Mirages of the Selfe. Patterns of Personhood in Ancient and Early Modern Europe by Timothy J. Reiss (review)

REVIEWS 271 constructed as a golden age” (145–146, 153–154).20 But what of its role in providing the ruler with a specific model or guide by which to live? How does this relate to David Carr’s arguments of “living according to a plot?”21 Does this literature of advice, when compared with documented royal behavior, suggest any particular, emplotted form of royal self-fashioning?22 Rarely did rulers in the Middle Ages pay heed to Augustine’s warning: “Hands off yourself. Build up yourself and you build a ruin.”23 Was Sultan Osman any different in this respect? 3. Hegel famously observed that to develop consciousness regarding the untruth of phenomenal knowledge is to tread on the “pathway of doubt, or more precisely the way of despair.”24 Given Piterberg’s explicit adoption of the dialectical method, perhaps An Ottoman Tragedy is also tragic in this larger, Hegelian sense. We gain an increasing awareness of our ignorance, and yet we are compelled nonetheless down the via dolorosa of negativity, doubt, and despair. Quo vadimus?25 COURTNEY M. BOOKER, History, University of British Columbia Timothy J. Reiss, Mirages of the Selfe. Patterns of Personhood in Ancient and Early Modern Europe (Stanford: Stanford University Press 2003) xviii + 608 pp., ill. I cannot in this brief review do justice to the complexity and depth of Timothy J. Reiss’s Mirages of Self. The crux of his argument is that the ancient and medieval spheres that made up the “selfe” disintegrated and early modern individuality emerged and was affirmed out of anger. Reiss acknowledges that the female experience was quite different from that of the male, but that women actualized through this same anger by rejecting the topos of a “good” woman. He uses medical, philosophical, ecclesiastical, legal, social, and artistic works 20 Cf. H. H. Anton, Fürstenspiegel und Herrscherethos in der Karolingerzeit (Bonn 1968); and the special issue on “The Power of the Word: The Influence of the Bible on Early Medieval Politics,” Early Medieval Europe 7.3 (1998). 21 Reprinted and criticized in G. Roberts, ed., The History and Narrative Reader (London 2001) 143–208. See also H. V. White, “Bodies and Their Plots” in S. L. Foster, ed., Choreographing History (Bloomington 1995) 229–234; J. A. Carter, “Telling Times: History, Emplotment, and Truth,” History and Theory 42 (2003) 1–27; and J. S. Bruner, Making Stories: Law, Literature, Life (New York 2002). 22 For example, M. de Jong, “The Empire as Ecclesia: Hrabanus Maurus and Biblical Historia for Rulers” in Y. Hen and M. Innes, eds., The Uses of the Past in the Early Middle Ages (Cambridge 2000) 191–226; eadem, “The Emperor Lothar and His Bibliotheca Historiarum” in R. I. A. Nip, et al., eds., Media Latinitas: A Collection of Essays to Mark the Occasion of the Retirement of L. J. Engels (Turnhout 1996) 229–235; and Dutton, The Politics of Dreaming (n. 12 above). 23 Sermo 169, cap. 9 (11), “Impedis te: si tu te aedificas, ruinam aedificas” (PL 38: col. 921); as cited by S. Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago 1980) 2. 24 G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, Introduction (78), trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford 1977) 49. 25 I wish to thank Eugene Sheppard, Allan Smith, and Kevin Attell for their kind suggestions and criticism. REVIEWS 272 to evoke, invoke, enhance, and support his argument. These many primary sources provide a rich texture, as well as foils, for Reiss’s expansive research of “who-ness.” Reiss’s work is divided into two parts, with an important stand-alone chapter separating those parts. After an explanatory introduction, the first part covers Greco-Roman writers’ thoughts on the self and how their theories of the self continued as vital and integral conceptions in medieval and Renaissance Europe. Reiss tries to impart what it was to be a person of the ancient world. He explains the concept of interlocking circles or spheres, which “did not ‘surround ’ a person ... They were what a person was: integral, … public and collective , common to everyone qua human.” These spheres defined a person “in reactive relation.” The ancient self, therefore, is one not just of a...