Between Science and Drawings: Renaissance Architects on Vitruvius’s Educational Ideas by Liisa Kanerva (review)

Abstract

REVIEWS 245 compound words, and how they were critically interpreted in nineteenth-century philology, Jurasinski makes his case that nineteenth-century philologists often engaged in oversimplifying the complex nature of land tenure in AngloSaxon England, projecting upon the poem naïve, presentist notions of democracy . Chapter 3 and 4 are more closely related in their thematic concerns with the notions of vengeance and the blood-feud, and the (in-)applicability of the vengeance principle in the case of accidental homicides, illustrated by the Finn episode and the Hrethel episode in the poem respectively. In chapter 3, Jurasinski takes to task the nineteenth-century idea that revenge was a sacred duty in Germanic society by suggesting that the scholarly work of most nineteenthcentury and twentieth-century philologists had unwittingly confused a willingness to countenance vengeance in some parts of Germanic legislation with a sacral reverence for feud and revenge in early Germanic society. Chapter 4 extends this argument by studying how feohleas gefeoht, a fight for which no monetary compensation is possible, is critically read within nineteenth-century philology and its latter heirs as a crime which is inexpiable, thereby fudging the differences between accidental and intentional homicide within early Germanic society. Underlying these two chapters is the assumption that nineteenth-century legal historians such as Brunner, who read the Hrethel episode as an example of the absence of distinction between accidental and intentional homicide, were working from the implicit evolutionary model of Germanic history in which Germanic society was seen to progress from a “primitive” to a more “enlightened” state. In engaging the wealth of secondary critical materials found in Grimm, Klaeber, Kemble, and various other nineteenth-century literary scholars and legal historians concerning the Beowulf poem, Jurasinski provides a compelling series of arguments for his premise that presentist notions imposed by nineteenth -century philological studies still form the core critical tradition with which twentieth-century literary criticism approaches the poem. One Achilles’s heel of his study is an occasionally undiscriminating attitude on his part towards the various sub-categories of Germanic society—such as Merovingian Gaul, early Icelandic society and Nordic society—which can tend to indicate a uniform “Germanic” ethnic umbrella although he maintains the mutability of Germanic customs. This tendency, on the other hand, points to a relative dearth of non-literary material evidence about Anglo-Saxon legal institutions. That said, Jurasinski’s work will reinstate the importance of the Beowulf poem within Anglo-Saxon studies, drawing attention to the critical-philological baggage with which modern twentieth-century scholarship is loaded, and thereby creating among Anglo-Saxonists a greater awareness of Beowulf criticism ’s historical genesis and its limitations. Given the attack fostered by modern critical theory against philology, this study thus helps facilitate a more selfconscious practice of philological study. KEVIN TEO, English, University of Calgary Liisa Kanerva, Between Science and Drawings: Renaissance Architects on Vitruvius’s Educational Ideas (Helsinki: Finnish Academy of Science and Letters 2006) 203 pp., ill. REVIEWS 246 Liisa Kanerva’s Between Science and Drawings is a well-researched and thoughtful study of how Vitruvius’s ideas on the education of the architect were received by Renaissance “architect-writers.” It is also, in a way, a personal tribute to the topic in its unusually hand-crafted presentation. The author’s own art graces both the cover of the book and the chapter title pages where Kanerva has placed vignettes adapted from woodcuts of Caporali. She also illustrates certain passages with her own drawings of architects’ instruments and demonstrations of perspective. Kanerva’s hands-on attention to the production of this volume reflects a personal commitment to her subject which comes through in the text as an insatiable (and contagious) curiosity and a will to make the story she is telling maximally accessible to her audience. Kanerva is refreshingly transparent in setting out not only her goals in writing this book, but also her starting points and sources of inspiration. She outlines in concise terms her debt to Panofsky and his assertion that the Renaissance was a period of “decompartmentalisation” which allowed theory and practice, and art and science, to come together as they had not during the Middle Ages (12). Her...