Authorizing Words: Speech, Writing, and Print in the English Renaissance (review)

102BOOK REVIEWS Martin E\sky, Authorizing Words: Speech, Writing, and Printin the English Renaissance. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989. ? + 232 pp. $29.95. by John Ottenhoff Most of us, having absorbed the wisdom of Ong and the slogans of McLuhan, carry a general sense of the worldshaking movements in the Renaissance from manuscript to print culture, from the priority of speech to the priority of writing. Those notions about the interplay of spoken and written language, Martin Elsky informs us, are not totally askew but require refining. Elsky takes on the task with alacrity, carefully distinguishing among humanist reactions to scholastic grammar and sensitively grounding the work of writers like Ascham, Herbert, Bacon, and Burton within this changing world of discourse. Authorizing Words otters a sophisticated, microscopic study of the linguistic, literary, and social issues that converge as Renaissance print culture emerges. Elsky's project is decidedly historical in orientation. It only briefly notes the rigorous Derridean questioning of distinctions between speech and writing and soundly rejects the claim that language is fundamentally incoherent. Most crucially, Elsky asserts that "the deconstructive certification that Renaissance language theory is incoherent and its attendant claim that speech is reducible to writing and writing to speech glosses over phenomena of major importance in the history of language and literature" (p. 3). Elsky understandably doesn't pursue the critical debate, letting his historical readings do the talking, but one can't help wondering what might have resulted had he strengthened his claims, adding, perhaps, a concluding chapter that more explicitly confronts recent assertions about logocentrism. The first three chapters of Authorizing Words describe various "speech-dominated" views of language. Elsky deconstructs , if you will, the usual oppositions of scholastic vs. humanist and philosophy vs. rhetoric, tracing a common root in Aristotelian semiological theory. In consequence, the humanist position emerges as less than monolithic and more fractured than normally assumed as Elsky persuasively illus- BOOK REVIEWS103 trates how the humanist and scholastic positions existed side by side in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The real terms of the debate, he claims, were between logic and grammar and the degree to which linguistic theory received authority from culture. Elsky describes in some detail the efforts of the scholastic grammarians to "deculturate" language. Theirs was an "anguished " effort to escape the consequences of natural language, to find a universal grammar that gets to the "transparent vehicle of thought about things." In a curious sense — though Elsky doesn't make the claim — his portrait of the modistic grammarians resembles the twentieth-century Chomskyan, innatist, universals-seeking strains of grammar that desperately wish to avoid the messinese of performance. The humanists, in contrast, add cultural and moral dimensions to their definition of language as speech, rejecting along the way the scholastic reign of logic in the curriculum. But Elsky finds considerable continuity between the two movements. Focusing especially on Joseph Webbe, whose Appeale to Truth (1622) and languagetextbooks exemplifythe position, Elsky carefully establishes that "Despite humanist denunciations of scholastic logic and grammar, scholastic concepts of language were preserved" in humanist projects, including the widely used Lily's Grammar. Rather than representing a Ramist (Ramus, by the way, receives barely a mention from Elsky) eloquence-only movement, concerned with words rather than things, the humanist linguistic theories retain much scholastic thought. And even in its most obvious differences— elevating literature as the exemplarof language's base in cultureand speech and in honoring grammarover logic — the humanist project remains essentially conservative. Most strikingly, the humanist position includes an interesting notion of intertextuality — for Webbe, "all acts of language are imitations of prior utterance" — but Webbe and others wished to "control which prior utterances are to be imitated" (p. 50). Thus, while the humanists recognized that "cultures encode the proper norms of language in their sanctioned texts and place limits on the possibilities of meaning within the parameters of those texts" — an insight central to current cultural studies — they moved to privilege Latin as the language of a morally superior culture. By Elsky's account, the humanist linguistic enterprise had 104BOOK REVIEWS a certain coherence but also fundamental problems. It focused on "social communication" while defining social speech as ethical — a position that...