Hardwick Hall Research Articles

{Not}ation: The In/Visible Visual Cultures of Musical Legibility in the English Renaissance

Legibility can seem as similar to the quintessence of musical notation, without which any attempt at musical inscription has fundamentally no purpose. Nevertheless, the visual culture of the English Renaissance is full of surviving examples that feature music books that are, fundamentally, illegible. Such instances are not useless, but rather shed vital light on the concerns of the visual culture of the English Renaissance, as well as what representation meant to the people who originally created and viewed these objects. What does it mean to include sheet music that merely looks similar to, but does not manifest, as legible notation? When does an object lose its semantic value? When do writing, notation, and signification pull lose from their seams and cease to be meaningful? Through the lens of a trio of objects (Four Children Making Music by the Master of the Countess of Warwick, an anonymous furnishing panel from Hardwick Hall, and a wall painting from High Street, Thame) that feature partially, or tantalizingly, legible musical notation, this paper seeks to explore the ramifications of visually depicting things that are and are not readable. Such objects have a graphic eloquence beyond the simple equation of sign and signified. Ultimately, entertaining the concept of illegible music notation within visual art objects as a deliberate stylistic choice, I argue that we can greatly enhance our understanding of what the notes on the page could mean in the English Renaissance.

In it for the Long Haul: Collaboration and Adaptation in Conserving a Set of Sixteenth-century Tapestries over 25 Years

ABSTRACT The conservation treatment challenges of a monumental set of sixteenth-century tapestries from Hardwick Hall, a property belonging to the National Trust (NT), UK are discussed. Estimated to take 10 years, over 20 years later the conservation of the final tapestry began in 2021. Due to their scale, with the set of 13 tapestries covering 430m2, the work was planned to be carried out both by the NT Textile Conservation Studio and Danielle Bosworth Textile Conservation, an independent studio. To enable a consistent approach, a methodology was established in 1997. As challenges arose, it was vital the two studios worked collaboratively to adapt the methodology to achieve the best possible outcomes. One of the more significant collaborations was with De Wit in Belgium, who wet cleaned this set of extremely dirty and fragile tapestries. The three largest tapestries posed new challenges but new techniques and methodologies were developed to solve them. Ultimately, good leadership and management have been essential to ensure continuity of treatment in conserving these extraordinary tapestries and to manage change while delivering a consistent outcome. The investment in their conservation treatment will extend their lives by 100 years, allowing future generations to appreciate the craftsmanship and stories contained in this remarkable set.

Climate, comfort, and architecture in Elizabethan England: an environmental study of Hardwick Hall

Hardwick Hall is one of the great houses of Elizabethan England. It has been widely researched in terms of its architectural form, construction, and iconography. This article, which builds upon earlier research, explores the internal environment of the house as it would have been experienced by its first occupants at the end of the sixteenth century. It shows that the form, construction, and internal planning of the house were consciously and precisely organised to provide a comfortable internal environment in the often severe climate of late sixteenth-century England. The climate of the ‘Little Ice Age’ is described from sources in climate history and cultural observation, and the Elizabethan concept of comfort is outlined with reference to accounts of contemporary events and to studies in costume history. The article focuses on five significant spaces within the house to reconstruct their historic environments with reference to archival sources on Hardwick and to the results of a programme of physical monitoring of the thermal environment in the house, carried out by the authors between July 2018 and August 2019. Our aim is to show how the combination of architectural history and building science allows us to reach a deeper cultural interpretation of the historic environment.

Describing the historic indoor climate: thermal monitoring at Hardwick Hall

ABSTRACT This paper presents data on air temperature and relative humidity collected at Hardwick Hall between July 2018 and August 2019. By reference to historic weather records of the climate of the Elizabethan period and consideration of the changes that have been made to the fabric of the building it is possible to recreate a picture of the environment of the house at the time of its construction. The monitored data have been input into a model of the effect of the fireplaces and windows in promoting thermal comfort in key spaces of the house. This allows us to build a more complete description of the inhabitation of the house, informed by contemporary records of building accounts and inventories. The outcome is to provide a new understanding of the environment of the house through the combination of modern building science and architectural history.

The Genealogy of a Book Collection: An Early History of the Cavendish Family’s Book Collection, 1599-1811

ABSTRACT This article analyses the early modern book collecting activities of the Devonshire branch of the Cavendish family as an example of elite cultural capital accumulation across multiple generations. The detailed records of seventeenth-century book collection by the first, second and third Earls of Devonshire and their librarian-tutor Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679), demonstrate the development of the collection at Hardwick Hall as a resource for investment information, political news, scholarly activity and children’s education. The family tradition was continued by the first Duke of Devonshire (1640–1707) who shifted the base of collection to Chatsworth House, and the bibliophile second Duke (1673–1729) who expended vast amounts on works using an array of London booksellers; as did the third Earl of Burlington (1694–1753), and the Duchess Georgiana Cavendish (1757–1806) thereafter. These collections were amalgamated at Chatsworth by the sixth Duke of Devonshire at the start of the nineteenth century, where this account concludes.

(Re)creating the Eglantine Table

Abstract The Eglantine Table at Hardwick Hall (c.1568) was probably crafted to commemorate marriages made between the Hardwick-Cavendish and Talbot families. In addition to various heraldic symbols, the table’s friezes depict gaming paraphernalia, thirteen musical instruments, and several music books, including a stacked score of a devotional song by Thomas Tallis: ‘O Lord, in thee is all my trust’. While there is thorough existing scholarship on what the Eglantine Table depicts, this article explores what can be inferred about the contemporary value of musical recreation from how meaning was produced in the table’s iconography using a ‘material approach’ to music as both an object and also a sounding body. This article demonstrates why recreation, including music-making, is defined most prominently by why people choose to engage in it and the human actions that make recreation happen. Viewed in this fresh light, the Eglantine Table, including its musical iconography and notation, offers insight into the meaning of musical recreation and the values that shaped domestic interiors, objects and social bonds in an early modern English aristocratic home.

What we mean when we talk about style: the ‘Redolent’ Eglantine Table (c.1568)

Created c.1568 to commemorate a trio of dynastic marriages between the Cavendishes and the Talbots, the ‘Aeglentyne’ Table stands in the High Great Chamber at Hardwick Hall, Derbyshire. Featuring an intricate three-panelled motif of musical instruments, gaming paraphernalia, and intertwining flowers borrowed from various continental prints, it has long been held as a masterpiece of English furniture. However, when approached through a traditional stylistic analysis, based upon the identification of tropes and features, the Eglantine Table runs the risk of falling under the category of ‘bad’ style: it is paratactic; it is epideictic. Such a judgement utterly misses the point of the Eglantine Table, and its visual strategies. ‘Style’ has become a ubiquitous term for the analysis of the things of visual culture. It allows the historian of visual culture to categorize into a shorthand that belies the sheer variety of the objects of study. The work of Willibald Sauerländer, amongst others, has long since argued for a deeper reflection on ‘style’ and a shift away from the ‘sheer abysmal vagueness’ of stylistic analysis. This paper seeks to respond to Sauerländer’s call by providing a sensitive and illuminating analysis of the style(s) of the Eglantine Table.

Supplying the kitchens of the earls of devonshire in the mid-17th century

The country house has long been seen as a space of luxury consumption. Large houses are characterised as enclaves of London, spending all their money in capital, rather than buying goods locally. They sapped wealth from the local area rather than stimulating economic activity. This paper analyses data from highly detailed account books which record the kitchen expenditure at Chatsworth and Hardwick Hall in the years 1658-1660 to understand how the kitchens of the Earls of Devonshire were supplied. In discussing the ways in which the household sourced foodstuffs and how much they spent doing so, this paper challenges the prevailing idea that houses are economic leeches on the local area. The Devonshires spent a vast sum of money on food locally; helping to create communities of commerce in the local area and to fuel a vibrant and various grocery trade.

Agnès Lafont (ed.), Shakespeare’s Erotic Mythology and Ovidian Renaissance Culture

THIS essay collection explores Shakespeare’s Ovidian and erotic subject matter with an eye to ‘classical and continental aesthetic contexts’, examining ‘how Shakespeare screens and sifts erotic mythology to offer personal readings of the classical tales’ (1; 3). The studies included in this volume draw on ‘exchanges between different aesthetic media’, from visual depictions of erotic myth in fountains, paintings, and needlework to dramatic adaptations of classical material by Marlowe and Shakespeare (7). The volume thus builds on a substantial corpus of work on the reception of Ovid and erotic mythology in the Renaissance, including the seminal work by Jonathan Bate, and more recent studies and essay collections prepared by Liz Oakley-Brown, Goran V. Stanivukovic, and A. B. Taylor.1 The chapters included in this volume offer a rich variety of approaches and interpretive frameworks. With the close attention it pays to lexical nuance, Marguerite Tassi’s essay on Macbeth makes for persuasive and engaging reading. Building on Macduff’s description of Duncan’s corpse as ‘a new Gorgon’ (2.3.66), Tassi understands the play as a reworking of the Gorgon myth, whose gaze transfixes and enraptures characters and audience alike. Here the textual and historical evidence is tightly packed and there is rarely a sentence that does not pull its argumentative weight. The editor too appears to appreciate that this is a stand-out chapter, awarding it a subsection of its very own (‘Deadly Rapture’). Ilaria Andreoli’s piece on ‘Ovid’s Meta-metamorphosis’, which focuses on the woodcuts and illustrations which furnished early editions of the Metamorphoses, offers some thoughtful insights into the censorship and reproduction of such material. From the vignettes of the 1497 Giunta edition to the engravings by Pieter de Jode of 1606, Andreoli deftly guides the reader through these visual responses to Ovidian myth across the Renaissance. François Laroque’s chapter on ‘Erotic Fancy/Fantasy’ considers Shakespeare’s excitement and subsequent frustration of the erotic in his audience. Laroque produces some detailed close-readings of Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and Antony and Cleopatra, fruitfully comparing the prologue from Henry V to the ‘rhetorical strategy’ at work in Shakespeare’s flirtation with sexual fantasy (62). The volume includes in addition a series of exquisite plates, from the plasterwork frieze of Diana, the Huntress at Hardwick Hall to Andrea Del Sarto’s Saint John the Baptist, allowing the reader to engage with some of the most important visual responses to Ovidian myth highlighted by this collection.

The Sheffield portrait types, their Catholic purposes, and Mary Queen of Scots’s tomb

The tomb of Mary Queen of Scots is widely recognized as one of the most important visual symbols of dynastic power that can still be viewed in Britain today. Although art historians had originally regarded the strongly Catholic depiction of Mary in captivity, the so-called Sheffield portrait, as the model for the effigy, for more than a century the consensus is that it was based on one of Nicholas Hilliard’s miniature portraits. In this essay a study of the images as well as related documents in the exchequer and Hardwick Hall accounts reestablishes that the Sheffield type was indeed the specific model for the tomb. This does more than simply settle a long-standing question. It also opens the way for an exploration of the content of this most popular portrait of Mary, which was fraught with significance not only for King James VI, Mary’s son, but also the crypto-Catholic nobleman Henry Howard, first earl of Northampton, who was in charge of the tomb’s completion.

Modernity Beyond the West: A Review of Kathleen James-Chakraborty’s Architecture Since 1400

With Architecture Since 1400 another volume has been added to the list of authoritative surveys of architectural history published in recent years. With 30 bit-like chapters and some 300 illustrations, this book is an ambitious attempt to write a global history of architecture that focuses on the arrival of modernity. The central idea of this survey is the shift away from the Weberian approach that views modernization as emanating from the West. Instead, in this book modern architecture is rewritten according to a global approach that allows for multiple perspectives in a multipolar world. This decentring approach is also pivotal for other parts of the book. For example, there is the much-needed effort to include women in the canon. In addition, the author exchanges a stylistic history for a social history and combines this with a narrative that maps the agents of the built environment, thus complementing the narrative of the genius-architect with that of the role played by clients, patrons and critics. In this way, Lina Bo Bardi or Zaha Hadid not only take their place next to Le Corbusier or Brunelleschi, but in addition Eleanor of Toledo is mentioned as an influential sixteenth-century ruler next to her husband Cosimo I, and Hardwick Hall in England is now considered the outcome of the cooperation between the architect Robert Smythson and the landowner Bess of Hardwick.

A Review of Architecture and Climate: An Environmental History of British Architecture, 1600–2000

Chronologically arranged in eight essays dealing each with a topical chapter of British architectural history, ranging from the Smythson of Hardwick Hall fame to his twentieth century namesakes, Alison and Peter, the book’s aim is to trace a common line of architecture’s adaptation to the British climate throughout the period examined. The central argument is that factors such as location, light and orientation played a fundamental part in the planning of all the examples selected for discussion.

Old Hardwick Hall

The ruined shell of Old Hardwick Hall stands just to the south of the house which first supplemented and eventually replaced it, Hardwick Hall, built by Elizabeth, Countess of Shrewsbury (known as Bess of Hardwick), from 1590. The history of the Old Hall was published in 1913. Although the building accounts were known at that time, and an inventory of 1601 was available, recent research has included dendrochronology and remote-sensing ground survey; and the study of inventories has refined historians’ understanding of how rooms were used.This article profits from modern research to propose a new chronology of the surviving fabric of Old Hardwick Hall. Its west end incorporates the house in which Bess had been born in 1527, which may have been in existence since c.1375. Bess’s brother had owned it since 1547, and had altered it in the 1560s and 1570s. When she bought it from him in 1583 it had a great hall, which this article suggests was at right angles to the present one, and a detached kitchen. More buildings stood east of it at a slight angle. Bess began building in 1587, linking the medieval house and one of the angled buildings east of it. This article shows that she built a gallery, plastered in 1588, at third-floor level on top of the latter, and a richly decorated room called the Forest Great Chamber adjacent to it in 1589. Between 1591 and 1597 she rearranged the medieval house, now the west end of Old Hardwick Hall. She built a buttery and pantry west of the great hall, another gallery (the Little Gallery), and a second richly ornamented room, called the Hill Great Chamber, on the third floor, reached by stairs which were built in 1596. After her death the east end was rebuilt (in 1620), and two lodges were added north of the house (after 1628).

The Gideon Tapestries at Hardwick Hall

This article draws on new research, documentary evidence, and technical analysis to provide a detailed account of the Gideon tapestries at Hardwick Hall. The tapestries are dated 1578 and consist of thirteen panels, each nearly 20 feet high and over 230 feet in total length. They were woven for Sir Christopher Hatton, and after his death in 1591 were bought by the Countess of Shrewsbury and installed at Hardwick Hall. The tapestries are based on an earlier set woven for Cosimo I de’ Medici in Brussels, but the designs are significantly expanded. The tapestries were made in Oudenaarde, confirmed by a newly discovered maker’s mark. Recent conservation has revealed the use of paint on the front of the tapestries, and poor-quality dyestuffs that have faded. Both features can be linked to documented workshop practices in Oudenaarde. The imagery of the tapestries also engages in unexpected ways with Reformation thinking on idolatry.

Women's Wealth and Women's Writing in Early Modern England: 'Little Legacies' and the Materials of Motherhood (review)

Reviewed by: Women's Wealth and Women's Writing in Early Modern England: 'Little Legacies' and the Materials of Motherhood Sarah C. E. Ross Mazzola, Elizabeth, Women's Wealth and Women's Writing in Early Modern England: 'Little Legacies' and the Materials of Motherhood, Aldershot, Ashgate, 2009; hardback; pp. xii, 126; 14 b/w illustrations; R.R.P. €50.00; ISBN 9780754666639. This book is a study of 'the ways that women's writings in the early modern period concern their wealth', with wealth defined as women's kinship ties and influence, moveables and other property, and investments (p. 3). Elizabeth Mazzola is most interested in how women's writings and other material belongings and productions describe, foster and reproduce relationships between women in Early Modern England. So she explores, for example, the robes of state worn by Mary Tudor and her half-sister Elizabeth at their coronations, and the tapestries produced by Mary Stuart in conjunction with Bess of Hardwick, and sold off in 1610 by Arbella Stuart, as well as Elizabeth I's The Miroir or Glasse of the Synneful Soul, and Mary Stuart's casket sonnets. Mazzola's focus on writing as one of several kinds of material legacies [End Page 231] of women in the period is a fertile one, and enables a series of chapters on selected artefacts of four women: Elizabeth I; Mary Stuart (Queen of Scots); Elizabeth Talbot, Countess of Shrewsbury (Bess of Hardwick); and Arbella Stuart. These four kinswomen are well-chosen and intriguingly interrelated, all jostling around the English throne. Bess acted as keeper at Hardwick Hall to Mary Stuart and later to her grand-daughter (and Mary Stuart's niece) Arbella, each of her charges potential and potentially dangerous heiresses to Elizabeth. Mazzola demonstrates convincingly that the women's 'entanglements' (p. 7), as evinced in their material productions and legacies, are potent expressions of gendered subjectivity and familial and political cultures. Chapter 1 is described as being on women's education, although its focus is on Elizabeth's translation of Marguerite de Navarre's Miroir, presented by the eleven-year-old princess to Katherine Parr. Chapter 2 explores the state robes worn by Mary Tudor and by her sister Elizabeth on their coronations, unpicking with care the signifiers of gender, family and state involved in the sartorial choices of a woman being crowned as monarch. Elizabeth's Catholic and Scottish cousin, Mary Stuart, is the focus of Chapter 4, which reads the Queen of Scots' embroidered tapestries alongside the so-called casket sonnets that were used to incriminate Mary in the murder of her second husband, Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley. Chapter 4 also examines the letters written by Arbella Stuart during her detention by Bess, while Chapter 5 focuses on Arbella's sale in 1610 of Mary Stuart's needlework panels, again teasing out the career of the redoubtable Bess herself. Each chapter is like a detail picked out of the tapestry of the four women's interwoven lives. But as these details accumulate, Mazzola's insistence on reading the women as 'mothers' and their artefacts as 'mother's legacies', the approach signalled in her subtitle, sits uneasily over them. Elizabeth I and Arbella Stuart were never mothers, and maternity does not seem to be the strongest connection between these four subjects, even if maternity is read, via Wendy Wall, as a metaphorical 'language of legacy' (p. 43). It is also unlikely that these elite women were representative of 'what other early modern mothers and daughters were trying to achieve with each other' (p. 5), a claim which could only be established through exploration of women across a much wider range of classes and with very different material lives. Mazzola's subjects emerge as women of exceptional familial and dynastic standing, revealing far more about how 'aristocratic families were also constructs underwritten by the state' (p. 75), and about the status of women and their artefacts within [End Page 232] these aristocratic constructs, than they do about maternity or maternal legacies. Mazzola uses Virginia Woolf's tenet that daughters think back through their mothers to define, not only their own critical practice, but the interrelationships between Early Modern women themselves...

"The Innocent Victim: A Franco-American Civil War Novel." ed. by Adélard Lambert (review)

Book Reviews207 Reformation, covering such diverse topics as Egyptian justice, Constantine, Arianism, Germanic invasions, the Crusades and Martin Luther. Its discursive form (a dialogue between the interlocutors Primus and Secundus) and its mixed genre place it in classical and humanistic traditions, recalling such authors as Thucydides, Horace and Erasmus. A compelling argument is made for the poem as both a clarification ofHobbes's ecclesiology and a literary undertaking. The questions which are brought to fore include Hobbes's place in the humanist and Latin poetic traditions, his fear of the charge of heresy, his connections with Continental thinkers such as Gassendi and Lorenzo Valla and his critique ofthe Nicene Creed. This edition offers a multitude of significant information; all told, the support material amounts to over 400 pages. The introductory chapters help to elucidate a complicated context, and the index ofproper names serves as a guide to a multifaceted text. A first appendix provides a survey of the manuscripts and printed editions while a second offers the entries in the Hardwick Hall Library, a collection which Hobbes himself helped to collect and document. The material is rounded out by extensive bibliographical references and a glossary of pertinent proper names. The remainder of the volume contains the Latin text with a facing English translation, extensive footnotes, manuscript variants and the 1 688 glossary and preface. The translation is meticulously researched and, although there might be the occasional disagreement as to the use of a term, this does not detract from an excellent presentation of Hobbes's expression. Scholars might disagree on such questions as Hobbes's sources, his reaction to Platonism or his historical intentions, but the particulars presented in this edition provide ample proof of the importance of this text and its archeology and also serve to illustrate the necessity for further research. Given the complexity of the text and its context, one could wish for a slightly more approachable style in the introductory materials, and those unfamiliar with such elements as Hobbes's Epicureanism and Erastianism would do well to begin with more general readings on the religious and political situation in Europe over the course of his life. However, this density and the occasional typographical error do not take away from the importance of the scholarship. A monumental effort, the volume serves as a remedy to a regrettable omission and is an essential addition to Hobbesian scholarship. Dorothy StegmanBall State University Lambert, Adélard. "The Innocent Victim: A Franco-American Civil War Novel." Ed. and trans. Margaret S. Langford in collaboration with Claire Quintal. Bennington, VT: Images from the Past, 2008. Pp [i]-xxviii; 116. ISBN 1-884592-50-3 (Paper). ISBN 978-1-884592-50-8. $15.95 (Paper). L 'Innocente victime is Adélard Lambert's (1867-1946) melodramatic tale of French Canadian immigration to the United States. Originally serialized in Le 208Women in French Studies Droit (an Ottawa daily) in 1936, Lambert's text is steeped in the ideology of French Canadian cultural conservation, known as la survivance. Set in 1 864, the story begins in the small village St. Pauvret, Quebec and follows one family's emigration to Manchester, NH and Lowell, MA. Lambert's account of trickery, forced enlistment into the Union Army, abduction, and murder reveals the dangers of easy money enticements just across the border. Margaret Langford's translation of this roman à thèse stays close to the original language, capturing its journalistic prose. In his foreword, Robert Perreault, a historian of Manchester, NH's Franco-American community, describes the unsolved murder case that provided the inspiration for Lambert's story. Langford's introduction offers a brief biographical sketch of Lambert, who, like many French Canadians moved back and forth across the border many times. She also outlines his development into a well-known expert of French Canadian folklore and collaboration with Marius Barbeau, a pioneer in French Canadian ethnography. The well-researched footnotes annotating the text clarify historical allusions and situate the cultural references. The two appendices describe French Canadian working life and French Canadian folksongs. Langford ends her text with a thorough bibliography ofworks on Franco Americans. Margaret Langford's volume offers a welcome addition to the growing collection...

Historia Ecclesiastica by Thomas Hobbes (review)

206Women in French Studies thematic and aesthetic complexity, and this despite the upsurge of scientific theories insisting on the biological and intellectual inferiority of women, and attendant backlash against creative women, discussed by Catherine Perry in her richly textured introduction to the period. Both Shapiro's bio-bibliographical notices and texts selected for the poets included in this section flesh out the stunning array of poetic works by women in modern France. For expert readers, however, the absence of Malvina Blanchecotte, Louisa Siefert and Marie Krysinska from the nineteenth century is glaring and the treatment of Louise Ackermann not sufficiently robust to transmit for posterity her strikingly poetic engagement with science. Readers may challenge for various reasons Shapiro's inclusion or exclusion ofparticular poets to represent women's poetic achievements in a given century. One may also question why, in a collection aiming to redress women's poetic history, their accomplishments are often, though not exclusively, situated in relation to their male counterparts, eclipsing resonant poetic developments by women across the centuries. Whether expert or amateur, readers will recognize without question the breadth and depth of Shapiro's superb volume, which offers stirring proof of the exceptional legacy of nearly sixty women whose poetic influence shall continue to shape the way we read and write French literary history. Adrianna M. PaliyenkoColby College Hobbes, Thomas. Historia Ecclesiastica. Ed. and Trans. Patricia Springborg, Patricia Stablein and Paul Wilson. Paris: Honoré Champion, 2008. Pp 729. ISBN 978-2-7453-1577-9. 130€ (Cloth). Thomas Hobbes's ecclesiology has been eclipsed by the magnitude of his political philosophy in his Leviathan and by censorship of his criticism of papal and episcopal power. Published posthumously, his elegiac Latin poem Historia Ecclesiastica has been given little critical attention. An Italian translation of the work was published in 1988 and a French translation is currently in progress, but this edition is the first English translation of an essential part of the Hobbesian corpus. It contributes to Hobbes's principal concerns of the state and civil order. An understanding of this poem and its political, poetical and religious contexts illuminates heretofore unexamined areas of Hobbes's thought. An extensive task with acknowledged contributions from several scholars, the edition gives an excellent account of the poem's composition and publication as well as its reception and historical context. What comes through is Hobbes's preoccupation with heresy and historiography. The ambiguous poem serves as a connection between several other works and can be seen as a summary of the philosopher's thoughts on the history of Christianity and the struggle between ecclesiastical and political authority. The poem details the relationship between Christianity and the rise of European states up to the Book Reviews207 Reformation, covering such diverse topics as Egyptian justice, Constantine, Arianism, Germanic invasions, the Crusades and Martin Luther. Its discursive form (a dialogue between the interlocutors Primus and Secundus) and its mixed genre place it in classical and humanistic traditions, recalling such authors as Thucydides, Horace and Erasmus. A compelling argument is made for the poem as both a clarification ofHobbes's ecclesiology and a literary undertaking. The questions which are brought to fore include Hobbes's place in the humanist and Latin poetic traditions, his fear of the charge of heresy, his connections with Continental thinkers such as Gassendi and Lorenzo Valla and his critique ofthe Nicene Creed. This edition offers a multitude of significant information; all told, the support material amounts to over 400 pages. The introductory chapters help to elucidate a complicated context, and the index ofproper names serves as a guide to a multifaceted text. A first appendix provides a survey of the manuscripts and printed editions while a second offers the entries in the Hardwick Hall Library, a collection which Hobbes himself helped to collect and document. The material is rounded out by extensive bibliographical references and a glossary of pertinent proper names. The remainder of the volume contains the Latin text with a facing English translation, extensive footnotes, manuscript variants and the 1 688 glossary and preface. The translation is meticulously researched and, although there might be the occasional disagreement as to the use of a term, this does not detract...

Michael Saenger. The Commodification of Textual Engagements in the English Renaissance. Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing Company, 2006. xii + 170 pp. index. illus. bibl. $89.95. ISBN: 0-7546-5413-3.

“English translations of theMetamorphoses are the ‘very life of difference’” (193). This diverseness would not matter if the case studies were more compelling and sharply etched. Oakley-Brown’s appetite for unfamiliar material is admirable; the chapter on Caxton, whose prose Metamorphoses has yet to be edited in its entirety, is especially welcome. The chapter on women Ovidians is valuable for dramatizing their notable scarcity in this patch of English literary history and for the alertness with which the exceptions have been located; they include three specimens of needlework from Hardwick Hall. Brought into the light, though, they look like modest discoveries. (As women coming to grips with suspect classical texts, these four pale beside Lucy Hutchinson translating the great atheist Lucretius.) A deeper kind of problem is an impressionistic laxness in argumentation, which keeps putting weight on shimmery evidence — for instance, to make a climactic claim about Elizabeth Talbot’s Phaeton panel: “Instead of simply depicting women in a subordinate position, Talbot’s Ovidian translation implicitly promotes their textual agency” (131). Implication here has to be routed through Ovid and Philip Hardie; the female figures in the panel are neither writing nor weaving. In discussing Sandys, a certain amount is made of his adoption of the trope of Charles and Henrietta Maria as a Neoplatonic hermaphrodite. A quotation from Graham Parry is misleadingly used to make this trope sound like the “prevailing image” in royalist ideology (74); finding it in Sandys (to set up a supposedly telling contrast with a distressing visual representation of the Ovidian myth in the illustration to book 4) requires combining passages from two panegyrics, one in which Charles is compared to, among other gods, Mercury (Hermes), and one in which his wife is called “Queen of love” (Aphrodite). It is hard to have confidence in such legerdemain once you start noticing it. Production values are not commensurate with the purchase price. The textile panels are unattractively reproduced; one is available only on the dustjacket. A page break appears to have hiccupped onto p. 98. No one stopped Smart Quote software from turning ’tis into ‘tis, or locus amoenus from transgendering into locus amoena.

Liz Oakley-Brown. Ovid and the Cultural Politics of Translation in Early Modern England. Studies in European Cultural Transition 34. Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing Company, 2006. viii + 222 pp. index. illus. bibl. $94.95. ISBN: 0-7546-5155-X..

“English translations of theMetamorphoses are the ‘very life of difference’” (193). This diverseness would not matter if the case studies were more compelling and sharply etched. Oakley-Brown’s appetite for unfamiliar material is admirable; the chapter on Caxton, whose prose Metamorphoses has yet to be edited in its entirety, is especially welcome. The chapter on women Ovidians is valuable for dramatizing their notable scarcity in this patch of English literary history and for the alertness with which the exceptions have been located; they include three specimens of needlework from Hardwick Hall. Brought into the light, though, they look like modest discoveries. (As women coming to grips with suspect classical texts, these four pale beside Lucy Hutchinson translating the great atheist Lucretius.) A deeper kind of problem is an impressionistic laxness in argumentation, which keeps putting weight on shimmery evidence — for instance, to make a climactic claim about Elizabeth Talbot’s Phaeton panel: “Instead of simply depicting women in a subordinate position, Talbot’s Ovidian translation implicitly promotes their textual agency” (131). Implication here has to be routed through Ovid and Philip Hardie; the female figures in the panel are neither writing nor weaving. In discussing Sandys, a certain amount is made of his adoption of the trope of Charles and Henrietta Maria as a Neoplatonic hermaphrodite. A quotation from Graham Parry is misleadingly used to make this trope sound like the “prevailing image” in royalist ideology (74); finding it in Sandys (to set up a supposedly telling contrast with a distressing visual representation of the Ovidian myth in the illustration to book 4) requires combining passages from two panegyrics, one in which Charles is compared to, among other gods, Mercury (Hermes), and one in which his wife is called “Queen of love” (Aphrodite). It is hard to have confidence in such legerdemain once you start noticing it. Production values are not commensurate with the purchase price. The textile panels are unattractively reproduced; one is available only on the dustjacket. A page break appears to have hiccupped onto p. 98. No one stopped Smart Quote software from turning ’tis into ‘tis, or locus amoenus from transgendering into locus amoena.

The Development of the Kitchen in the English Country House

The purpose of this paper is to identify, over a period of 500 years of English history, the architectural development of the kitchen in the English country house. Seven periods of architectural design; Medieval, Elizabethan, Restoration, Palladian, Neo-Classical, Gothic and Picturesque, are included in this study. Each period has been assigned an appropriate English country house beginning with Bodiam Castle in 1315 and ending with Cragside House in 1884. The review of each house includes, where appropriate, a discussion of the role of the kitchen in the overall architectural design of the house, period design influences on the determination of the kitchen location and architectural changes in the kitchen that are a reflection of social change occurring during the specified period. Architectural periods and houses are presented in the following order: •Period I Medieval: Bodiam Castle, 1385 and Knole House, 1456 •Period II Elizabethan: Hardwick Hall, 1597 •Period III Restoration: Belton House, 1684 •Period IV Palladian: Holkham Hall, 1734 •Period V Neo-Classical: Kedelston Hall, 1763 •Period VI Gothic: Ashridge, 1808-1817 •Period VII Picturesque: Cragside House, 1864-1870