Readers and Authorship in Early Modern England by Stephen B. Dobranski (review)

REVIEWS 243 perception, the individual becomes its own authority (thus lessening the need to appeal to authorities such as Aristotle). In addition, “the very distinction between intuitive and abstractive becomes meaningless” (156). Denery asserts Nicholas recognizes appearances mark a limit of what we can know about the world (160), and thus speculates there is no connection between theory and truth. There is only a “hierarchy of intellects … in order to avoid a complete relativization of truth” (164). He concludes only scripture, and not other study, can lead to complete truth. Denery’s conclusion states that Nicholas’s argument returns Denery’s own book to where it began—with the Dominicans’ ambivalence toward the value of studying. Seeing and Being Seen in the Late Medieval World makes a strong case for the influence that perspectivist optics, theology, and religious practice had on the conception of the European medieval self, whether that self was a layperson, a preacher, or a theologian. While more technical and less accessible in the later chapters, this interdisciplinary study will prove valuable to medievalists examining the era from either a scientific, literary, or philosophical point-of-view. VALERIE CULLEN, English, UCLA Stephen B. Dobranski, Readers and Authorship in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2005) xiii + 226 pp., ill. Arguing from silence is probably the scholar’s most difficult task; nonetheless, Stephen Dobranski has set for himself the task of investigating silence in early modern English writings and arguing, not so much from it as about it. Neither does he seek to examine the metaphors of silence or absence in these writings, but actual missing bits from published pieces. As Dobranski notes, the fact that two of England’s greatest writers’ works (Chaucer in his Canterbury Tales and Spenser in The Faerie Queene) were published in incomplete texts “presumably provided sufficient precedent for later Renaissance stationers and writers who wanted to take incomplete works to press” (4). It is these deliberate lacunae and their roles in both readerly and authorial authority into which Dobranski seeks to delve. Reader response theory has, particularly since the last half of the twentieth century, sought to identify the reader’s role in creating meaning in a text, sometimes to the extent of denying any meaning-making power to the writer her or himself. Of course, few people would deny any authority to the author, but by shifting the emphasis to the reader, theorists evolved new theories of communication that rejected a simplistic transmission of meaning through a code, as it were, of words that must, inevitably, mean particular things. Not just the authors but the readers, we began to acknowledge, play distinct roles in creating the meaning of a text—and the meanings of the reader might well be just as or even more provocative and interesting than those of the author. This acknowledgement takes on particular potency when dealing with blank spaces in texts—whether left blank by intention, by loss of interest, or by the accident of death. Of course, the impulse of readers to fill in the blanks is nothing new, as Dobranski reminds us. Editions of “completed” Canterbury Tales were common , but we can note even further back the tendency of the medieval religious REVIEWS 244 establishment to create stories about the “lost years” of Jesus that are not in the scriptural canon. What is new in the early modern period, Dobranski suggests, is the combination of increased authority for the writer—indeed, much has been written on the writer’s increasing control over publication and ownership of a work. The tension, then, between the expanding authority of the writer and the ongoing willingness of the reader to make meaning provides the locus of Dobranski’s investigation. The deliberate publication of texts with omissions constitutes not only an openly acknowledged invitation to the reader’s authority to create meaning, but also, Dobranski argues, a tool by which the author inserts his or her own authority. He suggests that “both authors and readers gained considerable authority during the early modern period and … the two phenomena were reciprocal” (12). The first chapter, which provides a background to this argument, investigates the shifting role of the reader during the...