YES,31, 200I Narrative and Meaning in Early Modem England. By HOWARD MARCHITELLO. (Cambridge Studies in Renaissance Literatureand Culture, 20) Cambridge, New York, and Melbourne: Cambridge University Press. 1997. xiv + 229 pp. ?37-50; $59-95The Projectof Prose in Early Modern Europe and the New World. Ed. by ELIZABETH FOWLER and ROLAND GREENE. (Cambridge Studies in Renaissance Literature and Culture, 16)Cambridge, New York,and Melbourne:Cambridge University Press. 1997. xii + 205 pp. ?35; $59.95. The Cultureof Slanderin EarlyModer England. By M. LINDSAY KAPLAN. (Cambridge Studiesin Renaissance Literatureand Culture, 19) Cambridge,New York,and Melbourne: Cambridge University Press. I997. xii + I48 pp. f32.50; $49.95. John Bergeronce wrote that sometimes to refute a single sentence, you have to tell a life story. Howard Marchitello has a neat neologism, 'narrationality',for the narrativethat is used as argument, and which 'declares the world to be saturated with meaning thatis in everyinstancenarrativein nature'(p. 5). The concept serves to hold together an otherwise theoretically disparatebook, which ranges from the discoursesof anatomy and geography in the early modern period to the canonical texts of Shakespeare and Browne. The first chapter neatly and persuasivelypulls together Vesalius (as opened for us by Sawday'swork), the visual focus of the new science, and the tension between 'ocularproof' and the desire for something more than visual, anatomical interiorityin Othello and 'TisPityShe'sa Whore. The second chapter, on textual variation in TheMerchant of Venice, is less interesting. If the firstchapterhas at least held out the possibilitiesof grandculturalnarratives,this is resolutely postmodern textual theory: there is no original text, the differences between editions do not aggregate into one significant re-interpretation, and the accidental is precisely the accidental. The argumentswould be of interest to those concernedwith the text of Shakespeare'splay, and theway in which textualscholars attempt to construct narratives of the production of various editions from the evidence of variations.The thirdchapter,on cartographyandpolitics,and the sense in which maps have a narrative function, is the best of the whole book, deftly holding together recent cartographicaltheory, politics (in the sense that readersof New Historicism would be familiarwith), history, and the map poems of Donne. The fourth chapter, on the New World, startson yet another theoretical complex, this time connecting Levinas and Todorov on the Other, though it returnsto the preoccupations of the previous chapter, the ways that mapping and exploration divide theworld into bitsfordifferingpurposes,usuallyeconomic. The finalchapter gets distracted at the start by an over-long narrative of the fate of Browne's skull interlinked with an analysis of the racial motivations of nineteenth-century phrenology, but it comes sharplyinto focus with a fascinatingaccount of Browne's epistemology and his ideas about time. This is a very impressive first book. It is more than a thesisbook in the traditionalsense, in that it shows, notjust the ability to develop a thesisover a wide range of material,but also a criticalgraspof a range of theoreticalpositions. The collection of essays edited by Elizabeth Fowlerand Roland Greene on 'the project of prose' shows the problem of attending to something which is usually either self-effacing or so consciously stylish that stylistic analysis seems the best response, but so peripheralto our currentcriticalconcerns as to be dismissed.Add to that the wide range of languages, genres, and topics represented, and the centrifugalforces are almost too much for the collection's coherence. This is not so much a new approach to Renaissance prose, as the editors claim, as a collection of 303 essaysdrawingon alreadyestablishednew approachesto the period. However, the cluster of critical preoccupations do hold together well enough: loosely New Historicist (the best sort of New Historicist to be), especially in its concerns with exploration, colonialism, and profit;self-consciousnessabout language and genre; gender; and the fictions of power. Add to that a distinguishedroll-call of criticson good form, and the justification for the volume is more assured. Particularly important are David Scott Kastan's reversalof the usual preference for Stow over Grafton as historians, Paula Blank on language reform, and William Sherman on the representationsof Elizabethanpublic order.Amy Boeskyusefullybringsout the urgency of the 'new' in the new science of TheNewAtlantis. My favourite,though, is Timothy Hampton's virtuoso piece on Montaigne's 'Des...