Fictions of Credit in the Age of Shakespeare. Laura Kolb. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021. Pp. x+223.

Abstract

Kolb’s prose is assured, expert, and full of lively charm. She has a fine sensibility for how the most pedestrian language uses may open out onto the poetic: the author of a manual for notaries “advocates a kind of writing that is in some ways poetry’s opposite: writing that needs no interpretation and that cannot be altered according to a reader’s desiring imagination. This directive is necessary precisely because wills are poetic documents: arousing desire and imagination; activating the circuit between wanting and making. They are lists of things, money, and people. In their thingliness and their listiness, they offer grounds for imaginative flight” (165). Though the matters she presents might seem arcane in their datedness (the formulae of early modern letter writing) or their abstraction (the invention of logarithms), Kolb not only renders them accessible to modern readers but situates them in a vivid picture of early modern living. I gladly recommend Fictions of Credit to anyone interested in how people collaborate in crafting the poetics we live by—a rubric that, I imagine, includes many readers of Modern Philology.