Invention: The Language of English Renaissance Poetics by Rocío G. Sumillera

Abstract

Reviewed by: Invention: The Language of English Renaissance Poetics by Rocío G. Sumillera Catherine Bates Invention: The Language of English Renaissance Poetics. By Rocío G. Sumillera. Cambridge: Legenda. 2019. x+159 pp. £75. ISBN 978–1–781883–20–4. Keeping good company with the current surge of interest in Renaissance poetics, this meticulously researched and useful book shows how the concept of 'invention' undergoes a critical development during the early modern period. Through a series of carefully marshalled arguments and extensively illustrated examples, Rocío Sumillera convincingly demonstrates that the 'conceptual richness' (pp. 2, 125) of Renaissance inventio results from its intermediary position between classical antiquity and the Middle Ages, on the one hand, and Romanticism, on the other. While referring widely to Italian, French, and Spanish sources, Sumillera focuses specifically on sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century England to trace the evolution of this critical concept, as it shifts from being a functional term in classical logic and rhetoric to assuming much wider connotations of artistic originality and creativity. Key to this development is the change from invention as a form of finding (from in +venire, literally 'to come upon') to invention as a form of devising, making, or creating. To explore how and when this change takes place, Sumillera considers inventionʼs relation to imitation and imagination, respectively. With their origins in Plato and Aristotle, theories of imitation have always struggled with the question of ideality—whether the object imitated or the imitation itself might be in some way exemplary—and this problem comes to the fore when the object being imitated is another author. While there is little dignity in slavish copying, imitatio assumes an altogether more 'inventive form' (p. 49) when—differentiated as aemulatio—it aims to alter, personalize, and surpass the original. As for theories of the imagination—although originating in the quite different discipline of natural philosophy and associated there with questions of perception and cognition—the 'image-making faculty' was similarly understood to work with both 'what had already been experienced' and 'new realities never even perceived' (p. 111): in other words, to be capable of producing something potentially better and new. The idea that a human artist might create something out of nothing—surpassing not only literary forebears but nature herself in 'making things either better than Nature bringeth forth, or, quite anew', as Philip Sidney puts it in the Defence of Poesy—was alien to the Greeks; for the polytheistic societies of antiquity saw the gods or Muses as sources of inspiration rather than as the single, ideal, creator God of Christianity in whom the human artist might find the ultimate model, 'the heavenly Maker of that maker' (Sidney, again). It was in the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, interestingly enough—when scholastic Christianity was at the [End Page 278] height of its reach and power—that the notion of inventio first entered the field of poetics: through the poetic treatises of men such as Geoffrey of Vinsauf and John of Garland, and through the medieval artes poetriae that taught the principles of composition and interpretation (that is, the writing and reading of literary texts). By the same token, however, in exercising a creative power more properly deemed divine, the human artist ran the risk of presumption if not of sacrilege and blasphemy, which is why such creativity also roused strong opposition (especially among the Calvinists, with their emphasis on human depravity): an anti-poetic sentiment that was to feature particularly strongly in the English Reformation. All in all, this is a detailed yet wide-ranging scholarly book that will serve students and scholars equally well. Although its focus is English Renaissance poetics, the breadth of reference to European sources gives this study a notable ballast and breadth. Sumillera is particularly adept at the selection and presentation of primary quotations, finding the perfect examples—and plenty of them—to illustrate her argument. This makes the book a great resource, as well as a pleasure to read. Catherine Bates University of Warwick Copyright © 2022 Modern Humanities Research Association