Chaste Thinking: The Rape of Lucretia and the Birth of Humanism by Stephanie H Jed (review)

108Rocky Mountain Review Hohendahl's discussion "Literary Criticism in the Epoch of Liberalism, 1820-1870," translated by Jeffrey S. Librett, forms the pivotal chapter of the book. It brims over with historical detail as Hohendahl brings literary criticism into a larger sociopolitical framework over a period offive decades, illuminating the theories of Menzel, Vischer, Prutz, the Young Germans, and many others. He examines the production and distribution of literature and literary journals, and pinpoints the gradual institutionalization of criticism, tracing how academic criticism withdraws into its professional journals from the 1860s on and becomes divided fromjournalistic criticism. Librett's translation is polished and, except for an occasional Germanism, highly readable. Russell A. Berman picks up the chronological thread in his "Literary Criticism from Empire to Dictatorship, 1870-1933," ably translated by Simon Srebrny. Berman delineates the process of depolitization of criticism in the Wilhelminian period and focuses on the emergence of feuilletonism as the dominant model of subjectivist literary criticism. The study offers fascinating insight into the critical strategies of Fontane, Frenzel, and Brahm, and the theories of the early naturalists. Alfred Kerr's aestheticization of literary criticism, Franz Mehring and the workers' movement, and the views of Georg Lukacs form further topics, as do the politicized literary criticism ofthe leftist intellectuals and the populist literary criticism of the radical right wing. Berman's well researched analysis concludes with a discussion ofBertolt Brecht and Walter Benjamin. Bernhard Zimmermann brings the volume to a close with his treatise "Literary Criticism from 1933 to the Present," translated by Franz Blaha. Zimmermann gives social dimension to the literary life in the Third Reich and depicts the chilling transformation of literary criticism into a totalitarian propaganda apparatus. The theoretical positions of the antifascist literary critics in exile are put into perspective. The work concludes with a broad overview of the different forms and functional frameworks of criticism in the two postwar Germanies. Zimmermann's style is dense and Blaha's translation with its long complicated sentences strains the English language at times. Blaha could perhaps have taken a few more liberties in his transcription. Thorough notes underscore the scholarly nature of this impressive work. A bibliography was not included in the German original and is still omitted. It would have made a welcome addition. My most serious concern is about the quality of the printed edition. Perhaps the problern was an isolated one, but the binding of my book broke in half during my reading. Texas A & M University STEPHANIE H JED. Chaste Thinking: The Rape ofLucretia and the Birth ofHumanism. Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1989. 160 p. The point ofdeparture for this provocative, innovative, and eloquently written book is a fifteenth-century Florentine version of the legend of the rape of Lucretia, Salutati's Declamatio Lucretiae. Jed's study of this document occasions consideration of numerous important literary critical issues: Book Reviews109 philological practice, canon-formation, the materiality oftexts, the connections between apparently discrete modes of discourse, and the representation of humanism in modern scholarship. For, instead of approaching Salutati's text as simply another version ofthe Lucretia legend, Jed considers this document in relation to fifteenth-century Florentine political ideology and the writing practices of both humanists and merchants of this period. She discusses the political underpinnings ofwriting by humanists and their philological methods, the ascription of different rhetorical conventions to "literary" and nonliterary writing, and the adoption of different scripts by humanists and merchants. According to Jed, the rape of Lucretia is conventionally regarded as a prologue to republican freedom; Salutati's retelling of this legend represents one instance of the reconstruction of history in support of a political ideology which idealizes Republican Rome and which legitimizes Florentine foreign policy by linking Florence to ancient Rome. The ascription of such universalizing meaning to this legend, however, typifies what Jed terms "chaste thinking," for reading the rape ofLucretia as a prologue to republican freedom depends upon severing the legend from both its material conditions and its social-historical context. Jed regards the Lucretia story not as the "inevitable prologue to Rome's liberation," but "as a historical figuration, formed and reformed to serve various interests and needs in different historical moments" (7...