Michael Saenger. The Commodification of Textual Engagements in the English Renaissance. Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing Company, 2006. xii + 170 pp. index. illus. bibl. $89.95. ISBN: 0-7546-5413-3.

Abstract

“English translations of theMetamorphoses are the ‘very life of difference’” (193). This diverseness would not matter if the case studies were more compelling and sharply etched. Oakley-Brown’s appetite for unfamiliar material is admirable; the chapter on Caxton, whose prose Metamorphoses has yet to be edited in its entirety, is especially welcome. The chapter on women Ovidians is valuable for dramatizing their notable scarcity in this patch of English literary history and for the alertness with which the exceptions have been located; they include three specimens of needlework from Hardwick Hall. Brought into the light, though, they look like modest discoveries. (As women coming to grips with suspect classical texts, these four pale beside Lucy Hutchinson translating the great atheist Lucretius.) A deeper kind of problem is an impressionistic laxness in argumentation, which keeps putting weight on shimmery evidence — for instance, to make a climactic claim about Elizabeth Talbot’s Phaeton panel: “Instead of simply depicting women in a subordinate position, Talbot’s Ovidian translation implicitly promotes their textual agency” (131). Implication here has to be routed through Ovid and Philip Hardie; the female figures in the panel are neither writing nor weaving. In discussing Sandys, a certain amount is made of his adoption of the trope of Charles and Henrietta Maria as a Neoplatonic hermaphrodite. A quotation from Graham Parry is misleadingly used to make this trope sound like the “prevailing image” in royalist ideology (74); finding it in Sandys (to set up a supposedly telling contrast with a distressing visual representation of the Ovidian myth in the illustration to book 4) requires combining passages from two panegyrics, one in which Charles is compared to, among other gods, Mercury (Hermes), and one in which his wife is called “Queen of love” (Aphrodite). It is hard to have confidence in such legerdemain once you start noticing it. Production values are not commensurate with the purchase price. The textile panels are unattractively reproduced; one is available only on the dustjacket. A page break appears to have hiccupped onto p. 98. No one stopped Smart Quote software from turning ’tis into ‘tis, or locus amoenus from transgendering into locus amoena.