Elizabeth Jane Weston: Collected Writings ed. by Donald Cheney, Brenda M. Housington (review)

HUMANITIES 219 symbols. The Society was possibly more dangerous in this way than in the more obvious kinds of craft often attributed to it. If readers look at the emblems in the Jesuit Series as simply pictures with mottos, they miss the point. Seen as a whole, the emblems constitute an enormous body of educative devices designed to appeal to eye, ear, and mind. Learning to command this body lent, in turn, an enormous command over moral precept and doctrine, made by the learned for the elite. Some of this research is now available on the Web, where a modern technological device, which allows for close study by enlargement, works with materials related to the earlier science practised by those who saw the use of these earlier sources of unexploded energy in managing the political world through encoded morality and theology. Now that the labours of Daly and companions are establishing a body of images and commentary from the emblems, it will be possible to trace them not only in printed books and in the words about them, but also in the decorative arts. As John O=Malley=s recent collection of essays on the Jesuits= arts, science and culture has shown, the Society was aware of how their way of taking over each of these might produce doctrinal effect. We need to study these matters in the world of vestments and altar furnishings and in the other decorative arts which encode and manifest early modern religious traditions. Daly=s and Dimler=s work will be valuable in offering the sources essential for this kind of study. (PATRICIA BRÜCKMANN) Donald Cheney and Brenda M. Housington, editors and translators. Elizabeth Jane Weston: Collected Writings University of Toronto Press. xlii, 448. 9 black and white plates. $80.00 The core of this edition is the Parthenica (>Maidenly Writings=) of 1608, a collection of the Latin works of Elizabeth Jane Weston (and others), compiled and edited by her friend Georgius Martinus von Baldhoven. The Parthenica , in three books, is an amplification of her two-book Poemata (1602), also compiled by Baldhoven. Other writings include poems and letters in her praise, prose correspondence, and a prose list of famous women writers from Deborah to Weston herself, based on a collection of 1552. Weston (1581B1612) left England in childhood with her mother and stepfather Edward Kelley, and settled in Prague. Kelley fell into disgrace in 1591 and died about 1597, leaving Weston and her mother destitute (a frequent topic of the poems). In 1603 she married and had seven children; she died in 1612. She was in touch with the highest nobility, and wrote a poem to James I of England on his accession in 1604. She had received a fine education in Latin, possibly from John Hammond (Poemata I.34), and her poems won praise from major European litterati. Book I contains personal poems (pleas for money, birthday congratulations, etc); Book II 220 LETTERS IN CANADA 2000 1B84 is mainly religious and moral; 85B91 contains Aesopic fables; 92B98 deals with mottoes, and there are occasional poems and letters. Book III has letters (1B36) to and from Weston. Her poems, mainly in elegiacs, are heavily classical and conventional, occasionally light-hearted, as in i.47B49 rebuking Haller for his seven-foot hexameter. The best example of her light wit is found in her poems in the margin of a copy of the Parthenica, complaining that the book is full of typos, has the poems in the wrong order, includes poems written after she was married (despite the title), omits much of her own output, and contains much that is not hers: Hinc omissa scias mea plurima, multa videbis Hinc modulis passim mixta aliena meis, and she remarks to George Carolides that he has no business in her book: A nostris aufer modulis tua scripta, Georgi, Vel tua curr mea sint, dic, me curve tua? This is just playful: Carolides wrote the propempticon to the whole Parthenica (III.60), and Weston=s letters to Baldhoven accept his decisions on what to include; she jokes with >Georgi= and uses his own words against him. Nevertheless, there is a surprising amount of the Parthenica that is not...