Writing from history: the rhetoric of exemplarity in Renaissance literature (review)

158 Reviews Philosophy and Theology: the Liberal Arts. Hamburger reminds his reader that the 'study of the arts forms an essential precondition to mystical knowledge'. Art historians, in particular, will welcome the critic's linear and tangential approaches, as evidenced in his discussion of the Trinity miniatures. They are demonstrated to be firmly anchored in Biblical traditions, but also to exemplify mysticism and mystagogy, apophatic imagery, geometrical abstraction and anthropomorphism. In the light of suchtextualand pictorial illumination one may appropriately raise the question of the manuscript's patron. Hamburger believes it was a 'woman of aristocratic descent attached to a convent or a foundation of canonesses'. H e records a certain Dominican aura pervading the textual extracts, arising perhaps from the intervention of a Preaching Friar as a spiritual adviser. Three areas of concern about passages in Hamburger's exposition may also be mentioned. In the interest of accuracy there is little point in invoking extraneous apparatus, in this instance the form of the Oriental mandala (p. 128), if Christian artists had no knowledge of it. Characterizing the presence of thorns and Jews around the recumbent's bed in the Tree of Jesse icon, as an 'antiSemitic interpretation' (p. 91) is untoward. The accompanying text does proclaim positively the commonplace sicut spina protulit rosam, ita iudea mariam. Again, it is a shaky methodological approach to claim that artist Y of the year 1400 is said to 'anticipate' the work of artist Z who lived centuries after him (cf. p. 48). Does not the verb 'anticipate' imply an act of knowledge. The art work is by a competent painter with marked Franco-Flemish traits, employing iconographic models that emanated from the Rhineland. The colour and monochrome figures which reproduce the miniatures of the Yale manuscript and illustrations of supporting material are of good quality. All in all, the volume's appearance recalls that of a large Meiss monograph which art historians rely on for solid scholarship, breadth of vision, and plethora of details. It is easy to predict that Hamburger's study will earn the reputation of being the definitive work on the Rothschild Canticles. Peter Rolfe Monks Townsville Hampton, Timothy, Writing from history: the rhetoric of exemplarity in Renaissance literature, Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1990; cloth/paper; pp. xvi, 309; R.R.P. US$42.95 (cloth), $12.95 (paper) + 1 0 % overseas. W e are so used to exemplary figures that the problematic complexity of exemplarity is easily overlooked. Hampton's stimulating study removes all excuses. H e treats exemplarity as a microcosm of a familiar paradox of historicity. Societies need images of some authoritative past in order to deal with the present, yet the more these images are explored, the more alien the past Reviews 159 may appear and the less assurance it may give. Thus the present may be destabilized, the past discredited. It is in the context of such a dialectic that historians in the early m o d e m period needed so often to defend themselves. The notion that history was philosophy teaching by examples stood like a Trojan horse at the centre of such defence. After a theoretical introduction, Hampton begins with what he takes to be the orthodox humanist position in which the exemplar has a central pedagogical role. The teacher displays the virtuous figure so that the appropriate audience can act in emulation. This position, he argues, is beginning to be eroded in Machiavelli's Prince, for its theory of exemplarity is contradicted by a practice in which few ancientfiguresare fully exemplary. The next chapter provides an analysis of Tasso's Gerusalemme liberata. Pagan exemplars had always been awkward in a Christian context and the Counteneformation provided an added impetus to seek Christian ones. Tasso's use of them by no means eased thetensionsin exemplarity, not least because the raw materials had to be adapted to fit Aristotelian poetics. Ironically, the continued exemplarity of Aristotelian theory causes Tasso trouble. Chapter Four is on Montaigne, a man devoted to ancient figures who are at best a means towards self-exploration. Chapter Five deals with Corneille's Le Cid and Shakespeare's Julius Ceasar. The implicit Montaignesque emphasis on interpretation becomes an explicit...