206 Reviews (p. 69) and Guyon is 'presented at the outset as a bad reader, unaware of the true meaning which lies beneath the deceptive surface of the text' (p. 79). The world isno doubt fullof bad readers, but there ismore topoetry than the subject of poetry itself. TRINITY COLLEGE DUBLIN GERALDMORGAN Masculinity, Anti-Semitism and Early Modern English Literature: From theSatanic to theEffeminateyew. By MATTHEW BIBERMAN. Aldershot and Burlington, VT: Ashgate. 2004. XiV+26opp. ?45. ISBN 978-0-7546-5045-4. This book charts the relationship between anti-Semitism and gender, arguing that in the earlymodern period a prevalent stereotype of the hypermasculine 'Jew-Devil' began to give way to a contrasting stereotype of the effeminate 'Jew-Sissy'. Matthew Biberman illustrates this process with reference to the transition fromMarlowe's Barabas, violent, arrogant, and avaricious, to the emasculated Shylock, bewailing the loss of his stones, while Doll Common's performance as a Hebraic scholar in The Alchemist shows how 'the two previously antithetical concepts of femininity and Ju daism are now being synthesized' (p. 52). The principal reason for thisdevelopment, Biberman argues, is thedecline in amartial-heroic model ofmasculinity ofwhich the Jew-Devil is the forbidden extreme, and theconsolidation of bourgeois heterosexual ity: the Jew-Sissy 'validates the bourgeois oedipalized male by serving as itsextreme caricature' (p. 7I). In Paradise Lost, forexample, themarriage ofAdam and Eve is contrasted with the instances of 'illicitheterosexual sex' (p. 96) alluded to in Milton's roll-call of demons (I. 392-5 15),where Jew-Sissies such as Solomon, Zimri, and the sons of Eli fail to control their sinful desires. The Jew-Sissy's failure of self-control also motivates his attitude to divorce, which he sees as facilitating remarriage rather than (Christian, masculine) abstinence: bymaking Dalila Samson's wife in Samson Agonistes,Milton allows us tocontrast Samson's firstdivorce, with itsJew-Sissy aim of remarriage toDalila, with his second, which is a proto-Christian renunciation of sexuality.Milton too, of course, saw divorce as ameans to remarriage, a view that 'positions him not just as a woman, but as a Jewishwoman' (p. i i i); moreover, his Hebraic learning and Erastianism led him to be associated with Judaism by subse quent writers. Biberman provides a telling analysis both of the effacement bymany twentieth-century critics ofMilton's Jewish dimension, and of the anti-Semitism discernible within T. S. Eliot's critique ofMilton's stylistic exoticism. This is a verywide-ranging book, almost to thepoint of diffuseness: there are some sections, such as a discussion of earlymodern divorce practice as itapplies toEpicoene, and an attempt to relate The Alchemist to theGowrie conspiracy, that seem extrane ous to themain argument. However, perhaps its most striking feature is itsextremely schematic analysis of anti-Semitism. Biberman argues thatpost-medieval male sub jectivity can be understood as a position upon a 'theo-sexual matrix', and that the presence of the Jew-Sissy within this matrix prevents themale subject from reconcil ing his masculinity with his Christianity. The Holocaust was accordingly motivated by an ontological anti-Semitism: Jewsneeded tobe removed from theequation so that German men could deproblematize theirmasculinity. The earlier texts are explicitly readwith this teleology inmind, as when Biberman relates Shylock's Jew-Sissy re course to legal process rather than private revenge to the ambiguous gender of his vanquisher, Portia-Balthasar. I felt thatBiberman's analogy with twentieth-century Europe entailed a collapse of chronology that sat uncomfortably with the ostensible historicism of his initial hypothesis. Moreover, given thathis book purports to con trast modern and medieval anti-Semitic stereotypes, it is strange thathe pays so little attention to texts from the Middle Ages: 'The Prioress's Tale' and theCroxton Play MLR, 102. I, 2007 207 of theSacrament get a total of two pages. As a result,while there ismuch to praise in this book, such as theway Biberman relates the divergent sexualities of Donne and Milton to the Jew-Devil and Jew-Sissy stereotypes, and his reading ofGothic fictionas representing the returnof the repressed Jew-Devil, itsbroader argument is somewhat letdown by the fact thathe at once attempts todo toomuch and too little. LONDON SOUTH BANK UNIVERSITY TOM RUTTER RefiguringMimesis: Representation inEarly Modern...