Haec Vir debate about such cross-dressing, Rose's skirting of the issue of marginal sexualities and their representation on the Renaissance stage is especially noticeable. David Buchbinder School of Communication and Cultural Studies Curtin University of Technology Sauer, Carl Ortwin, The Early Spanish Main, forward by Anthony Pagden, rpt Berkeley/New York/Los Angeles/Oxford, University of California Press, 1992; cloth and paper; pp. xviii, 306; 6 illustrations, 4 tables, 24 maps; R.R.P. US$40.00 (cloth), $16.00 (paper). Sauer's classic work has still a great deal to offer students of the first European contacts with central America. His sensitivity to the difficulties both sides faced in an encounter which was so ineducibly strange and his shaping of the encounter as a tragedy still has much to commend it even where further scholarship and shifting methodologies have rendered some aspects of his work old-fashioned. Other aspects of his work, such as the perception of the landscape, are coming back into...