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214 Reviews But for m a n y readers, the book will chiefly be of interest in that i t allows unmediated access to the words of a w o m a n . The voice which emerges is engaging, both modest and confident, and Carol Neel draws special attention to this tension between her self-deprecation and the boldness of her educative purpose. She brings out, without adjudicating between, different approaches to the text opened up by feminist scholarship: for example, can it be taken as the voice of a distinctive female piety, or does it reveal a flattening of gender distinctions? Neel has done a fine job. Her book is a paperback reprint of a work published in hard covers some years ago, with the addition of new material at the end, where an exceptionally helpful Afterword engages with some of the surprisingly large volume of relevant recent work and suggests ways in which it facilitates the reading of the text. Dhuoda's work is rendered into clear English, to which an introduction, pitched roughly at undergraduate level, eases the path. The notes make available much material accumulated by Pierre Riche for his publication of a critical edition, and are generally helpful, although I a m not sure whether to believe the suggestion that the letters in the term 'tD+Mt', which abbreviate the Latin 'dis manibus', stand for 'into the hands of God'; perhaps Dhuoda mistakenly thought they did, but the original meaning is 'to the spirits of the dead'. The book effectively presents a text which is interesting in many ways, and deserves a wide readership. John Moorhead Department ofHistory University of Queensland Hiller, Geoffrey G , and Peter L. Groves, ed., Samuel Daniel. Selected Poe and A Defense of Rhyme, University of North Carolina, Asheville, Pegasus Press, 1998; paper; pp. xii, 251; R.R.P. US$12.95. As I read this fine book I often thought of Shylock's exclamation: ' come to judgement; yea a Daniel!' For not only have the editors and the publishers donean excellentjob, butDaniel's work, as offered in this selection, embodies many of the qualities that at this stage our discipline is much in need of: such as discipline, c o m m o n sense, sound workmanship, and above Reviews 215 a l latotallyunprejudiced, shrewd, independent and unfashionable judgement of the world—perhaps particularly the literary world. As the editors point out, 'Daniel was highly regarded in his o w n time and much of his poetry was innovative and influential' (p. ix), but he has suffered from neglect by modern scholars, not least editors, and this selection, which presents him as a poet rather than dramatist, including a well-chosen sampling of his poetic output and the justly famous A Defense of Rhyme (which, fortunately, has not been neglected, though i t still deserves more attention) should do something to redress the balance. Whether it will do so or not to the extent that Daniel deserves remains to be seen at a time like the present, which is still characterised by much sweeping, politicised comment on the 'Early Modern' period in general rather than careful reading of literary texts of any kind, leave alone texts as understated, unspectacular, and subtle as those of this poet. But that is all the more reason w h y w e need this edition. A Defense of Rhyme, for example, is an outstanding example of English empirical common sense, accompanied by such theoretical insight as is needed for i t s job (but fortunately no more), warring against outrageous theorising based on undue admiration for foreign writers. Daniel seems to m e even better in this treatise than the editors would allow. They feel that he would have benefited from 'the advent of modern linguistic theory' (p. 19), but i t appears that he needed to learn little from that, and that he has a clear enough grasp of what he is discussing. Daniel exposes as purely dogmatic and silly Campion's thinking that the English should discard rhyme because the ancients did not use i t , and, more importantly, successfully dismisses the foolish experiment with 'quantitative' verse that some of his contemporaries...

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