Second world and green world: studies in Renaissance fiction-making (review)

138 Reviews the Friar's tale in Studies in the age of Chaucer 12 (1990), insists on including even that fabliau among Chaucer's religious fiction. Following his lead, I cannot see how the Summoner's tale can possibly be excluded. It is precisely its risky, parodically inverted play with religious discourse which denies us easy acquaintance with Chaucer's faith. There are many good things in this book. Pearsall identifies one in predicting that the most promising tine of approach into the religious tales might be feminist. A line of such comments, in fact, leads to notable feminist readings of the Clerk's tale and the Prioress's by Elizabeth Kirk and Elizabeth Robertson. If I have dwelt at length on a general problem with the book rather than on valuable work done in individual essays like these, it is because they seem to m e in fact to lose their force in a context of such unrelieved piety. Chaucer's Canterbury picture may not be exactly a Bosch triptych, but it is certainly no retable. Roger H. Nicholson Department of English University of Auckland Berger, Harry, jr., Second world and green world: studies in Renaissance fiction-making, ed. John P. Lynch, Berkeley/Los Angeles/London, University of California Press, 1990; paper; pp. xxiii, 542; 22 illustrations; R.R.P. US$15.95. This collection of essays confirms that Hany Berger is one of the most eminent American scholars of his generation. His achievement includes contributions to literary theory as well as magistral knowledge of a wide range of Renaissance culture. The essays in this collection include theoretical accounts of the Renaissance mind as well as commentaries on Shakespeare, the Neoplatonic tradition, Erasmus and More, Marvell and Milton, Alberti, da Vinci, and Vermeer. Most of the essays werefirstpublished in the 1960s. Then value as textual interpretation stands the test of time. In addition, each essay is a significant point in Berger's development of a theoretical view of the Renaissance mind and Renaissance culture. Berger has been an influential figure in the development of American criticism in the last twenty years and the collection is a crucialtextfor understanding the development of American critical theory from the liberal humanism of the N e w Critics to N e w Historicism. The title essay presents a definition of Renaissancefictionsas an expression of an historical 'technique of the mind' which involves a mode of serio ludere and the construction of an 'explicitly fictional, artificial, or hypothetical world' (p. 12). The account of 'period imagination' in the second essay becomes a theoretical model of art and the imagination which foreshadows N e w Historicist strategies of indirect insistence on the claims of individual interpretation and Reviews 139 subversion of historical study of the material and social conditions of literature. As an account of historical states of mind the argument has some similarities to Foucault's theory, but with the difference that Berger's theory is defined as a method which 'substitutes hypothetical for historical causes because its aim is to describe cultural objects as phenomena in their ownrightrather than account for them as effects of "the background'" (p. 46). In a later essay Berger's method leads to an analysis of More's Utopia in which the green world of Utopia is interpreted as an ironic lesson that utopianism is a condition of hatred of life, 'Utopian misanthropy' (p. 156). In contrast to what he sees as Utopian enor Berger appeals to an order of liberal individualism, 'the hope that human beings can be trusted to solve their problems through the ordinary informal activity of self-regulation and self-criticism, persuasion and argument, cooperation and compromise' (p. 237). Berger's commitment to explicit theory makes this collection of early essays a significant contribution to cunent debate about literary interpretation and history as well as a clear statement of some main directions in American studies in the Renaissance. Axel Kruse Department of English University of Sydney Bitel, Lisa M., Isle of the saints: monastic settlement and Christian community in early Ireland, Ithaca and London, Cornell University Press, 1990; cloth; pp. xvi, 268; 4 maps, 11 figures; R.R.P. US$28.95 + 1 0...