Vanities of the Eye: Vision in Early Modern European Culture (review)

This deeply and widely researched book, intellectual history more than cultural history, pursues ideas about the sense of sight through a range of texts in natural philosophy, medicine, theology and magic, and also the theory of images. The period is the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries; the central issue is how far the eye deceives; and due attention is given to the domains of demonology, dreams, madness, and witchcraft. There is a real elegance about Clark's adoption not only of a title, but also, as he explains, of an agenda and structure from George Hakewill's The vanitie of the eye of 1608. Doing so enables Clark to sustain a period universe of discourse of the ripest kind. One can legitimately take it all in either of two ways—as an autonomous intellectual world reeking of its time or as a spectacular case of systematic equivocation and category misalignments which one unpicks. Never did "vision" mean so many quite different things.