Translating Investments: Metaphor and the Dynamic of Cultural Change in Tudor-Stuart England by Judith H. Anderson (review)

Abstract

JUDITH H. ANDERSON, Translating Investments: Metaphor and the Dynamic of Cultural Change in Tudor-Stuart England. New York: Fordham University Press, 2005. ISBN: 0-8282-2421-X. $55. This 'exploration of cultural metaphor' (3) traces the rhetorical and cognitive functions of a handful of especially polysemous words in religion, politics, literature, and economics in Tudor-Stuart England. With theoretical sophistication and rigorous attention to the nuances of language, Anderson illustrates with exhaustive detail the fecundity and dynamism of early modern English as it was lived. As the title indicates, 'Translating' figures prominently in this analysis, both as an emblem of the appropriation of Latin words by Renaissance English writers, and as a theoretical paradigm describing the potential for figurative language to expand beyond the boundaries of intended meaning. Although focusing on only a few root words, Anderson's analysis illustrates the profusion of possible meanings produced when they are transferred ('translated') from one context to another. Her many examples document with painstaking detail the subtle and not-so-subtle shifts in meaning these words acquire as a consequence of previously unrealized metaphoric associations, simultaneously charting how other meanings fade or wither altogether. The main title's second term, 'Investments,' orients the reader to the primary exemplar of the phenomenon of metaphoric polysemousness she elucidates. Tracing the word's Latin and Italian etymology, she identifies its flourishing in English in the sixteenth and early seventeenth century, noting how its association with clothing was adopted in English to express the idea of capital outlay in support of commercial ventures. She proceeds to show how Shakespeare's multiple uses of the word in Hamlet and 2 Henry IV enlarges and reshapes this basic association between clothing and risk to include any attempt to improve one's status or authority by assuming the appearance or apparel of that station. The network of meanings associated with Shakespeare's use of 'invest/ment' but one example of the kind of 'surplus of nuance' (25) that Anderson uncovers and revives in her analysis of the metaphoricity of early modern English. While her treatment of Shakespeare, which follows a brief introductory chapter, sets the stage for her subsequent analyses, it also illustrates the theoretical problematic that both frames and complicates them: the debate between Ricoeur and Derrida over the relationship between the meaning of a metaphorical word and its material origins. Each subsequent chapter analyzes an example of the metaphoric capacity of a word being warped or stretched. In the third chapter, which will bring a wry smile of recognition to those who recall Bill Clinton's equivocal testimony about 'what the meaning of the word is is' during the Lewinsky affair, she investigates Reformation debates about the linguistic representation of the sacrament, in particular the significance of the word 'is' in the sentence, 'This my body.' Chapter 4 extends and expands this examination by considering differences between Luther's, Zwingli's, and Calvin's attitudes toward metaphor as a cognitive mechanism for religious understanding, then turns to Donne's Devotions upon Emergent Occasions as an illustration of how his self-aware tropology expresses humanity's relationship to the ineffability of the divine. …