Political discourse in early modern Britain (review)

154 Reviews Okken's quite full discussions of the origins of some of the Arthurian material and the explanations of cultural details such as armour,ridingtechnique, or the meanings of gestures, are always clear and informative. Similarly informative are Haage's two short articles in the appendix, on medieval medicine and the 'Ouroboros' motif (a snake biting its own tail) as they occur in Hartmann's romances. Cross-references within and between the different sections of the book are useful. Okken has done well to draw together the insights of so many other scholars, readily accessible under the entry for the relevanttines.Yet a source of irritation is that citations of secondary literature are usually given without the writer's name, for which it is necessary to consult the relevant footnote at the back of the book. It would have been preferable to give the name of the writer and date of publication with the citation itself and to do away with most of the thousand-odd footnotes. An index to keywords such as armour, Avalon, or Famurgan would also have made Okken's discussion of such points more easily retrievable. Finally, it is disappointing that Okken pays only very scant attention to matters of literary interpretation. The result is that, despite its size, the commentary is, for many potential users, an incomplete one at best. Within the scope it sets itself, however, Okken's Kommentar zur Artusepik, though not without its flaws, is a solid work and will prove a useful source of background information for readers of Hartmann, scholars and students alike. Nicola McGregor Department of Germanic Studies University of Sydney Phillipson, Nicholas and Quentin Skinner, eds, Political discourse in early modern Britain, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1993; cloth; pp. xiii, 446; R.R.P. AUS$120.00. This volume is a tribute to John Pocock and his abiding influence on the form of present day historical writing on early modern political theory. The contributors include many of the most highly regarded exponents of the particular language that is at present the dominant explanatory mode. Even Jonathan Scott, who proposes to oppose Pocock 'to show him what he taught me' (an in-joke, paraphrasing his subject, Harington) takes some insight of Pocock's, as do the rest, as the hook to sustain a development or modification of the whole vision. The paradigm may be modified, it is not to be superseded. Those who might seek an alternative find no voice here. At best they are dismissed in footnotes. For all the labours of half a century and more amongst the lesser luminaries of the political thought of the time, the volume is still primarily focussed on the major names: Hobbes, Locke, Hume, Harington, Baxter, and Shaftesbury; Reviews 155 although, it is leavened by Condren's commentary on Cavendish and Schochet's on Samuel Parker. Scholarship in the area is demanding. Its exponents require the same comprehensive knowledge of the classical writers (especially Cicero and Quintilian) that their subjects possessed, familiarity with the nature and stage of the ongoing philosophical and theological debate, and a gift for identifying the conceptual content of the terms their subjects employed. Presenting all this in an intelligible, let alone readable, form is a formidable task and not all the contributors have succeeded. This is not a book for the fainthearted . The only general context provided assumes close familiarity with Pocock's work. It is not a book for undergraduates struggling in their first encounter with classical theorists whose vocabulary and mind-set are so alien to present day usage. Terms of art, even those like monarcbomach, which is not included in the Shorter Oxford Dictionary, are not explained. It is not even a book comfortably designed for the ordinary historian, who may struggle to identify passages in the subject's texts given only as page references to the contributor's own edition with no chapter reference that might help those equipped with other editions. Its primary audience is apparently the select band of specialists whose close familiarity with the extensive recent literature will produce instant appreciation of the subtleties of the points involved. Fortunately John Pocock uses hisrightof comment tofitthe articles into the...