Renaissance Medievalisms ed. by Konrad Eisenbichler (review)

REVIEWS 325 Renaissance Medievalisms, ed. Konrad Eisenbichler (Toronto: Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies 2009) 310 pp., color ill. The fifteen essays of Renaissance Medievalisms (initially presented at an interdisciplinary conference held at the University of Toronto, 6–7 October 2006) examine the continuing influence of the medieval past on Renaissance culture. While some Renaissance humanists considered themselves participating in a sui generis age distinct from prior eras, most members of the merchant and working classes, most women, most Europeans in general would have viewed the fourteenth, fifteenth, or sixteenth century not as the dawn of a new age, but as the continuation of time-honored customs, institutions, socioeconomic conditions , and ways of life. The essays in this volume take a middle ground, neither undermining the importance of the Renaissance revival of classical learning and culture, nor relinquishing the term “Renaissance” in favor of “Early Modern.” In focusing on a Medieval-Renaissance continuum, they demonstrate rather that the rediscovery of antiquity occurred largely from within medieval structures and systems of knowledge which, whether emended by humanists or scientists, in many respects continued to develop according to traditions and trajectories established in the Middle Ages. The volume begins with Paul F. Grendler’s examination of changes in the university system. Grendler argues that the content of research and teaching in some disciplines manifested considerable innovation. Many of these innovations , which were largely in the areas of research and teaching methods, he attributes to humanism. The disciplines of medicine and natural philosophy witnessed the broadest revisions; the field of law registered fewer alterations; and theology remained Scholastic. In the next essay, Alexander Nagel and Christopher S. Wood revisit an argument initially posited by the authors in “Towards a New Model of Renaissance Anachronism,” Art Bulletin 87 (2005) 403–432, in which they theorize that, for medieval audiences, artifacts principally held a “substitutional” meaning : buildings and works of art were chiefly valued for referring to earlier, often antique, prototypes rather than for embodying the “performance” of an architect or artist. The authors argue that modern scholars have generally misunderstood humanists who regularly designated medieval artifacts as ancient. Such misdatings reflect the medieval and Renaissance mind-frame accustomed to peering beyond the particular circumstances of an artifact’s production and towards the ancient forms that it exampled; thus many twelfth-and thirteenthcentury artifacts were treated as antiquities because they imitated and thus substituted for earlier works. Nagel and Wood provide examples of how Byzantine and Romanesque churches, medieval Mosaics, and Cosmatesque pavements served as so-called “antique” models for Renaissance artists who were, in fact, rediscovering art created in the Middle Ages. In other essays, James Nelson Novoa examines the influence of Iberian vernacular humanism on Leone Ebreo’s Dialoghi d’amore (1535). Donald Beecher considers how Renaissance writers reconceptualized the fifth-century Persian narrative Fables of Bidpai. Gary Waller analyzes Marian motifs and sexuality as well as Reformation controversy in the final scene of Shakespeare ’s All’s Well that Ends Well. Lidia Radi explores the function of memory in Guillaume Michel de Tours’ Le Penser de royal memoire (1518), a work of REVIEWS 326 political rhetoric advocating crusade. Brian Gourley interprets work by John Bale (1495–1563) to argue that the Henrician Reformation is a pre-destined outcome of medieval struggles between England and the papacy. Philippa Sheppard examines how Shakespeare reinvented the medieval figure Joan of Arc in Henry VI, Part I. Linda Vecchi shows how Early Modern English authors such as Isabella Whitney reinterpreted medieval forms of plaint into selfexpressive complaint literature for Renaissance audiences. Michael Edwards investigates how the positions of Renaissance Scotist philosophers contributed to the debate on the “Scotist” theory of time. Richard Raiswell examines the conflict between medieval ethnographies and the new information brought back by European explorers and merchants, particularly in the work of Joanne Boemus (1485–1535). The tension between medieval traditions and recent empirical discovery is also considered by Hans Peter Broedel in his examination of how Renaissance natural historians moved from purely textual sources, such as ancient and medieval bestiaries, to the textual and empirical. Gabrielle Sugar historicizes Johannes Kepler’s Somnium (1634). Vittoria Feola analyzes how the poems of Elias Ashmole...