Peripheries of the Enlightenment by Richard Butterwick, Simon Davies, Gabriel Sánchez Espinosa

Abstract

MLR, 105.3, 2010 813 Medcalf. Discussing Alfred's Boethius, the last jolts the reader by quoting (p. 366) R.W. Chambers's Man's Unconquerable Mind: Studies ofEnglish Writers, from Bede toA. E. Housman and W. R Ker (London: Cape, 1939). Alfred had declared 'it is God's purpose which rules, and not Fate'; Chambers, mindful of theNazi menace, commented that 'on this belief theDanes broke5. This touch of glory startles one by itsnobility (and archaism). It also implies how much English Studies have changed in seventy years. Yet perhaps one comments best on thevolume by listing points of growth in it.A major one concerns theOld English Orosius (pp. 46, 118, 333). JanetBately inher edition of 1980 thought the textdictated by a Briton to an English scribe, leaving tell-tale Celtic features in the spelling of names. Later investigation, suggesting the translatorwas a Cornishman (not aWelshman), seems confirmed byMalcolm Godden's research on a Cornish gloss in a Vatican Boethius. That the Alfredian Orosius was the work of a Celt might be thought significant. But the present volume never mentions this. There are other sins of omission. One concerns the prologue to the Wycliffite Bible, which cites versions of Scripture by Bede and King Alfred (p. 200), but also French, Czech, and Welsh translations. Nothing is here said on the interesting latterobservation. Or again, Caxton inhis preface toMalory defends Arthur's historicity from the 'many noble volumes' on him 'in Frensshe' and 'inWalsshe'. Rosalind Field (p. 306) claims Caxton read both (he says no such thing) and fails to explain the second as translations of Geoffrey ofMon mouth. One more growing point concerns Leonard Cox, friend and translator of Erasmus and Melanchthon. He here has themerest mention (p. 438), even though his dazzling international career, outlined in Jacqueline Glomski, Patronage and Humanist Literature in theAge of the Jagiellons: Court and Career in theWritings ofRudolf Agricola Junior,Valentin Eck, and Leonard Cox (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007), has material for a string ofmonographs. One puts down this stout volume, not with the sinking feeling that all has been said and done, but the rousing one that this bulky vessel may carry explorers on furthervoyages. University of Navarre, Pamplona Andrew Breeze Peripheries of theEnlightenment. Ed. by Richard Butterwick, Simon Davies, and Gabriel Sanchez Espinosa. (SVEC, 2008: 01) Oxford: Voltaire Found ation. 2008. ix+340 pp. ?60. ISBN 978-0-7294-0926-1. Reading this book of essays from start to finish (as perhaps only a reviewer would) recalls the experience of reading another, now classic, collection: The Enlighten ment inNational Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), edited a generation ago by Roy Porter and Mikulas Teich. The idea of treating the En lightenment as a series of national or provincial variations on an international theme is no longer new, of course, and in recent years this approach has been attacked by Jonathan Israel (Jonathan I. Israel, Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy 814 Reviews and the Making of Modernity 1650-1750 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. v-vi, 137-41). But Richard Butterwick and his colleagues give it a new twist by concentrating on the relationship of periphery to core. And although their contributions aremore varied inweight (and to some extent in quality) than those in Porter and Teich, they have produced a collection which at its best can stand alongside itsfamous predecessor. Anyone looking for up-to-date guidance on En lightenment thought and policy in, say, Sweden, Russia, or Hungary, in southern Italy or northern Spain, or even?closer to home?in Ireland or provincial Britain, could hardly do better than to consult the relevant chapter or chapters here, many of them equipped with helpful and extensive notes and bibliographies. Prefaced by awide-ranging and observant introduction, the fifteenessays collec ted in thisvolume began lifeas papers for a colloquium held atQueen's University Belfast in 2005. Itmust have been a livelymeeting, stimulated not least by the fact that its central idea, the periphery, isboth protean and subjective. The term is often used?as indeed some contributors use ithere?in a geographical, or more precisely a continental, sense. If the core of the Enlightenment is taken to lie within a...