REVIEWS 227 death for Venetians. Paster’s essay considers the materiality of bodily waste in relation to John Harington’s Metamorphosis of Ajax and links this materiality to wavering sixteenth-century discourses on the control of the body, especially the gendered female body. Unfortunately, and in contrast to the other authors in this volume, Paster seems to have felt that her topic necessitated a language so obscure as to be disturbing. In the volume’s last historical article, R. Malcolm Smuts examines the ways in which Tudor and early Stuart writers discussed material culture in order to express concerns about the actions of the landed elite, and points out that the situation cannot be described solely as a dissemination of metropolitan ideas outward to the rural environment—reserves of conservatism and loci of change were to be found in both places. Smuts does admirably what Bruster calls for in his concluding essay on the new materialism: he returns to the materialism of the English Renaissance itself, and by discovering how Renaissance writers themselves perceived objects, he finds partial answers to the questions that we, in a post-Marx era perhaps “uncommitted to the historical originality of late capitalism,”34 still must ask about the material roots of inequality. MAYA STANFIELD-MAZZI, Art History, UCLA Manual Robbins, Collapse of the Bronze Age: The Story of Greece, Troy, Israel, Egypt, and the Peoples of the Sea (Author’s Choice Press 2001) 433 pp., ref., ill. As the title indicates, this book mainly concerns itself with the eastern Mediterranean region during the period from about 1500 to 1000 B.C.E., and attempts to elucidate the various factors involved in the fall of so many important civilizations in such a short period of time. Robbins quotes from Richard D. Barnett’s The Sea Peoples (1975) in his preface: “If we wish to obtain a picture of this period of sudden decline and collapse, we have to be content to pick our way through a bewildering tangle of evidence, much of it highly fragmentary, much of it highly conjectural and insecure.” This is exactly what the author proceeds to do, and does quite well. Robbins does not follow his predecessors in basing a study for the period on one particular region and then using that region to help better explain the rest of the world. Instead, he has taken the daunting task of studying the interrelated polities of the period as a whole. As a result, his results are more authoritative than any previous regional study, and more farreaching . As an example, one might examine his approach to the problem of the Peoples of the Sea, a group of separate tribes or cultures who appeared together toward the end of the Bronze Age and twice attacked Egypt without much success . It has for long been assumed that they were able to work together because they came from the same area, and he makes the same assumption based on their ease of unity. However, he studies their origins by taking the various theories for each tribe and treating them separately. As he discusses each one, the author meticulously and impartially presents the evidence for the points of ori34 On 226, Bruster cites Fredric Jameson, “Radicalizing Radical Shakespeare: The Permanent Revolution in Shakespeare Studies,” in Ivo Kamps, ed., Materialist Shakespeare: A History (London 1995) 328. REVIEWS 228 gin and gives all the regions which match what Egyptian pictures and hieroglyphic spellings tell us and what other region’s historical records indicate may have produced raiders or may have been home to tribes with the traits the Egyptians indicated. Then, he takes all the resulting possibilities. When the entire process has been finished, he takes the options for each individual study and cross-references them with others to show where the most likely general region of origin was for these people. The idea is brilliant in its simplicity, and could only be done properly by someone intimately knowledgeable about the history of the entire Middle East. His review of the histories of the Egyptians and Hittites during this period serves to supplement his findings by identifying key problem areas which were only under nominal control and could...