Roger L’Estrange and the Making of Restoration Culture ed. by Anne Dunan-Page and Beth Lynch (review)

79 Ms. Sutherland shows that Astell was not writing simply to respond to Locke, but for a female audience, which explains her simplified tone and diction. Her ethos thus compassionately communicated to her audience, winning them over to the idea of change without appearing to criticize them. Though Locke may have been a peripheral audience , he was not a central one until The Christian Religion (1705). It is in her ‘‘magnum opus,’’ The Christian Religion, that Astell confronts Locke’s materialism and explores their theological differences. Ms. Sutherland shows a deep familiarity with all of Astell ’s works, even her political pamphlets , which are important because she was respected for joining a discussion usually left to men. Ms. Sutherland also brings out the contemporary relevance of the debates. From the book’s title, I expected to hear a great deal concerning Cicero. After all, not only was Astell an eloquent rhetorician herself, but she used his example of the letter genre as treatise, so the use of ‘‘eloquence’’ in Ms. Sutherland ’s title does double duty. Although Astell followed Ramus’s belief that rhetoric was mere ornamentation, and that invention and argument fell under ‘‘logic ,’’ she used Lamy to expand her definition of rhetoric to include letter writing and everyday discourse. Ms. Sutherland points out that Augustine must have been invaluable in his insistence that good orators must be good Christians and in his emphasis on love. This book is a good introduction to some concepts of rhetoric, and to those historical and philosophical nuances of seventeenth-century culture that ground feminist theories today. Kristen Welch Longwood University Roger L’Estrange and the Making of Restoration Culture, ed. Anne DunanPage and Beth Lynch. Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2008. Pp. xvii ⫹ 236. £60. Close to a hundred years ago, Roger L’Estrange’s biographer George Kitchin pronounced L’Estrange a ‘‘solitary skulker,’’ noting that he was not questioning his ‘‘loyalty or his courage,’’ but ‘‘his humanity.’’ The biography then tried to prove that L’Estrange spent his hours harassing printers and publishers and trampling on the freedoms of those who voiced their dissent. Yet even Kitchin showed what one man could do—and had to do—to defend his principles . In L’Estrange’s case, these principles never wavered. L’Estrange’s news sheets, starting with the Intelligencer in 1663 and culminating in the long-running Observator from 1681 to 1687, located him at the center of intense religious and social upheaval wrought by the Popish Plot and the Exclusion Crisis, while his pamphlets and his role as Licenser placed him in control of much—but not all— that was printed in that tumultuous era. His was a world tumbling toward Enlightenment . But it was still a world in which the condemned were lucky, as were Stafford and Russell, simply to lose their heads. Punishments were swift and brutal, and contemporary readers of Behn’s Oroonoko knew that the eponymic hero’s end was not exaggerated. In the late 1670s and early 1680s, many died—commoner and noble, Catholic and Protestant, Whig and Tory—as the plots, Popish and otherwise, played themselves out against a world of lies and libels. While the Whig historians of the nineteenth century were content to portray L’Estrange as a self-serving, cowardly temporizer, who came late 80 into the fray when he smelled victory or fled when it was opportune, he is only now receiving credit for speaking out against Titus Oates and, in his own way, trying to avoid another ’41. These original essays, gathered by Ms. Dunan-Page and Ms. Lynch, are not for the tyro: one must be grounded in the world of Charles II and James II. I would have liked a more detailed Introduction , but the editors defer to Harold Love’s fine exposition in the new DNB, although Sidney Lee’s late nineteenthcentury study in the old DNB proves still quite useful. Perhaps after reading the Introduction and the two DNB entries, the best starting place is the last essay, the annotated bibliography of L’Estrange’s printed works. Geoff Kemp helps define L’Estrange while making some sense of the chaos of attribution resulting from Wing and the...