Practicing New Historicism (review)

Reviews 191 Parergon 20.2 (2003) emphasis on procedural politics understandably necessitates downplaying Christine’s interest in sexual politics, it would have been refreshing to have seen Christine’s remarkable formulations of female political agency given a more central place by Forhan, both within Christine’s oeuvre and, by extension, in the history of political theory. Forhan writes in a prose that is limpid and uncluttered, yet still manages to incorporate the terminology of medieval political theory with precision. She negotiates with apparent (and surely deceptive) ease the finer points of the medieval theorists she examines and demonstrates a real talent for extracting from them the points most fundamental to her argument. There are some redundancies, and the prose occasionally gives the impression of being incompletely edited, with some evidence of former drafts creeping into the final text (eg. ‘no medieval political theorist was wrote in a vacuum’; p. 43). Errors are mostly inoffensive but are occasionally distracting (as when one book is described as the ‘companion peace’ of another). The concluding discussion of Christine’s understanding of vulnerability evinces Forhan’s enormous sympathy for her subject, a sympathy that nevertheless remains even-handed and sensitive to the aspects of Christine’s political theory that perplex modern readers. She subtly addresses the question of Christine’s much-debated conservatism without being an apologist for her social elitism or the less palatable elements of her nationalism. In sum, Forhan makes a compelling case for Christine’s political texts as responses to her volatile circumstances, and for Christine as a significant voice in the history of political theory. I look forward to this book having the impact it deserves in the discipline of political theory, and in medieval studies. Louise D’Arcens English Studies Program University of Wollongong Gallagher, Catherine and Stephen Greenblatt, Practicing New Historicism, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2000; paper; pp. ix, 249; 12 b/w illustrations; RRP US$14.00; ISBN 0226279359. In the first chapter, new historicist approaches are defined as attempts at revealing ‘both the invisible cohesion and the half-realized conflicts in specific cultures’ through an opening of the perspective to ‘particular times and places’ 192 Reviews Parergon 20.2 (2003) (pp. 13-4). On the surface theoretically elusive, this ‘history of possibilities’, although concerned with the collective, is fundamentally linked with the ‘single voice, the isolated scandal, the idiosyncratic vision, the transient sketch’. Emphasis is thus placed on ‘representations’, investigations of the human body/ subject, ‘the discovery of unexpected discursive contexts’ for literary works and discourse analysis (pp. 16-7). This theoretical introduction is further enlarged upon in two sections, ‘The Touch of the Real’, in which Greenblatt tackles the critical stances put forth by Clifford Geertz and Erich Auerbach, and ‘Counterhistory and the Anecdote’, in which Gallagher links the disruptive effect of the anecdote to the practice of New Historicism, and discusses, among other major critics, the works of Raymond Williams and Michel Foucault. In ‘The Wound in the Wall’, Greenblatt approaches the altarpiece Communion of the Apostles by the Flemish painter Joos van Gent, in the Palazzo Ducale in Urbino. An exceptional case in Western painting, the altarpiece presents Jesus as both priest and symbol of the Eucharist. The appeal of the painting is neither emotional nor mystical, but doctrinal and institutional, with the result that ‘time is twisted back upon itself […]; end and origin meet and touch’ (p. 78). Yet, Greenblatt points out, Gent’s panel excludes narrative and conflict without eliminating history, contained in a complex tissue of allusions in the background of the main representation. The second part of the essay is dedicated to Paolo Ucello’s six-panel Profanation of the Host, drawn on the tradition of circulating legends about the miracles performed by the Host, while being manipulated by the enemy of the faith. The Jewish family depicted in the panels attempt to profanate the Host by placing it in a frying pan over a fire. The mystery of Christ’s presence becomes apparent when the Host turns into flesh, bleeds, floods the room and spills onto the street, where soldiers arrive to bring the Jews to the stake. Gent’s altarpiece thus represents formal doctrine, Ucello...