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REVIEWS 335 cution of borders, drolleries, and miniatures. The comparison with contemporary work is especially informative and evinces a vast knowledge of fifteenthcentury illumination. All this is combined with beautiful full-page color plates of the thirty-nine miniatures in the manuscript. The translator has, by and large, rendered the author’s work with precision and dexterity; the volume was a delight to read. It could have used a much more careful editorial eye, however: I came across over about a dozen typographical errors of varying levels of egregiousness. In one instance (the first paragraph of Appendix 2), this led to a momentarily confusing misfoliation of the manuscript. On page 241, in the midst of a delightful and charming discussion of the drolleries surrounding scenes of saints’ lives, the translator makes a series of mistakes in the mention of an image of a hoopoe. The hoopoe appears on the folio (41v) which bears an image of Saint Eutropius healing the maimed, in the midst of a magnificent border filled with lush vegetation, several birds, two female centaur-instrumentalists (one winged), and two monkeys (one dancing between the centaurs, one playing the viol). Although the analysis here fails to take into consideration the broader cultural valence of hoopoes in medieval magic, the translator errs first in the spelling of the word itself (“whoope”), then renders the bird’s scientific name (upupa epops) as a pair of parenthetical appositives. All in all, this is a majestic capolavoro, a testimony to a rigorous and devoted scholar. The images are brilliantly reproduced, and the study a fine example of manuscript research at its finest. Although it is a shame the publisher failed to edit the volume more carefully, this book stands as a luminous tribute to de Schryver’s career. STEVEN ROZENSKI, JR., Harvard University, Villa I Tatti Meredith Ann Skura, Tudor Autobiography: Listening for Inwardness (Chicago : University of Chicago Press 2008) xii + 301 pp. What does it mean to write autobiography in the sixteenth century, before autobiography existed as a genre or a means of marketing a text; in an age when readers valued invention, artifice, and allegory; when poets feared the “stigma of print”; when a bloody schism in the Church compelled people to govern their tongues? In Tudor Autobiography, Meredith Ann Skura studies nine Tudor authors to demonstrate that, even though autobiography in the modern sense of the word did not exist, still there were texts that revealed, in their own way, the inner life and development of the author. Skura discusses a handful of definitions of autobiography then creates a “looser definition” to fit her source material: “The only requirement for inclusion in this discussion is that an author be writing about his or her experience—whether outward events or ‘that within,’ as Hamlet calls it—looking back over the experience and organizing it into a narrative of some sort.”(2) The texts she examines are diverse: lyric poems , hagiography, dramatic monologues, dream visions, husbandry manuals, fictional narratives, and poetic miscellanies. Diaries and letters are excluded, because they “do not assume a retrospective view that separates the writer in the present from her experience in the past” (2 n.). One conceptual problem Skura’s “loose definition” suffers from is a blurring of the terms autobiography and autobiographical. Thomas Wyatt’s poems do REVIEWS 336 seem to be autobiographical, directed toward Wyatt’s inwardness. His poems, however, are not autobiography except in that “loose” sense: they make no attempt at overview, sequence, or interconnectedness of events. The book’s subtitle, “Listening for Inwardness,” is the book’s truer description, and at this it is successful. For Skura, every text reveals at least something about its author , whether intended or not. To read the hidden autobiography in any text, Skura scrutinizes the author’s stylistic peculiarities while subjecting the text to continual questioning: Why was it written? For whom? What sort of publication did the author seek? What are the differences between the narrator and the author-as-character—as Skura says, between the “I” and the “me”? If the text is based upon a source, what can we observe in the author’s alteration of source material? If multiple editions exist...

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