Discontinuities: New Essays on Renaissance Literature and Criticism ed. by Viviana Comensoli, Paul Stevens (review)

humanities 351 of situations, their accommodation. Ignatius required that members be in touch with each other, with provincials, with the general, and so on. The Society is, at one level, very sharply controlled. It would not have been possible to achieve so much in so little time without this network. On the other hand, it is open to accommodation, as for the Mughals, as for architectural style, in missionary activity which responds to local culture, even in the handling of names so that its institutions do not seem exclusive. Jesuits are and have been remarkably talented in science, arts and architecture, philosophy, music and emblems, so that souls in their cure are led, if not to the rigours of the Exercises, then to experience echoing the patterns B in sequencing decoration to showing emblems to conducting poems, sometimes, as for Athanasius Kircher, for more than one of these. One commentator wishes that the volume had given some attention to Jesuit training and to the spirituality induced by the Exercises. So do I. The rigour of the Jesuit enterprise engages a certain kind of personality, prepared, in an echo of the motto, to give all to the greater glory of God. This volume of distinguished papers lends vast and far-ranging context to that `all.' Readers, notably those who may not be knowing in these matters, would have been helped by an opening paper on the organization and spirituality of the Society. (PATRICIA BRÜCKMANN) Viviana Comensoli and Paul Stevens, editors. Discontinuities: New Essays on Renaissance Literature and Criticism University of Toronto Press 1998. xx, 244. $65.00, $22.95 Most editors of volumes of critical essays emphasize the internal coherence and focus of their collections. Viviana Comensoli and Paul Stevens adopt a very different strategy for their collection Discontinuities: New Essays on Renaissance Literature and Criticism. In the wake of the `paradigm shift' in Renaissance studies that they associate with `new historicism, feminism, and cultural materialism,' they draw attention to the diversity of the essays in this collection, hoping to throw light on larger sets of `contradictions, unresolved discontinuities, new problems and new issues' which characterize the field. From this point of view, the polemical character of many of the essays is a merit. What is equally striking, though, is how many of the essays are cautionary in tone. This is particularly true of the three essays in the opening section, `Recovering Women's Writing: Historicism vs. Textualism.' Sylvia Brown's account of the genre of the mother's legacy repeats familiar warnings about the loss of women's experience and historical identity which she claims accompanies deconstructive criticism. Linda Woodbridge and Kathy Osler Acheson evince a more complicated 352 letters in canada 1999 relationship to historicism. Woodbridge writes convincingly of the dangers attendant on the casual uses of social history by literary scholars, emphasizing particularly the consequences of the evasion of literary issues. Acheson uses the `rhetorical structures of historical forms of writing' to place Anne Clifford in a subtle and shifting relationship to modernity which complicates both the relationship between history and textuality and the very idea of the modern. Another discontinuity to which many of the essays speak is the relationship between scholarly and professional work and claims for the political effects of work in the academy. These issues are explicitly addressed in a final section, `Political Engagement and Professional Discontinuities.' Barry Taylor critically examines the commonly held assumption that British cultural materialism preserves a political dimension which American new historicism suppresses. In this context, though, the omission of any attention to the specifics of the Canadian academic scene in the collection as a whole is a cause for regret. In a final essay, which might facilitate a provocative rereading of many of the earlier essays, Sharon O'Dair interrogates the significance of anti-capitalist rhetoric in contemporary criticism, arguing that it masks an anti-populist desire to preserve the privileges conferred by the modern university. Other essays examine significant areas of controversy in contemporary Renaissance studies. One group of essays, `Rethinking Subjectivity: The Turn to Lacan,' takes up the question of psychoanalysis, arguing for the relevance of Lacanian analysis as an alternative or as a supplement...