Words That Matter: Linguistic Perception in Renaissance English (review)

Reviews 159 should make more widely known Agrippa's singular contribution t o debates about w o m e n in early modern Europe. Charles Zika Department ofHistory University ofMelbourne Anderson, Judith H., Words That Matter: Linguistic Perception i Renaissance English, Stanford, Stanford University Press, 1996 cloth; pp. xiv, 340; R.R.P. AUS$64.95. This study takes issue with Ian Hacking's claim, in Why Does Language Matter to Philosophy? (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1975), that (in Anderson's words) 'language only comes to matter when sentences replace ideas as the medium of knowledge and when public discourse of the linguistically constituted subject replaces the mental discourse of the Cartesian ego'. Anderson argues, in contrast, that 'words, notably lexicalized and printed words, matter significantly and problematically long before then'. She seeks to show throughout h o w the emphasis, in the Early Modern period, was not on sentences but on 'sub-sentential units of various sorts, such as individual words, proverbs, Latin phrases, lexical entries, and rhetorical tropes and schemes' (p. 231). The book focuses chiefly on the varying attitudes of Early Modem writers to questions about the substantiality of language. Do words represent things rather than concepts? Are words themselves things? D o they have a natural and necessary connection with the things they name, or is language purely conventional? Is meaning prior to language, and does a reality external to language validate the meaning of words? The first three chapters ask h o w such questions are affected in the Early Modern 160 Reviews period by the transition from a manuscript to a print culture; by the vogue for proverbs and apothegms, especially in isolated contexts like inscriptions; by the dying out of medieval Latin as a spoken language and the use of classical Latin as a medium of communication; by the growth of dictionaries, both polyglot and monoglot; by attempts to 'fix' the language; and so on. Chapters Four and Five turn attention to attitudes to language revealed in some of the major literary works of the period. Chapter Four compares Jonson's attitude in The Forrest to Spenser's in The Faerie Queene, arguing that whereas Spenser tries 'to look through the word . . . to the secrets it contains', Jonson's poems 'can be read as participating in the early stages of a cultural shift of meaning from essence to word and logic to lexicon' (p. 134). Chapter Five begins with a consideration of the extent to which selected Early Modern writers on language (Agrippa, Ficino, Hart) considered words as things that had power in themselves; i t progresses with a comparison of the body=tree image in Lancelot Andrewes's Sermon II of the Passion ('Vindemavit me, as a vine whose fruit is all plucked off), Spenser's January Eclogue ('You naked trees, whose shady leaues are lost... All so m y lustfull leafe is dry and sere'), and Shakespeare's Sonnet 73 ("That time of year thou mayst in m e behold/When yellow leaves, or none, or few, do hang/Upon those boughs which shake against the cold'); i t concludes with an extended discussion of the Redcrosse/Duessa/ Fradubio-as-tree segment in The Faerie Queene I . i i , comparing i t with Ariel's imprisonment in the oak in The Tempest. The aim i s 'to watch the shifting relations of animate verbal object to icon and allegory, to commonplace or cultural site, and to the processes of cultural and conceptual reflection of these and on these' (p. 165). The long final chapter offers extended discussions of (1) the confrontation between Artegall and the Giant in Book V of The Reviews 161 Faerie Queene: words cannot be physically weighed in the Giant's scales; the Giant's failure raises 'the classic specter of the failure of words to refer in some intrinsic w a y to things, or at least to material things' (p. 185); (2) Donne's second Prebend sermon, demonstrating his 'awareness of words themselves as a meaningful and substantial m e d i u m ' (p. 214); (3) Donne's final sermon, 'Death's DuelT: 'it would be hard to bring life lived and life written and then...