1076 Reviews thinking of the relation between words and things in the Renaissance as a possible topic, as well as for putting together a team that could engage with the subject in an interesting and scholarly way. The resulting volume consists of fifteenpapers, one in French, four in German, and ten in English, by scholars in fields that include English literature and the history of philosophy, language, religion, and science. The Renaissance is defined broadly to include the intellectual history of most of Europe between 1450 and 1650, the end of the period being marked by Grotius, Hobbes, and the logic of Port-Royal. Among the disciplines with a place in the Renaissance university, logic, rhetoric, theology (including German Protestant theo? logy), law, medicine, and astronomy receive particular attention. The main themes discussed by contributors include nominalism, scepticism, fiction, metaphor, proof, exempla, signs, and interpretation. As for individual thinkers, it is no surprise to find that the ideas of Aristotle and Plato and their commentators receive more attention than those of anyone else, followed by Cicero, Aquinas, and, in the Renaissance itself, by Valla, Ficino, Erasmus, and Bacon. It is a pity, though, that the editors did not wish or were unable to include a paper on Comenius, whose views on education paid so much attention to the relation between res et verba. The focus of most contributions is on the sources, leaving disagreements with colleagues implicit rather than explicit, but Anna De Pace defines her interpretation of Copernicus's view of the discipline of astronomy against that of Nicholas Jardine, while Brian Vickers launches a frontal assault on Richard Waswo and other schol? ars who view the Renaissance, he suggests, through twentieth-century spectacles. It would be going too far to speak of a consensus among the contributors, but the thrust of the volume is to emphasize the importance and even the continuity of the classical tradition until the middle of the seventeenth century. Readers of The Modern Language Review will find much to interest them here. All the contributions are concerned with linguistic problems and three (Ullrich Langer, Marie-Luce Demonet, and Brian Vickers) with literature. A number of contributions are rather technical, written for specialists not so much in the intellectual history of the Renaissance as in the history of specific disciplines. However, a few chapters deserve to be singled out because they are particularly ambitious, accessible, or original. Ian Maclean on legal fictions and Nancy Siraisi on the problem of the 'symptom' in medicine make their points both intelligible and interesting to lay readers. MarieLuce Demonet draws on the history of logic but focuses on what she calls 'the status of literary objects' in the Renaissance. In a wide-ranging contribution that might have served to open the volume, Brian Vickers focuses on concepts as an indispensable middle term between words and things. Emmanuel College, Cambridge Peter Burke Changing Ideas, Changing Texts: First-Person Novels in theEarly Modern Period. By Reinhard Uhrig. (Mikrokosmos: Beitrage zur Literaturwissenschaft und Bedeutungsforschung , 60) Frankfurt a.M., Berlin, and Bern: Lang. 2001. 286 pp. ?29. ISBN 3-631-36919-0 (pbk). This study breaks new ground, but its very range may limit its appeal in much ofthe English-speaking world. Uhrig's literary awareness and command of his subject are cosmopolitan in the best sense of that term, but these qualities may not be appreciated in all quarters. First and foremost one is struck by his appreciative insistence on the intrinsic value of differenteditions of the specific works he discusses and by his recognition of the crucial, yet often underrated or even disregarded, role played by translations in the evolution and spread of what is and always was an interna? tional phenomenon. This corpus of texts, as Chapter 2 of his study demonstrates, MLRy 98.4, 2003 1077 was constantly in a state of textual flux as for one reason or another the texts were manipulated by generations of editors, publishers, adapters, and translators. One ex? ample of central importance in this wide-ranging study is the Golden Ass of Apuleius, another, the Confessions of Augustine: unlikely bedfellows, one might think, though not when it comes to the 'interrelatedness of autobiography...