Playful Letters: A Study in Early Modern Alphabetics by Erika Mary Boeckeler

Abstract

Reviewed by: Playful Letters: A Study in Early Modern Alphabetics by Erika Mary Boeckeler Adam Hembree Boeckeler, Erika Mary, Playful Letters: A Study in Early Modern Alphabetics, Iowa City, University of Iowa Press, 2017; paperback; pp. 308; 8 colour plates; R.R.P. US $75.00; ISBN 9781609384746. Playful Letters offers a compelling reading of early modern alphabetics, navigating a diverse set of primers, prints, and images spanning from western Europe to Russia. Boeckeler's driving premise—that letters are material bodies with pluripotent histories—provides a persuasive framework for understanding how teachers, artists, and religious or political authorities could wield them. The first chapter engages with French engraver Geofroy Tory, whose seminal work Champ Fleury (1529) anatomizes each letter as a body on a grid, reading each according to didactic humanist principles. Scholars interested in Jeffrey Masten's work on this subject in Queer Philology (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016) can find a complementary but divergent reading on Fleury's naughty letter 'Q', which Boeckeler takes as a rule rather than an exception to the logic of the cross row. She contends that Q's oddness reflects similar idiosyncrasies across the Fleury alphabet, and that many letters have the potential for disrupting his apparent project of language standardization. This is precisely what renders these letters as 'playful' in Boeckeler's view. From Fleury in France, we move to Peter Flötner's Menschenalphabet in Germany and I. Paulini's Ovidian Alphabet in Italy. In these and comparable examples, Boeckeler encourages readers to perform complementary but inverted practices: read printed text as a kind of image, and read images (for example, Flötner's human bodies posed as letters) as text. Chapter 3 follows this train of thought in using signatures and typography to interpret Albrecht Dürer's self-portrait by superimposition. The relationships between letters on Flötner's page, as well as the visual echoes across these alphabets and prints, are all extremely intriguing. In these two chapters more than most, however, Boeckeler shows a habit of stretching explanatory metaphors beyond their tension limits, which can at times obscure opportunities for clear conclusions. Shakespeare's Richard III presents a prophesy in which a certain 'G' that is plucked from the cross row will disinherit a king. In her fourth chapter, Boeckeler closely reads the possible valences of this moment on stage, with varying levels of success. Her link between Richard's 'G' and the central 'G' of a cruciform cross row is an exciting one, while the assertions that either the two Gs in the written form of 'George' or Richard's 'G-shaped' body would affect readers or audiences is tenuous. The chapter resolves with the much more compelling [End Page 197] claim that Titus Andronicus centres the Roman alphabet as a site and preserver of imperial violence. Boeckeler's earlier reference to 'onomancy' (the magic of names) contributes to this to build a conclusion that speech act theory has long used as a founding premise: speech is an action. The final chapter of Playful Letters offers a fascinating historical connection between this ostensibly western European history of alphabetics and complementary developments in Russia over the same period. Scholars of early modern letters as pedagogy in England, for example, will no doubt find the history of the premodern Cyrillic letter Az extremely compelling, with its simultaneous roles as first letter and first-person pronoun. Boeckeler guides the reader through the longstanding theological and philosophical resonances possible in an alphabet—az-buka—that literally means 'I am books' or, more pertinently to Boeckeler's premise: 'I am letters'. The Cyrillic alphabet's evolution and historic idiosyncrasies offer a divergent, but familiar, promise of the letter as a lens through which to make, see, and understand the self. Playful Letters offers an excellent point of reference for a range of both touchstone texts and lesser-known works on the early modern Roman and Cyrillic alphabets. It offers a wealth of rigorous research and intriguing intertextual connections to inspire further inquiry on the use of letters. Some of its theoretical framing work—especially the notion of 'letterature' as a term for period discourses on letters—ultimately proves an unnecessary...