‘Fama’ and her Sisters: Gossip and Rumour in Early Modern Europe eds. by Heather Kerr, and Claire Walker (review)

Stories, gossip, and rumour knit networks of people together as well as create irrevocable fractures between them. The intimacy of rumour and gossip occurs within households, in chance remarks when meeting acquaintances in busy streets, or telling news to neighbours, but news was also spread further afield through literature, letters, and art works, formal intelligence for the elite. Editors Heather Kerr and Claire Walker explicitly state in their Introduction that this collection extends previous treatments of reputation, rumour, and gossip to the study of ‘talk, whether spoken or written, in defining relationships and establishing authority’ (p. 2).

One of the strengths of this volume is the first chapter by Walker, who gives a clearly articulated analytical overview of the scholarly treatment of fama, gossip, and rumour. She covers the slippery definitions of fama and its parts – gossip, rumour, reputation – in the early modern period and then goes on to investigate the general omnipresence of fama within early modern European ways of thinking. She particularly draws on explorations of gender and gossip, which argue gossip (talk) was a conduit that linked public and domestic spheres. Both Walker and many of the authors in the collection acknowledge the centrality of gender to the analysis of reputation and talk.

The essays are arranged broadly chronologically, which has the advantage of encouraging reading between different source groups. There are two articles that use literature as principal sources. Lucy Potter’s article on ‘fame’ in the Aeneid, Metamorphoses, and Marlowe’s Tragedy of Dido, shows how the motif of reputation in the depiction of Dido changed over time. The last article in the collection turns to a different register of literature by examining eighteenth-century plebeian poetry both for its use of images of talk, rumour, and reputation and also for the interplay between the poets and their patrons. Art historian, Lisa Mansfield, has contributed an interesting essay on the way that fama and portraiture collided in the Hans Holbein portrait of Anne of Cleves made for Henry VIII. Mansfield’s analysis combines investigation of Anne’s reputation with the rumours about her appearance during the marriage negotiations, and the visual rhetoric of the final portraits.

The high-stakes and febrile world of European royal courts are the settings for two essays. Una McIlvenna’s contribution analyses the political and religiously motivated interventions into the relationship between the Protestant French Prince of Condé and his mistress Isabelle de Limeuil. Reputations and gossip were essential ingredients in this potent mix that included an illicit pregnancy and allegations of poisoning, all handled adroitly by McIlvenna. The machinations of another early modern court are the subject of Susan Broomhall and Jacqueline Van Gent’s article on the flight and conversion to Catholicism of Louise Hollandine von der Pfalz, daughter of the Bohemian royal family. Such a high-stakes conversion generated considerable talk and Broomhall and Van Gent analyse how the different Catholic and Protestant political groups used and managed these rumours.

Records of secular and ecclesiastical courts have long provided strong evidence of the importance of rumour and hearsay in medieval and early modern societies. Elizabeth Horodowich considers court cases for witchcraft in Renaissance Venice and the crucial role that public opinion, gossip, and rumour played in these legal proceedings.

Amanda Capern examines English court records of disputed wills, boundaries, and property for how witnesses, prosecutors, and defendants used speech and public opinion. Capern includes a detailed analysis of the extended Danby family’s dispute over a will and the division of property for the ways that reputations were built and lost over the use and abuse of family estates. Another extended family case study is presented by Katie Barclay who uses the letters of Dorothy Salisbury, a servant of the Duke of Hamilton in the early eighteenth century, who had...