Discovering the Subject in Renaissance England by Elizabeth Hanson (review)

190 LEITERS IN CANADA 1998 speech prefixes, and what could loosely be described as stage directions (or descriptions). Patterson's criticalapparatus is refreshingly conservative, the footnotes sparse, unobtrusive, and soberly illuminating. The introduction, likewise, is brief, allowing relevant source, background, and biographical information precedence over critical commentary, while a fairly generous bibliography suggests tools for further investigation. Appendixes include excerpts from The Legend of Nicholas Tluockmorton, a lengthy poem first published in 1736 and in which the author (probably Job Throckmorton, nephew to Nicholas and notorious composer of the Marprelate tracts) playfully claims to have encountered his 'uncle' from beyond the grave. An apparent advertisement for an early (non-extant) published version of the trial is interesting for having been composed by one Jolm Bradford who, awaiting execution for heresy, shared a room - in a prison overcrowded with members of the Wyatt rebellion - with the soon-to-be Marian martyrs Cranmer, Latimer, and Ridley. Also included are excerpts from a contemporary 's autobiography which witness the role of Protestant merchants in mitigating the Throckmorton jurors' discomfort while incarcerated (the draconian consequence of having, in disappointed attorney Edward Griffin's words, 'strangely acquitted the prisoner of his treasons whereof he was indicted'). Selections from Sir Thomas Smith's Commonwealth of England and Manner of Government Thereof (1589), finally, provide vital information about Tudor trial conventions and suggest the overwhelming likelihood that a person accused of criminal activity would be found guilty and punished accordingly. Because it was expected, according to Smith, that'commonly all thieves, robbers and murderers' would plead Not Guilty and because such pleas almost invariably were regarded as but stubborn and futile resistance, Patterson is right topoint out thatThrockmorton faced a situation in which the opportunity to defend himself was intended by the court merely as a kind of formal confession. In addition to offering a rare opportunity to examine sixteenth-century English court procedure in some detail, The Trial also suggests the highly ritualized, theatrical nature of those proceedings, a matter provocatively raised by Fatterson (if not fully addressed) in her introduction. Throckmorton 's eloquence, the occasional emergence of his understandable paranoia and fear, and even the prosecutors' obvious frustration at his learned prolixity - II never knew any thus suffered to talk as this prisoner is suffered/ moans the attorney - suggest palpable human drama amid the forensic machinery of the Tudor judicature. (ROBERT WHALEN) Elizabeth Hanson. Discovering the Subject in Renaissance England Cambridge University Press. xii, 190. us $54.95 Elizabeth Hanson's compelling study provides that intellectual fascination characteristic of deconstructive tactics adroitly executed, particularly those HUMANITIES 191 of the 'metaphysical' stamp which yoke through rhetorical violence what habits of categorical logic keep distinct and may render as contraries. Elizabethan judicial torture, Shakespeare's characterization of lago and Angelo, the vogue in cony~catching pamphlets appropriated to Jonson's authorial self-fashioning, and Bacon's projections for institutionalized science: such evident diversities become analogies in Hanson's argument. They cluster and interrogate each other as Early Modern instances, both specific and English, of local contributions to the notorious epistemic shift in Western conceptualization of subject and object which Foucauldian dis-course configures as 'emergent' historical narratives of knowledge and power. Foucault is certainly her point of departure, but Hanson's curiosity engages less with larger contours of historical consequence than with fugitive mysteries of root cause: how might such a fundamental shift of consciousness get started? 'The axiom from which this studyproceeds is that by the time epistemic assumptions are held with sufficient consciousness and consistency to receive philosophical treatment they have long been used by people in rughly contingent and untheorized ways to negotiate myriad local crises and opportunities in economic, social, and institutionallife.,Hanson posits 'discovery' and 'thesubject' to be justsuch'epistemic assumptions.' A short review can hardly do justice to the extensive scholarship and intricate filigree of yoked diversities she deploys to argue this axiom, but the issue of judicial torture may serve to illustrate some of its strategic qualities. Torture as a tool of juridical interrogation seems validated conceptually by analogy to 'other knowledge-producing practices,' particularly developments in the study of anatomy and voyages of exploration: it evidences the assumption of...