Blood, Milk, Ink, Gold: Abundance and Excess in the French Renaissance by Rebecca Zorach (review)

REVIEWS 288 ents tried to avoid forced marriages and generational conflicts. This article, which shows the importance of the dotal system in Florence, reflects the popularity of the dowry system in Italy that made it difficult for women to choose their partner without parental consent. The situation was different in Spain where, due to the fact that forms of joint ownership in marriage and equal inheritance were predominant, free-choice marriages were widespread. By declaring that the bond of marriage was contracted by the will of the spouses and that parental consent was not necessary, Tametsi prescribes a juridical form based on the Spanish influence coming from a system that had granted women a high degree of independence, and that we might consider today very progressive. In Spain, Romeo and Juliet would not have had to die. In chapter 12, “Marriage Property Law as Socio-Cultural Text: The Case of Late Medieval Douai,” Martha C. Howell looks at documents that view marriage as a property arrangement, and she interprets property law as a witness to the social and cultural meanings of marriage. In chapter 13, “Marriage Contracts , Liturgies, and Properties in Reformation Geneva,” John Witte, Jr. looks at marriage contracts in the context of reformed marriage law and theology. The specimen documents that conclude most of the chapters, most of them in translation from Latin, allow general access to voices from the past. Based on archival evidence, the volume offers a rich analysis of marriage in the West, and provides a particularly useful resource to the academic and less specialized audiences. The essays in this book contain notes and references that will prove useful to those interested in exploring the subject further. CRISTINA MITROVICI Rebecca Zorach, Blood, Milk, Ink, Gold: Abundance and Excess in the French Renaissance (Chicago and London: Chicago University Press 2005) xvi + 314 pp., ill. While Italy occupies the preeminent position in Renaissance studies, art historian Rebecca Zorach attempts in her new book to shift scholarly discourse to sixteenth-century France, thereby partially filling in a gap in Renaissance art history and cultural studies. She not only investigates largely unstudied materials , but also pushes the boundaries of critical attention by examining visual forms in a variety of media and focusing on a subject typically thrust aside in favor of others, namely ornamentation. Zorach’s title, Blood, Milk, Ink, Gold, mirrors the order of her book, as each chapter is devoted to one of these themes. In each chapter, she carefully and creatively links sixteenth-century French artistic style, what she characterizes as profuse ornamentation, to “fertility, eroticism, and organic abundance,” as well as to politics and economics. Zorach colorfully (and dare I say abundantly) argues that the classicizing style became a “vehicle for national identity” (6), serving as propaganda to promote royal ideology. Thus, her study responds to the need, as delineated by Kathleen Wilson-Chevalier, to examine ornament not as divested of meaning.9 9 Kathleen Wilson-Chevalier asked, “Why, in the decorative arts [of sixteenth-century France], do abundant fruits recur with such insistence?” Kathleen Wilson-Chevalier, Fontainebleau et l’estampe en France au XVIe siècle : Iconographie et contradictions, exh. Cat. (Nemours 1985) 6. REVIEWS 289 While the book’s complexity, both in subject matter and writing style, occasionally obscures the overall argument of each chapter, the table of contents functions as a helpful guide, acting as a simplified outline of Zorach’s main points. Her introduction sketches an overview of the book’s primary themes and details her methodological and theoretical framework. For instance, she insists that the lack of primary texts from the sixteenth century related to her subject afforded reception theory a small role in her discussion; instead, she turns to other concepts in anthropology and literary and critical theory to illuminate her discussion.10 In many ways, the lack of textual sources allowed her freedom to experiment with new methods and theories outside of art history. Her use of performance theory in relation to the production of meaning and the cultural performance of objects is exciting and valuable. The four core chapters proceed in a roughly chronological manner, beginning with King Francis I’s Galerie François Premier at Ch...