Textual Conversations in the Renaissance: Ethics, Authors, Technologies (review)

In this suggestive volume of essays in honor of Anne Lake Prescott, "textual conversations" is an inclusive category, defined by the editors as "practices of writing and reading conceived as dialogue" (3). It encompasses humanist conversations with the texts of the ancients, the dialogue and the colloquium forms, ideas about a social sphere or a politics of open conversation aligned with republicanism, studies of authorial influence or intertextuality, and explorations of the epistolary genre. The editors skillfully organize this diversity around three themes: ethics, authors, and technologies.

The ethics grouping opens up social, political, and legal perspectives on conversation. Arthur F. Kinney offers the most wide-ranging reflection on social negotiation in conversation, skilfully weaving together Tudor views of the community-building value of conversation derived from Stephano Guazzo's rhetorical anatomy with modern-day theories of linguistic interaction derived from Wittgenstein, Bakhtin, and Bourdieu. Illustrating with a passage from Castiglione's Courtier, this excellent essay highlights the capacity of artful conversation to encompass aggression, risk, opposition, and "divided state[s]" (26) while nonetheless sustaining community. Patrick Cheney's fascinating essay on "Marlowe's Republican Authorship" argues that Marlowe's translations of the first book of Lucan's Pharsalia and of Ovid's Amores, respectively "arch-republican" and "anti-monarchical" books (34, 36), signal his important place in a "representational" prehistory of English republicanism and herald his presentation of Tamburlaine (at least initially) as a sort of "republican freedom-fighter" (40). The essay touches on conversation only insofar as it reviews J. G. A. Pocock's and David Norbrook's ideas about "linguistic" republicanism, associated with "open speech and dialogue" (30–31), but the overview provided of criticism focused on writing English republicanism is valuable. Interpreting Measure for Measure in relation to theories about equity, Peter G. Platt suggests that, for legal theorists like Edmund Plowden, the effective practice of equity involved imagined conversation in cases where strict law and contingent experience parted ways: Plowden urges judges to put questions to the absent lawmaker, supposing what answers might have arisen if current circumstances were known.

The section on authors in conversation opens with Judith H. Anderson's convincing case that Spenser in books 1 and 3 of The Faerie Queene reiterates resonant elements from Chaucer — the Pardoner's figure of Death and Dorigen's plight in The Franklin's Tale — in a process of narrative transformation that reinterprets the original, eliciting "that which remains unspoken" (80) in it. In contrast to this sustained interpretation of two examples, William J. Kennedy finds numerous traces from French poetry in Shakespeare's sonnets and early plays, ranging from the less-familiar poets Philippe Desportes and Etienne Jodelle to Du Bellay and Ronsard, including echoes both "deliberate" and "distant" (109), and contextualizing in interesting ways in relation to the social and intellectual environment of 1590s London. With Margaret P. Hannay's excellent essay on the psalm translations of Mary Sidney Herbert, Countess of Pembroke, an Elizabethan woman writer enters into the "literary conversation," quite surprisingly, with both of the two "central discourses of early modern Europe," discourses associated with the "authorizing voices" of David and Petrarch (113).

The technologies section focuses first on early modern women's letter-writing, with Betty S. Travitsky opening up the pleasures of archival discovery and introducing two fascinating and unfamiliar autobiographical letters of an English Bridgettine nun, Sister Elizabeth Saunders. Roger Kuin's essay, "A Civil Conversation: Letters and the Edge of Form," is a tour de force, offering first a superb overview of the classical and Renaissance familiar letter; second a thoughtful interpretive sampling of Sir Philip Sidney's Latin correspondence; and third, under the curious subtitle of "Wolves," a whimsical and suggestive postscript troubling the lucid account that precedes it. The leading idea of Kuhn's essay, what he refers to as the "edge of form," is the in-between status of the Latin familiar letter...