The poetics of primitive accumulation: English Renaissance culture and the genealogy of capital (review)

156 Reviews quibbles. The translation is commended highly to students, specialists and the general public. K. V. Sinclair Department of M o d e m Languages James Cook University Halpern, Richard, The poetics of primitive accumulation: English Renaissance culture and the genealogy ofcapital, Ithaca and London, Cornell University Press, 1991; cloth/paper; pp. x, 321; R.R.P. US$47.50 (cloth), $15.95 (paper) + 1 0 % overseas. Discourse analysis blurs the boundaries between history and literature so that an increasingly influential school of scholarship seeks the historical past in texts that were once preserved for literary critics. Halpern after a long self-analysis on Derridean and Foucaultian methodology and the contribution of Althusserian insights on Marx, proclaims his conviction that Marx's modelling of the development of capitalism has continuing value for the understanding of the past. H e believes that the decoding of feudal practice by the virtual abolition of villeinage and its receding as a wage contract alongside the formation of absolute property rights and the detenitorialization of the labourer together with the creation of divisions within the peasantry has its counterpart in the management of education and the dominant forms of the literary text. He rejects a reduction of this to economic functionalism but envisages the period as one in which humanism helped create transformative and transitional institutions for a system of political authorization in which a new class structure was articulated and validated. To demonstrate this he considers the forms of learning promoted by humanists which he sees as mimetic and juridical. These developed a class character in which discipline and the work ethic were instilled in schools as a prophylactic against the idea of vagrancy, the characteristic of the detenitorialized peasant. The measured forms of rhetoric were approved but poetry was distrusted as a form dominated by passions which demanded control. In seeking to elucidate his argument Halpern principally considers Skelton, More, Spencer's Shepherd's Calendar and Shakespeare's King Lear. Each in turn is deconstructed to present a face other than that it shows superficially. More's Utopia is seen as reifying what it appears to reject. The handling of gold is seen as revealing commodity fetishism and the Utopians are presented as obsessed with surveillance and control. More's idea is apparently founded on the moral economy of use-value, a bourgeois strategy for wresting economic and social power from the aristocracy. The Shepherd's Calendar is viewed as almost obsessed with questions of knowledge, method and interpretation 'which it also poses as questions of social and political power'. The interplay of certainty and uncertainty is seen as part of the social production of knowledge. King Lear is Reviews 157 analysed as a quite different problem of empowerment to the obvious, a deconstruction which owes a great deal to Mauss's analysis of the gift and the problem of reciprocity. Halpern's conclusion is that Lear ends with society thrown back into feudal mode. Throughout Halpern is concerned to show that the discourse is developing concepts which are appropriate to Marx's idea of primitive accumulation; for example, the idea of surplus, exchange value, and use value. Sybil M . Jack Department of History University of Sydney Hamburger, Jeffrey F., The Rothschild Canticles: art and mysticism in Flanders and the Rhineland circa 1300, N e w Haven and London, Yale University Press, 1990; cloth; pp. xii, 336; 237 figures (12 colour, 225 monochrome; R.R.P. US$50.00. The volume takes its name from that of a recent owner, before the codex was acquired by Yale University Library and became its M S . 404. A codicological silhouette, complete with a diagram of the gatherings and a list of the illustrationsfillsappendices 4 and 5. The case is argued for Parts I and II of the manuscript as complementary, in spite of the divergent nature of the textual matter in each and of the disturbed gatherings in Part II. Both parts contain excerpta and,tikemany medievalflorilegia, the flowers here have been culled from the liturgy, the Bible and the Church Fathers. Those of the Part I resemble a series of spiritual soliloquies. All have been transcribed (in Appendix I), with sources indicated in...