Mapping the Renaissance world: the geographical imagination in the age of discovery (review)

318 Short notices Kellogg, Laura D., Boccaccio's and Chaucer's Cressida (Studies in the Humanities, Literature—Politics—Society, 16), Bern, Peter Lang, 1995; boards; pp. 144; R R P SFr.58.00. The story of TroUus and Cressida was used by Boccaccio in the Filostrato and by Chaucer in Troilus and Criseyde. Laura Kellogg provides an expansive and well-documented discussion of their sources, and some psychological interpretation of the motives of characters and narrators. This is a summary of existing material glossed with personal insight rather than original research or innovative methodology. Some specialists will find it useful. I a m inclined to think that Kellogg could have .given more consideration to the function of her work. As a compendium of detail, it assumes a lot, lacking facts at a basic level, such as when the works were written. For people who have not read Boccaccio and Chaucer, it will not serve as an introduction. O n the other hand, for those who have, much of the material is self-evident, such as the retelling of the story. For Kellogg, Chaucer 'translates and transforms' the Filostrato. This should be the starting point rather than the conclusion, and a theoretical discussion of theseterms,the authors' own understanding of what they were doing, and detailed comparison of the texts would be illuminating. Given Kellogg's acknowledgement of editorial contact it behoves the^publisher to give more guidance and focus to its contributors. M a x Staples School of Humanities Charles Start University Lestringant, Frank, Mapping the Renaissance world: the geographical imagination in the age of discovery, translated from the French by David Fausett, Berkeley and Los Angeles, University of California Press, 1994; cloth; pp. xvii, 197; 10 plates; R R P AU$38.00. Mapping the Renaissance world valuably touches upon a number of current issues in early m o d e m scholarship, including discourse surrounding the new world, the influence of genre upon the construction of knowledge, and struggles over authorship and authority. As Stephen Greenblatt comments in his foreword to the English translation, Lestringant explores a 'compelling instance of the Renaissance fascination with the invention—at once the finding and the fabricating—of reality' (p. xiv). Short notices 319 The study is erected on slight foundations. It centres on the career and milieu of Andr6 Thevet (1516-92), who rose to the position of royal cosmographer, but lived to see his work fall into disrepute. Lestringant focuses on Thevet's commitment to cosmography. He charts the classical origins of this genre, considers its radical claims for the value of experimentation, and explores through it the 'geographical imagination' of the sixteenth century. Cosmography sought to envisage the sheer quantity and diversity of the world, and was thus peculiarly suited to an age of frenetic exploration. Its perspective was Olympian, and its description privileged singularity and inexhaustible variety over order and causation. Lestringant's cultural microhistory is generally compelling. H e illuminates the power of a hitherto misunderstood genre, and also the forces which undermined that power. In Lestringant'sterms,Thevet 'bears witness to the crisis of a genre in transition: at an intermediate stage between medieval Imagines mundi and the adases, encyclopedias and voyage collections of the classical age' (p. 129). But in some places the basis of investigation seems simply too slight. Most importantiy, the chapters on the representation of new world natives offer subtie textual analysis, but their engagement with broader developments in colonialist discourse is a little disappointing. Although Greenblatt's foreword claims a wide intellectual context for Lestringant's work, it retains an ah of insularity that is at once a strength and a shortcoming. It is also disappointing that so little attention was devoted to the presentation of illustrations. The plates are too few and are poorly referenced in the text while the author discusses a number of images that are not reproduced. Andrew McRae Department of English University of Sydney Wilks, Michael (ed.), The world of John of Salisbury (Studies in Church History, Subsidia, 3), Oxford, Blackwell Publishers for the Ecclesiastical History Society, 1994; paper; pp. xii, 469; R R P AU$49.95. If there was a twelfth-century Renaissance, as...