Scenes of Instruction in Renaissance Romance by Jeff Dolven (review)

REVIEWS 258 which Dean wrestles with throughout the book. The study is intended to be a survey of crime in late medieval Italy composed from a multi-level examination of many sources, yet Dean devotes little attention to creating an overall picture of criminal justice in Italy for the non-specialist reader. However, Dean’s clear discussion of the methodological benefits and pitfalls of his approach and each individual source for legal history is beneficial to any legal history student. Dean writes with a clear, straightforward, and even Spartan style. For example, the first sentence of the book states the two main reasons for the studying criminal history without any story or literary embellishment to draw in the reader. Overall, Trevor Dean presents a nuanced examination of crime throughout Italy, providing a much needed survey of Italian criminal justice. SARAH WHITTEN, History, UCLA Jeff Dolven, Scenes of Instruction in Renaissance Romance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 2007) 288 pp., ill. Jeff Dolven’s enterprise in Scenes of Instruction in Renaissance Romance is aptly contained, or at least argued in the abstract, within the first few pages of his introductory chapter. “Telling Learning,” offers an overview of the pedagogical practices deployed in William Kempe’s schoolroom as a means of formulating a “poetics of pedagogy.” First by tracking the progress of a hypothetical student through the sequence of exercises he would encounter—repetition, catechism, analysis, classification, epitome, drill, translation, disputation, and composition—and later by unpacking each exercise to elucidate the fundamental form of both knowledge and test at play in each exercise, Dolven walks the reader through a sequence of Renaissance pedagogical exercises with both the acumen of a kind analytical philosopher and the scholarship of an attentive historicist. The aim of the chapter’s exercise is to give dimension to the peculiar epistemological and historical gray space occupied by a number of prominent poets of the late sixteenth century. As both humanists and hopeful bureaucrats, Dolven claims, the authors examined in the later chapters faced the peculiar challenge of being both informed by and highly critical of the pedagogical practices they participated in and, later, translated into the romance. Assuming that these pedagogical practices “offer an account of education as an a- or antinarrative process,” then “Romance … offers itself as a way of thinking outside or against this kind of training: a way of testing given understandings and exploring alternatives by reinvesting them in time” (64). A thorough account of three authors —Lyly, Sidney, and Spenser—and how their romances “reinvest” the process of learning in time occupies the remainder of the text. Chapter two, “Experience,” examines John Lyly’s Euphues as a text that “sets out to defend … a kind of shadowy ideal: the power of experience to teach Euphues what he needs to know to live a good life” (68). The chapter opens with an account of the late-sixteenth-century debate over the linguistic and epistemological status of the titular term, beginning with its Latin roots and tracing it through the various intellectual arenas in which it was deployed, ranging from the earliest of scientific experiments to quarrels about Protestant theology. Having set the groundwork for his examination, Dolven turns to REVIEWS 259 Lyly’s Euphues: An Anatomy of Wit “as if it were a manifesto, a statement of his determination to explore the power of romance narrative to call received modes of teaching and learning into question” (79). Looking, additionally, at Lyly’s sequel, Euphues and His England, Dolven teases out the means by which his texts attempt to posit experience as a dialectical opponent to classroom teaching, but only at the cost of suffering the often deleterious consequences of trail-and-error learning. Though Lyly hoped his manifesto defending experiential knowledge could offer a “story that puts a person together … Lyly cannot tell it” (97). Dolven turns next to Philip Sidney and his old Arcadia in Chapter three, “Maxim.” Expanding upon C.S. Lewis’s observations, Dolven identifies the maxims littered throughout the text as a “lesson in ethics, particularly Stoic ethics, upon which Arcadia will brood in a thousand ways” (101). Launching, again, from a consideration of a form both rhetorical and pedagogical...