Dead Lovers: Erotic Bonds and the Study of Premodern Europe ed. by Basil Dufallo, Peggy McCracken, and The Erotic in the Literature of Medieval Britain ed. by Amanda Hopkins, Cory James Rushton (review)

REVIEWS 252 were chosen. It is especially interesting to see how translators handled recently created concepts; when an Italian text is rendered in a classicized version of Latin, the word cortegianía is paraphrased as ‘negligently and (as is commonly said) in a careless manner’ (negligenter et (ut vulgo dicitur) dissolute) (79). Feza Günergun, similarly, elucidates the respective positions of Turkish and Arabic as languages of learning in the Ottoman Empire; Arabic, like Latin, has a broader and more classicizing effect. Hsia’s essay on Jesuit translation into Chinese provides a fascinating view of textual contact across a more profound cultural gap. If a Jesuit reads a text and a local convert composes a Chinese version of the content that he hears, is that translation or interpretation? In many cases this is all the more difficult to distinguish because linguistic translation is accompanied by conceptual shifts (such as adopting the Confucian term for heaven). Though there is no essay on the theoretical understanding of translation— which would have been useful—many of the essayists are clearly aware of the productive uneasiness of the term. Eva Kowalska details the stakes in the use of Czek and Slovak in the early modern period. Here, as in Carlos Eire’s work on Early modern Catholic Piety in Translation, the choice of a language or the translation of a phrase (Poeniterntiam agite: do penance or repent?) has potent sectarian implications. Geoffrey Baldwin outlines the motives and effects of the translation of political theory. Efthymios Nicolaïdis explores the exodus of Greek scholars and their manuscripts from the expanding Ottoman Empire into Italy, a crucial event in the Renaissance, and S. S. Demidov explores the limited use of science in Russia for most of the early modern period. Most problematic is Maria Lucia Pallares-Burke’s essay on The Spectator. She takes all claims by Addison, Steele and their imitators with undiluted acceptance , in contrast with most current scholarship on the Enlightenment, which is both skeptical of the period's progressive idealism and attuned to the class dynamics which such idealism enforces and hides. Pallares-Burke claims that The Spectator’s imitators, like the original magazine, were devoted to uniting men rather than encouraging their division (152). Pallares-Burke praises the genre with an over-use of intensifiers: It is, in fact, extremely interesting to note that there were actual controversies in the eighteenth century over what was or was not a true and faithful imitation of The Spectator (150). Overall, this is a useful, broad-ranging and illuminating book, one that will be of use to this expanding and important field. MICHAEL SAENGER, English, Southwestern University Dead Lovers: Erotic Bonds and the Study of Premodern Europe, ed. Basil Dufallo and Peggy McCracken (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press 2006) viii + 172 pp.; The Erotic in the Literature of Medieval Britain, ed. Amanda Hopkins and Cory James Rushton (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer 2007) 200 pp. Despite its title, or perhaps assuming an attention to nuance in the reading of the title, Dead Lovers, edited by Basil Dufallo and Peggy McCracken, is not so much a study of lovers in pre-modern Europe as a series of occasionally impressionistic , occasionally ironic, but always detailed and illuminating readings of love—lovers dead and alive; love fictive, dream-like, and literary; love for REVIEWS 253 family, for sexual partners, for the self and for literature that extends from the early Roman Empire to Angels in America. The authors, all but one of whom hail from the University of Michigan, write always with an eye to the modern: not just our current theoretical models, but also the reception of classical texts in the poetry of World War I (Reed) and the paintings of Dürer (Puff), Howard Carter’s moment of wonder at Tutkhamen’s tomb (Brown), as well as the affective and desiring response to dead lovers that extends through “male eroticism in Western literature” (Halperin 8). It is David Halperin’s essay, the first in the text, that establishes both the mood and motive of this slim volume. “There’s no lover like a dead lover,” Halperin claims; the following eight essays tease out the problematics...