Early Modern Society Research Articles

Monstrous Society: Reciprocity, Discipline, and the Political Uncanny at the End of Early Modern England, by David Collings

The ‘moral economy’ is a perennial topic in British social history. Ever since E.P. Thompson's essay on the concept in 1971, studies of early modern society periodically return to the idea of patricians and plebeians being conditioned by unwritten rules of ‘reciprocity’ and ‘community justice’. David Collings provides a refreshing take on the demise of the moral economy by reinterpreting certain classic texts of the period: Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (1791); Matthew Lewis, The Monk (1796); T.R. Malthus, Essay on Population (1798), and Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (1818). These analyses are complemented by an intriguing study of Jeremy Bentham's ‘Auto-Icon’, the stuffed remains of the philosopher, that now resides at University College, London. The book concludes with briefer surveys of loyalist-turned-radical writer, William Cobbett, and republican land campaigner, Thomas Spence. Collings underlines the pervasiveness of ‘reciprocity’ in these works and argues that it was challenged not just by the forces of government, population change, and the French Revolution, but also by its very own contradictions.

Historical Perspectives on Legal Pluralism

Historical research represents our richest vein of information about the workings of legal pluralism. Before the long nineteenth century, all legal orders featured jurisdictional tensions without strong claims of legal hegemony by states. In a world in which plural legal orders were the norm, multicentric jurisdictional orders created continuities across diverse regions and polities. What can we learn from the history of legal pluralism in considering its relation to economic development today? To begin, legal history can provide an analytic guide to grasping the complexities of current legal patterns and behavior. A particularly helpful rubric emerges out of studies of the legal history of empires. A second relevant fi nding confi rmed by historical studies of plural legal orders, including and especially empires, consists in the observation that legal actors — again, at all levels — tended to show a preference over time for adjudication in forums that seemed to provide a greater possibility of enforcement of rulings. This paper examines these phenomena in early modern societies in order to lay the groundwork for analyzing legal pluralism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. By keeping in view the jurisdictional jockeying of imperial legal orders, we gain new perspective on the role of legal pluralism at major turning points in the development of international law. In particular, it becomes possible to understand nineteenth century prohibition regimes as forming through jurisdictional restructuring within and across global empires — a view that contrasts with traditional narratives of the rise of international law. Similarly, understanding the pervasiveness and persistence of strategies of appealing to imperial legal authority allows us to appreciate the effects on legal behavior of robust claims to the dominance of state law over subordinate jurisdictions in the twentieth century.

A Merchant or a French Atlantic? Eighteenth-century account books as narratives of a transnational merchant political economy

In the eighteenth century, merchant financial accounting, especially double-entry accounting, should be of interest, and not only to accounting historians. The many account books left by traders the world over show how credit structured the early modern economy and society. Trade took place on credit, not with cash; Bordeaux merchant Abraham Gradis borrowed and loaned millions of Livres, and maintained a network of partners in France and the colonies across the Atlantic (Martinique, Saint-Domingue and Canada), shipping and/or selling as commission merchant wine, flour, sugar, coffee... Cash was used for smaller transactions, but commercial paper, and above all book credit, was key to merchant success. Because traders depended crucially on extended credit networks, the social construction of credit took precedence over all other considerations, including regional ones. Through the control of book credit, the largest merchants were able to establish themselves as a truly international ruling class.

Islam in Early Modern Quaker Experience and Writing

Islam in Early Modern Quaker Experience and Writing David Vlasblom (bio) From their beginnings in the mid-seventeenth century to the early twentieth century, the Religious Society of Friends, commonly known as the Quakers, offered a unique and often challenging perspective in the Western world as pioneers of both inter-faith dialogue and social justice issues. This paper will demonstrate that early modern Quakers were uniquely open to befriending and learning from Muslims and that this contact aided Quakers of the latter seventeenth and early eighteenth-centuries in challenging Western social norms, particularly with regard to Western slavery. Lessons learned from Muslims and the process of inter-faith dialogue outside of Western boundaries enabled Quakers enough distance and breadth of perspective to take unique ideological positions that ran counter to the powerful discourses of the West. Contact with Islam aided the early modern Quakers in thinking beyond the discourses of their English, Christian, Western culture and helped them to challenge oppression by presenting alternative models. The Quakers were much better suited than their fellow early modern English and Western European Christian religionists to learn lessons from other cultures because their religion did not prejudice them against Muslims and other cultures but rather encouraged dialogue. Elements of a culture of tolerance in early modern Islamic societies thus filtered through to the West through the pioneering work of the extremely influential Quaker movement. The Quakers adapted this seed of Islamic tolerance that was lacking in their own culture of seventeenth-century England, and they developed it in their own way into a worldview that would evolve with time to promote radical social activism. It is beyond the scope of this paper to consider the direct links between early modern Quaker values of equality and tolerance and the largely Quaker-led reform movements of the nineteenth century including abolition of slavery, rethinking capital punishment and the enfranchisement of minorities and women. Nevertheless it is a premise of this paper that there is a strong continuity of ideology and that these later social movements were a logical outworking of early modern Quaker beliefs and values. While Islam was by no means the only force influencing early modern Quaker ideas, it was a vital ingredient because it presented the Quakers with a different set of cultural discourses with which they could begin their centuries-long challenging and overthrow of Western injustices. This paper will first explore the importance of Islam in forming the uniquely inclusive Quaker worldview in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries; [End Page 1] secondly this paper will examine the influence of Islamic culture in early modern Quaker thinking on the issue of slavery, demonstrating how this intercultural and inter-faith exchange stimulated early Quaker social activism. Part I: Relationship with Islam Aids Early Modern Quakerism in Transcending Western Discourses This paper does not claim that Islam was the primary religious influence on the Quakers as they formed their worldview. It is beyond the scope of this project to consider the vast array of religious traditions and Enlightenment thinkers whose ideas filtered into Quakerism. In terms of religious traditions, the early Quakers certainly identified much more closely with the Christian Millenarian and Anabaptist traditions; and, more broadly, with Christianity in general and even Judaism. Derogatory references to Islam, Muslims and the Qur'an outnumber favourable ones in early modern Quaker writings. George Fox, the man who founded Quakerism in the middle of the seventeenth century, believed that Muslims were misguided1 and should be evangelized into Christian truth.2 Even so, Quaker openness to Islam was remarkable for its time. Extensive research of Quaker writings for this paper has failed to uncover any demonic imagery employed against Muslims or characterizations of the Qur'an as a wicked or evil book. As will be demonstrated below, there was an emergence among Quakers of a collective concept of Islam, or the "Turk," that was fundamentally different from the predominating English and Western perceptions. Overwhelmingly, Quaker writers found Muslim society to be morally equal to the Christian societies of Europe, and they often cited examples in which Muslims were acting in a more enlightened way than Christians. This section will demonstrate that early modern...

Early Modern Ottoman Coffeehouse Culture and the Formation of the Consumer Subject

We examine the sociohistorical formation of the consumer subject during the development of consumer culture in the context of leisure consumption. Specifically, we investigate how an active consumer was forming while a coffeehouse culture was taking shape during early modern Ottoman society. Utilizing multiple historical data sources and analysis techniques, we focus on the discursive negotiations and the practices of the consumers, the marketers, the state, and the religious institution as relevant stakeholders. Our findings demonstrate that multiparty resistance, enacted by consumers and marketers, first challenged the authority of the state and religion and then changed them. Simultaneously and at interplay with various institutional transformations, a public sphere, a coffeehouse culture, and a consumer subject constructing his self-ethics were developed, normalized, and legalized. We discuss the implications of the centrality of transgressive hedonism in this process, as well as the existence of an active consumer in an early modern context.

Monstrous Society: Reciprocity, Discipline, and the Political Uncanny, c. 1780–1848 by David Collings

David Collings. Monstrous Society: Reciprocity, Discipline, and the Political Uncanny, c. 1780-1848. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2009. Pp. 332. $61.50. David Collings's Monstrous Society is a subtle and ambitious book with a dual focus. In its broadest terms, the book offers an account of England's transition from the early modern period into modernity, a transformation that Collings dates to the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The subsidiary theme that drives much of the book's argument is the contention that the emergence of Gothic literature in this period represents both the demonization of the plebeian body and the resistance of that body when its claims to expression were delegitimized by official discourses such as Edmund Burke's appeals to natural law, Jeremy Bentham's utilitarianism, and Thomas Malthus's work on economy. Collings takes up the standard account of the shift from early modern to fully modern England as a transition from a customary social order grounded in embodied practices to a constitutional society based on codified principles. With this narrative as a point of departure, he argues that the concept of that depicts premodern societies as more organic formations than modern ones is mistaken. While both traditional and Marxist accounts of early modern English society describe reciprocity as a sign of mutual recognition between the propertied and plebeian classes, Collings argues that the reversibility of power demonstrated in social rituals like bread riots does not demonstrate the mutual recognition of legitimate interests but shows the effects of a structural antagonism. This thesis has two significant implications. The first is that antagonism is not a modern social phenomenon, dependent on the spread of literacy and the articulation of interests in written form; it is a fundamental feature of early modern society that was expressed in embodied practices. The second implication is that the belief that we inhabit a world of political modernity separated from the by an epistemic abyss is illusory. Collings argues for the necessity of a nonmodern historiography, one that does not rely for its premises on the notion of a break from the past (19). What does change in late eighteenth century England, Collings argues, is the representation of the bodies involved in this structure of antagonism. Defenders of the propertied class, such as Edmund Burke, Adam Smith, Jeremy Bentham, and Thomas Malthus, now claim to deduce public policy from an expert mastery of natural law (20). The effect of this claim is to deny the plebeians the right to demand accountability from the ruling class; when social arrangements are imagined not as expressions of class interest but as effects of natural law, the ruling class disappears from view and plebeian counterforce is figured as a monstrous violation of the natural. The subtlety of the argument in Monstrous Society involves the articulation of the rhetoric of economic determinism with the metaphorics of the body. While the originary, premodern conception of natural rights that informs bread riots is collective, modern discourse imagines subjects in terms of individual sovereignty and universal equivalence. Defenses of the classical body, whether in Burke's accounts of the beauty of Marie Antoinette or in Bentham's valorization of individuality, deny the rights of the plebeian body. Where carnivalesque rituals assert a reversibility of power along a vertical axis of high and low, in the modern era the delegitimation of power from below takes the form of the hyperbolization of the grotesque, carnivalesque body into a monstrous body. The Gothic investment in tortured, ghostly, and deformed bodies reasserts the claims of the negated collective (22) of plebeian counterpower. In Collings's account of the birth of modern English discourse, the possibility of revolution is crucial to converting the reversible present of carnival into revolutionary history: Revolution shifts the symbolic reversal of social norms into the process of their literal transformation; its axis is not high/low but past/future (46). …

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Today, violent abuse of parents by their grown-up children is veiled in silence; hut this has not always been the case. In 17th and 18th century Sweden, violent and verbal abuse of parents constituted a capital crime, and in the 19th century physical abuse of parents was still regarded as a serious crime. The turning point came in 1864 when parental abuse was excluded from the new penal code as an independent category of crime – a first step on the road to the modern veil of silence. The aim of this article is to analyse today’s silence and violent abuse in the light history. In the long run this was a history of changing attitudes and meanings. While the children of early modern families were obliged by both law and religion to respect their parents as the fundament of society, the rise of the modern bourgeoisie ideology implied that families should be united by bands of love and affection as a natural fact which didn’t need to be regulated by law. What was seen as sin and crime in early modern society was diagnosed as a psychological and social deviation in the emerging modern society.

Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure: The Problem Of Social Reform and Marriage

The article focuses on Shakespeare’s play: Measure for Measure, with the aim of bringing to light the central problem of the play which is that of social reform and marriage in an early modern European society. It is a play that has been located against the background of seventeenth century society of London where it was first performed. However, it is symbolically set in the city of Vienna. Feminist and Historicist critics have been cited in the article in an interpretation of the play which requires a consideration of the role of women and their status in the playworld. The issues of private and public marriages, and the ambiguity governing the laws on marriage, form the complex problem raised in the play. It is the contention of the article that Shakespeare emphasized the need to regulate the legal system with a view to promote greater representation and voice to women who were victimized by the corrupt legal institutions, both religious and official. Thus, the article suggests that the developments in the position of women, and the questions as to whether they were married or single, were the subject of public concern and debate in sixteenth and seventeenth century Europe. Marriage was, therefore, felt to be the most crucial issue in this regard and the aim of the dramatists and literary writers was to popularize the difficulties faced by women with a view to raising the consciousness of the public.

Widows: Outsiders in rural economy and society in central European villages, 1558–1750

Due to the lack of micro-historical empirical studies, a general account of the situation of women in early modern rural societies of demesne lordship (Gutsherrschaft) is not possible, yet. Previous research has generally assumed that their economic position was difficult. Recent studies, however, aimed to modify this picture by emphasizing, in particular, their independent economic activities, especially with increasing age. This paper will address the position of widows in rural society. It will analyze land transfer contracts for three individual villages of the Northern Bohemian estate of Frýdlant between 1558 and 1750 and contrast the results with normative sources of the same estate. It will particularly deal with the question whether widows could work subject farms and holdings independently and how they secured livelihood after selling their properties.

Sandra Cavallo and David Gentilcore (eds), Spaces, objects and identities in early modern Italian medicine, Oxford, Blackwell in collaboration with the Society for Renaissance Studies, 2008, pp. 123, illus., £19.99 (paperback 978-1-4051-8040-5).

This volume republishes a collection of essays that first appeared in print in Renaissance Studies, 2007, 21 (4). The essays exemplify the recent trend for the history of medicine to broaden its scope to encompass diverse aspects of social and cultural life. The essays focus on Italy in particular, but will be of interest to anyone studying the social history of early modern Europe. The papers by Elizabeth S Cohen and Filippo de Vivo both study the commercial spaces of apothecary shops in the seventeenth century. Cohen’s essay is a superbly researched microhistory of a criminal trial from Rome. The apothecary alleged that an intrusive guild search for counterfeit confectionary had provoked his wife’s miscarriage and subsequent death. The case incidentally reveals much intriguing detail about the spatial and social organization of shop and home, the role of women in a family business, and the policing activities of guilds. It is a fascinating case that repays such close examination, casting light on many aspects of medicine, culture and society. De Vivo’s essay is a brilliant study showing how apothecary shops in Venice were not simply spaces for buying products, but also centres for socializing and exchange of information, constituting a “public sphere” before the better-known coffee-shops and salons of the eighteenth century. Such was the social importance of these spaces that the security council, particularly concerned that dangerous ideas might spread across social levels, set spies to keep a close eye on the flow of customers. Other papers centre on the body, addressing the relation between science, society and religion. Gianna Pomata’s study of the role of doctors in canonization proceedings, looks at the case of the body of Saint Catherine in Bologna. This is a very interesting exploration of cooperation between religious and medical authorities in the scientific investigation of purportedly miraculous cures and instances of bodily “incorruption”, often flying in the face of popular cults. Related themes appear in Lucia Dacome’s essay on Anna Morandi, an unusual case of a female anatomist and maker of wax anatomical models in Bologna. The essay provides enthralling details of one of the lesser-studied aspects of empirical science in the eighteenth century, and the opportunities open to a woman in this field. It also contains interesting reflections on the particular qualities that made wax such an effective substitute for flesh, and its associations with religious practices, such as death masks. A similar emphasis on the socially embedded nature of scientific research and medical practice is found in Silvia De Renzi’s essay, a comparative study of the careers of two doctors in seventeenth-century Rome. She examines the various factors that determined professional success, from anatomical research to hospital practice to dealing in art. Overall this is an excellent and consistently interesting collection of research papers, that reveals new aspects of the central importance of medicine in early modern society and culture.

Early modern English kinship in the long run: reflections on continuity and change

ABSTRACTThe article highlights the significance of alliances of blood and marriage in early modern England and beyond, including both positive and negative relations among kin. Examining different historiographical approaches, it emphasizes the role of kinship in explanations of historical change and continuity. Rather than focusing on the isolated nuclear family or, conversely, on an alleged decline of kinship, it highlights the importance of enmeshed patterns of kinship and connectedness. Such patterns were not only important in themselves (whether culturally, socially, economically, or politically), it is suggested, but they also invite new comparisons with other early modern societies, and in the long run. Even patterns typical of present-day ‘new families’ and ‘families of choice’, or aspects of the present-day language of kinship may bring to mind some similarities with notions of kinship and related ‘household-family’ ties characteristic of the early modern period, the article proposes.

:Interludes and Early Modern Society: Studies in Gender, Power and Theatricality. Ludus Medieval and Early Renaissance Theatre and Drama 9

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Old age, masculinity, and early modern drama: comic elders on the Italian and Shakespearean stage

This first book-length study to trace the evolution of the comic old man in Italian and English Renaissance comedy shows how English dramatists adopted and reimagined an Italian model to reflect native concerns about and attitudes toward growing old. Anthony Ellis provides an in-depth study of the comic old man in the erudite comedy of sixteenth-century Florence; the character's parallel development in early modern Venice, including the commedia dell'arte; and, along with a consideration of Anglo-Italian intertextuality, the character's subsequent flourishing on the Elizabethan and Jacobean stage. In outlining the character's development, Ellis identifies and describes the physical and behavioral characteristics of the comic old man and situates these traits within early modern society by considering prevailing medical theories, sexual myths, and intergenerational conflict over political and economic circumstances. The plays examined include Italian dramas by Bernardo Dovizi da Bibbiena, NiccolA² Machiavelli, Donato Giannotti, Lorenzino de' Medici, Andrea Calmo, and Flaminio Scala, and English works by William Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, and Thomas Dekker, along with Middleton, Rowley, and Heywood's The Old Law. Besides providing insight into stage representations of aging, this book illuminates how early modern people conceived of and responded to the experience of growing old and its social, economic, and physical challenges.

Women and the Pamphlet Culture of Revolutionary England, 1640-1660. By MARCUS NEVITT.

In this sophisticated study of pamphlet culture in the 1640s and 1650s Marcus Nevitt attempts to draw a more ‘gender-sensitive picture’ of pamphlet discourse in the period (p. 3). His contention is that whilst ‘pamphlets, and pamphlet culture more generally, have frequently been located amongst the most inclusive and democratic aspects of early modern English society’, these notions of inclusivity and democratization can conceal ‘the material and rhetorical barriers that women encountered when participating in revolutionary pamphlet culture’ (pp. 1, 5). Nevitt’s book is divided into five chapters and proceeds, sensibly, given the topic of pamphlet culture, by detailed case study. He considers the radical Katherine Chidley’s involvement in debates over religious toleration in the 1640s, then examines the pamphlet writings of Mary Pope and Elizabeth Poole following the regicide. Nevitt goes on to look at Elizabeth Alkin (‘Parliament Joan’) as he attempts to further our understanding of the role women played in the book trade and in the production of pamphlets and newsbooks. In the final two chapters Nevitt seeks to unpack the significance of the physical (and naked) protest of an anonymous woman at a church service and the contribution made by women to the Quaker campaign against tithes.

Aging without agency: Theorizing the fourth age

This article looks at the “fourth age” as a manifestation of the fragmentation of “old age”. We argue that the fourth age emerges from the institutionalization of the infirmities of old age set against the appearance of a third-age culture that negates past representations of old age. We outline the historical marginalization of old age from early modern society to the contemporary concentration of infirmity within long-term care which makes of old age an undesirable “social imaginary”. As “old age” fades from the social world, we liken this to the impact of a “black hole” distorting the gravitational field surrounding it, unobservable except for its traces. Within this perspective, the fourth age can be understood by examining not the experience itself but its impact on the discourses that surround and orientate themselves to it.

Social Provisions and the Life of Civil Society in Europe: Rethinking Public and Private

This article discusses the critical role that social provisioning played in forming and maintaining communities across the longue durée of European history. Based on evidence from urban Europe in particular, the study suggests the importance of the early creation of a sphere of civil society here. Civil society was marked by the presence of both voluntary and civic associations, many of them designed for the care of the “honorable” or “house” poor. Although filled with the activities of “private” citizens, civil society was an eminently public sphere. It provided men and, more importantly, women with opportunities to extend their lives beyond the domestic to participate in organized associational life. Two types of community, based on confessional and civic affiliation, were especially important in shaping early modern societies and the poor relief organizations that helped to bind them together.The study argues that these types of community persisted well beyond the early modern period, leaving a legacy of community-building patterns and practices of social provisioning that helped to define the “imagined communities” of modern nations and their welfare states.

Tales of God's friends: Islamic hagiography in translation

This remarkable collection gathers a breathtakingly diverse selection of primary texts from the vast repertoire of Islamic stories about holy men and women - also known as of God - who were exemplary for their piety, intimacy with God, and service to their fellow human beings. Translated from seventeen languages by more than two dozen scholars of Islamic studies, these texts come from the Middle East, North and sub-Saharan Africa, Central and South Asia, and China and Southeast Asia. Historically, they begin with the eighth century and include samples from medieval, early modern, and modern Muslim societies. Expertly edited and introduced by John Renard, Tales of God's Friends serves as a companion volume to Renard's of God: Islamic Images of Piety, Commitment, and Servanthood.

Honor and Violence in Golden Age Spain (review)

{ 264 } Book Reviews sentence descriptions are readily available on Wikipedia. Along similar lines, some judicious pruning of the articles would have ameliorated the book’s turgidity (do we really need, for instance, a description of George C. Scott’s ­ living room?). Finally, Senelick reports that Edith Isaacs, one of the journal’s editors, dedicated “the August 1942 issue of Theatre Arts to ‘the Negro in Ameri­ can theatre’” (xvi). This important issue was later expanded into a book published by Theatre Arts in 1947. Why, then, were none of the comments about African Ameri­ can acting made in the 1942 issue reprinted in this collection? Other than Young’s essay on Mei Lan-­ Fang, the anthology lacks contributions beyond the white establishment. Despite misgivings, the significance of this collection is evident, and Laurence Senelick has done a great service to the scholarly and professional community. David Krasner — Emerson College \ \ Honor and Violence in Golden Age Spain. By Scott K. Taylor. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008. 320 pp. $55.00 cloth. Scott K. Taylor’s Honor and Violence in Golden Age Spain offers a fresh approach to understanding the Spanish concept of honor and its prominence in the cultural landscape of seventeenth-­ century Spain. Although Taylor is an early mod­ ern historian, his work is interdisciplinary in its breadth of scholarship as it touches on literary criticism, cultural anthropology, legal studies, and theatre history. In this book, he challenges the dominant theory that Spanish honor was a rigid social code based on shame and cultural anxieties as depicted in early modern Spanish drama and literature. In contrast to the strict “code of honor” traditionally ascribed to Spanish culture, Taylor introduces his concept of the “rhetoric of honor,” which he defines as “the conscious use of phrases, gestures, and actions—including elements of the duel—to convey information about the issues in contention while simultaneously advancing a violent confrontation”(21).Finding the term“code” too limiting in its implication of a formal process, Taylor’s “rhetoric” creates a loose template of action that establishes an accretion of shame which can then rise to violent confrontations—a fluid and performative approach to honor as a construct in early modern society and literature. Taylor presents his theory in juxtaposition to the previously published { 265 } Book Reviews theories of social anthropologists Julian Pitt-­ Rivers, J. G. Peristiany, and Jane Schneider, who have explained honor as a strict code that supported a family-­ centered morality, acting in and influenced by a larger sense of community. Taylor asserts that their concept of honor developed in part by using the“honor plays” of Lope de Vega and Pedro Calderón de la Barca and discussions of dueling in fencing manuals as examples of actual behavior. Taylor contends, however , that social interactions involving violence in dueling manuals, law books, and “honor plays” of the period do not accurately depict Spanish behavior. For him, these printed accounts of violence depict Spanish life in an imagined or idealized form where two wronged parties duel in accordance to a strict code of actions. He therefore places de Vega, Calderón, and other Spanish playwrights in the ranks of early modern moralists and an “elite culture” of Spanish authors . Rather then relying solely on dramatic and other literary representations, such as novels or dueling manuals, to illuminate the workings of “honor” and “violence” during the era, Taylor focuses on legal documentation of actual historical events. He does employ the plays, however, as tools for an intellectual discourse of honor contrasted with the factual events documented in legal records , by introducing each chapter with a dramatic scene treating the chapter’s topic, followed by an explication of the topic gleaned from his research into the courts. Through this methodology he deconstructs the romanticized anthropological and artistic concepts of honor by comparing them with descriptions of real-­ life confrontations involving civil matters of “honor” in early modern Spain. For example, in chapter 4, titled “Men,” which explores the anxieties of masculine honor and its dependency on the behavior of others, Taylor pre­ sents the opening scene of Calderón’s El pintor de su deshonra (The Painter of His Dishonor). He then contrasts the...

Vanities of the Eye: Vision in Early Modern European Culture (review)

Reviewed by: Vanities of the Eye: Vision in Early Modern European Culture Dallas G. Denery II Stuart Clark. Vanities of the Eye: Vision in Early Modern European Culture. Oxford-New York: Oxford University Press, 2007. Pp. xi + 415. Cloth, $75.00. A popular and pervasive historical narrative links the Renaissance development of linear perspective with Europe’s transition from a pre-modern to an early modern society. Erwin Panofsky gave this narrative its definitive form early in the twentieth century and William Ivins boiled it down to a simple idea that served as the title of his most famous book. According to Ivins, single-point perspective, the artistic technique championed by Alberti and perfected in the paintings of Masaccio and Piero della Francesca, allowed for “the rationalization of sight.” In other words, it provided a mathematically and geometrically grounded method for accurately representing the external world. It is a powerful and seductive claim, one that has shaped generations of scholarly work. It is also, Stuart Clark contends in this important new book, patently wrong. Far from exhibiting a renewed or reinvigorated confidence in the accuracy and reliability of vision, sixteenth- and seventeenth-century philosophers, artists, theologians, and doctors worried that sight was susceptible, perhaps permanently so, to all sorts of debilitating derangements, displacements, and delusions. Rather than relate a history of progress, Clark offers a history of exhaustion, failure, and, ultimately, of rejection. Early modern intellectuals inherited a comprehensive theory of vision and cognition from their medieval predecessors known as perspectivist optics. This theory sought to secure the accuracy of human sense perception through regularized causal processes that linked things in the world with our various cognitive faculties. While some fourteenth-century intellectuals, most notably Nicolas of Autrecourt and Nicole Oresme, recognized structural deficiencies in this theory, their critiques were mostly ignored or treated as anomalies. Over the course of the next two and a half centuries, Clark argues, the challenges to this theory multiplied until it collapsed under their weight (20). Clark’s argument is straightforward and, as his evidence mounts, thoroughly convincing. Throughout each of the eight engrossing chapters that form the core of the book, Clark outlines a different threat, a different set of challenges that pointed out problems with the assumption that vision is trustworthy. The range and depth of those challenges are truly amazing. Doctors worried that imbalances in our humoral system, and especially in the black bile that causes melancholy, could render our visual perceptions dubious at best (ch. 2). Theologians, wary of the dangers of witchcraft and eager to prosecute its practitioners, obsessed over the cognitive threats that devils and demons posed to good Christians (ch. 4), while Protestant reformers relegated the entire tradition of Catholic miracles to the counterfeit illusions of the antichrist (ch. 5). For their part, artists believed that perspective undermined vision, depending as it does on the assumption that what we see is always relative, dependent upon our point of view (ch. 3). Clark structures much of his argument around George Hakewill’s 1608 book, The vanitie of the eye, an exposition on the natural, artificial, and demonic sources that forever render visual knowledge suspect. He could just as well have organized it around the opening pages of Descartes’s Meditations, and in many ways Clark’s book serves as a superb rumination on the sources of Descartes’s skeptical arguments. Unlike Etienne Gilson and, more recently, Richard Popkin, both of whom have done so much to open up the scholastic and early modern sources of Descartes’s skeptical thought experiments, Clark does not limit himself to philosophical lineages. Rather, he considers sources of visual skepticism that developed across an entire culture—in natural philosophy, medicine, art, religion, and literature (especially in Shakespeare’s Macbeth). Not only does the sheer volume and variety of such [End Page 103] sources help to explain Descartes’s urgent desire to overturn everything he had learned and begin again from the foundations, but it also contextualizes the specific arguments he employs. None of Descartes’s skeptical arguments were new and most were well known in the Middle Ages. What had changed over the intervening centuries, Clark contends, was how these arguments drew from...

A Complex Delight:The Secularization of the Breast, 1350–1750 (review)

Reviewed by: A Complex Delight:The Secularization of the Breast, 1350–1750 Madeline H. Caviness A Complex Delight: The Secularization of the Breast, 1350–1750. By Margaret R. Miles. (Berkeley: University of California Press. 2008. Pp. xiv, 177. $39.95. ISBN 978-0-520-25348-3.) This book is difficult to review: On the one hand, it is the work of a scholar whose earlier publications (e.g., Image as Insight[Boston, 1985] and Carnal Knowing[Boston, 1989]) were in the forefront of women's studies and feminism in the 1980s; on the other hand, it largely adheres to the epistemologies that informed feminist scholarship then, as immediately evinced by the bibliography. For one chapter in A Complex Delight, the author revises and expands her seminal article "The Virgin's One Bare Breast' (1986). Yet these retro aspects do not vitiate a present contribution that builds and enlarges upon older scholarship. As a significant departure from the author's concern with European cultural production of the Middle Ages, this work traces the reception of visual representations of the uncovered breast up to the eve of the modern era. The subject has resonance in the United States, where scandals surrounded a statue of a symbolically nude "Spirit of Justice" in Washington (covered up by then-Attorney General John Ashcroft) and a momentary "wardrobe malfunction" by the popular singer Janet Jackson in front of a football crowd. [End Page 819] The author states her aim in chapter 1: To understand, by contextualizing, her observation that "by the mid-eighteenth century, the absence of paintings of the Virgin with an exposed breast suggests it was no longer possible to signify religious subjectivity by depicting a naked breast" (p. 14). One consequence was to dramatize eroticism without nakedness, as in Bernini's famous St. Teresa in Ecstasy(1652) and similar works (figs. 5, 6). Eventually, secular discourses—medical, pornographic—took over the exposed female body. The author also lays out her theoretical framework at the outset (pp. 19–21), bravely acknowledging the problems that arise from postmodern notions of multivalence and "meaning," gender and sex, and briefly pondering the significance of a "Period Eye," and of alterity ("did people of early modern societies see what I see?"). She intends to "triangulate" (my term) the visual object between historical/contextual and postmodern/theoretical sightlines, but the chapters are weighted toward the former, following the mantra that "bodies are historically contingent." An apt summary is provided in an afterword: "I have sketched the interaction of an art historical and religious phenomenon with the intellectual, religious, social, and economic history and technology that created a Western European early modern world vastly different from its late medieval predecessor" (p. 131). The meat of the book is presented in two sections, each with two chapters: "The Religious Breast" (The Virgin and Mary Magdalen), and "The Secular Breast" (anatomy and pornography). The Magdalen is eroticized from the Renaissance on, even as she repents the sins of the flesh (sensual/sexual pleasures) that were attributed to her. The author's narrative is not disturbed by the sado-eroticism of the tortured bodies of Ss. Agatha, Barbara, and Catherine, frequently represented with their breasts about to be cut off. She does perceive tensions "between cultural and natural meanings," and between "erotic attraction and religious meaning" (p. 45). "Natural" is a freighted concept in postmodern gender theory, since it essentializes the experience of some (lactating) women. Late-medieval women's intensely erotic devotional writing may be viewed as somatized spiritual experience. The author sets the scene for her analysis of the later secular representations, by invoking the negative or conflicted attitudes to the female body in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (pp. 79–83). In the same period, artists and physicians showed an increased interest in the gynecological body, usefully summarized by the author (pp. 89–95). There were also changes in parenting, such as conflicting attitudes to wet nurses (pp. 104–06). The rise of pornography is associated with witch-hunting and the circulation of printed images (pp. 111–20). The author unquestioningly accepts the view that pornography is always objectifying and demeaning of women, denying the possibility that it might have...