Literary Culture in Jacobean England: Reading 1621 (review)

Reviews 233 Parergon 21.2 (2004) The impact of the portolan charts on the world maps is rather confusingly handled with oblique references to Gautier Dalché’s argument about ‘intersections in the cultural domain which allowed the emergence of both traditions’(p. 99) but not until p. 126 do we meet the terms coined by David Woodward and Marica Milanesi for the modified form that emerged. The discussion of the impact of the rediscovery of Ptolemy’s Geography is full of insights that are not fully developed. In particular, we are never certain whether we should be focussing on the slow demise of the classical/medieval world map and its lingering heritage, or the growth of maps with a very different purpose. The section on the mapping of the interior is both fascinating and frustrating. This is a difficult book to use because it has a very restricted index. The bibliography for example lists the important work on the Klosterneuburg maps where in the spirit of the Ptolemaic Geography the monks were compiling the precise longitude and latitude of all the major cities and landmarks of Europe, a development that one might think has relevance to a significant shifting of function in cartography. There is no listing in the index, however, and careful reading of the text shows only a passing reference on p. 129 to the corpus and no discussion of this land-oriented endeavour. Equally, a fifteenth century map of Africa drawn by Pedro Reinel is included in the illustrations but there is no index reference to a discussion of its significance. Some of the chapter titles are confusing in their oblique references to other ideas. ‘From mare clausum to mare liberum’ should surely imply some concern with the bitter legal arguments about maritime jurisdiction and authority, but Relaño uses it to discuss the breach in the classical notion of an encircling sea surrounding the known and habitable lands without any discussion of the implications. Careful reading is required if this book is to yield its secrets. Sybil M. Jack University of Sydney Salzman, Paul, Literary Culture in Jacobean England: Reading 1621, New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2002; cloth; pp. xix, 268; 7 b/w illustrations; RRP US$62; ISBN 1403900736. Paul Salzman has performed a feat that many scholars must have dreamt about or cogitated on or even half planned. He has read every surviving book, news sheet, and proclamation published in England in one year, 1621, as well as manuscripts, 234 Reviews Parergon 21.2 (2004) parliamentary records, and texts of performances that can be dated to the same year. Having done that, he presents his findings in a thoughtful and stimulating fashion. He organises his account into categories that are sometimes thematic (‘Selves’), sometimes generic or formal (‘Transformations of Romance’, ‘Poetry’, ‘News’), and sometimes related to transactions between text and audience (‘Performances’, ‘Instruction’). At the end of each chapter a series of suave overviews links these categories through comparisons and contrasts. Not only has Salzman worked over the entire field of primary texts: his mastery of the historical and critical scholarship related to that very wide field shows admirable industry and intellectual grasp. He elucidates the recent historiography of political debate in Stuart England, and he moves confidently and expertly through work on critically contested texts such as Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy and Jonson’s The Gypsies Metamorphosed. His chapter on ‘Selves’ is informed by and engages with influential treatments of selfhood from Stephen Greenblatt to Francis Barker to Katherine Eisaman Maus. Salzman establishes his reading parameters through an interesting study of the letters of 1621 from John Chamberlain to Dudley Carleton. He notes Chamberlain’s position ‘within a certain elite grouping … but outside the centre of court culture’ (p. 2), and seeks to give his own reading position a similar ubiquity or inquisitive flexibility. He models his methodology on Chamberlain’s interest in the effects or reception of writings as much as in their contents (p. 7) and on Chamberlain’s readiness to move freely between writings that are otherwise ‘taken to be quite distinct in their genre and in their audience’(p. 11). In practice, Salzman...