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261 cautious changes in making and keeping wealth, and were driven by ‘‘[s]ensible administrative conservatism’’ about cash. Arne Bialuschewski’s exhumation of the scheming shipmaster John Breholt’s attempted scam to ‘‘recover’’ supposed pirate hoards in Madagascar is perhaps too local a history. Although an entertaining episode and example of Defoe’s financial gullibility in supporting the scheme, it underscores enduring fears of Captain Kidd’s more famous treasure scams, but is otherwise too hard to stretch in significance beyond its very brief moment of forgotten failure. The book concludes with a pair of essays that collectively work well to make the case for treating Irish financial history , especially in the 1720s, separately from England’s. Unfortunately, the arrangement of these very similar accounts by Charles McGrath and Eoin Macgennis is rhetorically backwards in leading with Mr. McGrath’s more detailed and expert account and following with Mr. Macgennis’s snapshot version of much of the same information. Finally, this book’s methods produce its intellectual benefits and costs: the histories of persons, writers, and institutions are on a small enough scale to be done consistently carefully, backed with detailed evidence, and they avoid all sweeping and shaky claims; however , they are often the historical equivalent of numbering the streaks on the tulip , not always the best estimate of lasting value. The essays are listed in Contents, p. 307. John Morillo North Carolina State University JENNY DAVIDSON. Breeding: A Partial History of the Eighteenth Century. New York: Columbia, 2009. Pp. xviii ⫹292. $35. Ms. Davidson’s Breeding, a ‘‘mosaic ’’ of the nature/culture connection prior to the age of genetics, is anything but typical. In her Introduction, she defines her book by what it is not, claiming that her ‘‘goal has been neither to compose a literary-critical account nor to write a history (whether intellectual or cultural or scientific) of the period’s changing orientation to the idea of heredity.’’ Instead , she aims to write a new kind of scholarly work, one that resists containment , linear argument, and grand narratives through an ‘‘unconventional patterning’’ of material on the topic of breeding pulled from literary, scientific, philosophical, and medical texts. A professor of English and comparative literature and the author of two novels , Ms. Davidson variously compares her book to a collection of voices, conversations , ‘‘an oratorio or a grand country dance,’’ a ‘‘micronetwork,’’ a ‘‘nuance exercise.’’ This impressionistic, as opposed to concept driven, goal is noble. The results, however, are mixed. This book is so playfully quixotic and unconventional that its central argument on the slippery nature of nature-nurture thinking in the eighteenth century is itself unduly unstable. Indeed, Ms. Davidson often appears more interested in following Shandyesque trains of thought on the topic of heredity than a rigorous line of inquiry. The book’s first chapter, for instance, opens with a brief mention of the mutability of literary taste followed by a claim that The Winter’s Tale was rarely performed from the time of Shakespeare’s death up through the 262 middle of the eighteenth century. This suddenly changed, however, in the second half of the eighteenth century when the play was staged some 100 times. A more conventional and credible discussion would slowly and carefully build an argument to account for this sudden shift in literary taste. Ms. Davidson does not do this. Instead, she strolls among notions of breeding and reproduction in the play, medical theories of generation and reproduction , cultural interest in monstrosities , the shaping power of the maternal imagination, and art and nature debates in seventeenth-century gardening manuals. Only some fifteen or so pages after making her statement about the eighteenth century’s shifting interest in The Winter’s Tale does Ms. Davidson attempt to tie together disparate threads of her conversation. She explains that revived interest in The Winter’s Tale in the latter half of the eighteenth century was the result of Garrick’s adaptation of the play, which discarded Shakespeare’s original emphasis on how children of both sexes resemble their fathers to one that emphasized how female children were imprinted by their mothers. This shift from paternal to maternal influence , it is explained, was due to...

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