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,_. Reviews 174 In a much too brief concluding chapter, Pryor deals with the relationship between human objectives and available technology. He is certdnly right in pointing out that a reconstructed optimum pattern for achieving objectives with a given technology may serve as an important tool in historicd research. But it is rather questionable whether one should assume that, in actud situations, men do not tend to demand more, or extract less, from a given technology than it objectively offers. Indeed Pryor refers to cases in which optimum patterns were negated by other factors (p. 199). His ingenious argument that medieval fleet commanders might easily have extended their range of operation by employing sailing ships as waterers, but simply never hit upon this idea (pp. 85-86), exemplifies human failure to attain an objectively feasible technological optimum. Perhaps the introduction of less tangible factors (one of which could be, despite justifiable reservations, mentality) might enhance still more the heuristic value of Professor Pryor's model. Benjamin Z. Kedar Department of History Hebrew University of Jerusdem Roche, T. P., jr, Petrarch and the English sonnet sequences, N.Y., AMS Press, 1989; pp. xviii, 604; R.R.P. US$25.00. This is an industrious, enthusiastic and idiosyncratic book. Professor Roche explains that it began as a study of Petrarch's Canzoniere, then became a bridge connecting Petrarch and the English sonnet sequences, though 'without a lot of hoopla about comparative literary studies' (p. viii), and eventudly turned into a revaluation of the sonnet sequences themselves. The Preface dismisses the view of the sonnet sequences as 'written by young men in love with beautiful but unyielding young women' (p. ix) - already dismissed, one would have thought, half a century earlier - and with it the narrative fallacy (that the sonnets tell a story), the biographicd fallacy (that they deal with the private life of the writer), the formal fallacy (that they form sequences - although ' the phrase sonnet sequence is so deeply embedded in our critical vocabulary that it would be fruitless to want to do it in' - p. xii). Although Roche warns that his reading of the sequences is to be 'unremittingly Christian in its outlook' (p. viii), this is not so obtrusive in the study itself. He relies much more on the numerological appraoch of Fowler's Triumphal Forms, arguing again that the first 63 sonnets of Astrophil and Stella form a unit based on the Grand Climacteric year 63, and reinforcing the Pythagorean pyramid in Shakespeare's sonnets. He is in some difficulty with Greville's Caelica, from the variant numbering of the Warwick M S S and the printed text. A study of the manuscript would have disclosed further difficulties, as the deletions and restorations made and abandoned by Greville indicate that the Reviews 175 total number of sonnets could have been of no real consequence to him. It is unfortuante here that Robert Sidney's poems are not considered, as a series surviving in the author's hand. There are, however, some 40 pages of appendix, devoted to numerological oudines of the sequences discussed. Professor Roche's other major resort is to myth as the subtext of the sequence. Petrarch relies on the myth of Apollo and Daphne; Sidney's Penelope has Homeric resonances; Caelica draws on the Endymion myth. Jonson's A Celebration of Charis is brought in at the end to write finis to the whole tradition. There is much of incidental interest in the book; for example, in the pages questioning Frances Yates' view of Giordano Bruno or Yvor Winters on 'the plain style'. But generally the approaches which Professor Roche is refuting, dlied to the approaches he is advocating by way of replacement, make this a museum of twentieth-century criticism of the sonnet sequence. G. A. Wilkes Department of EngUsh University of Sydney Salmon, J. H. M., Renaissance and revolt: Essays in the intellectual and social history of early modern France, Cambridge, C.U.P., 1987. This book comprises eleven scholarly articles, ten of which have appeared over the past twenty years in a variety of periodicals, and one new to this volume. Individudly, they either summarize recent debate on issues ranging from peasant...

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