271 which Andrew Elfenbein has built his theory of links between representations of queerness and genius. Ruth Smith discovers further evidence of Handel’s interest in romantic male friendships in his collaboration with Charles Jennens on Saul. Revisiting accusations of queerness at court, Ruth Herman examines the favorites of Queen Anne and King William III through the lens of the patronage system and is convinced that the latter, but not the former, engaged in physical same-sex relationships. Queer spaces emerge in various writing genres. The literature of companionate marriage even harbored the possibility for romantic bonds between women, as Chris Roulston reveals in her analysis of ménages à trois. The editors’ essays investigate the sexual resonances of oriental fantasies, each encountering circumcision as a metonym for foreignness that carried associations with both sexual deviancy and castration of British manhood. Mr. Mounsey looks beyond the Christian moralizing of Penelope Aubin’s novels to the conversion panic and its attendant disorderly desires in women and men that her seductive Turks instigate. Ms. Gonda tries to make sense of the homoerotic subtext in the pamphlet literature swirling around the Jewish Naturalization Act of 1753 depicting lustful Jews, Gentiles unmanned by exposure of their circumcised penises, and, unprecedentedly, the Gentile who made off with these foreskins to increase his sexual potency. The varieties of homoeroticism depicted in eighteenth-century sources soundly demonstrate that same-sex sexuality cannot be contained within modern identity labels. The essays are listed in Contents, p. 307. Marilyn Morris University of North Texas ALEXANDER WELSH. What Is Honor? A Question of Moral Imperatives. New Haven: Yale, 2008. Pp. xxii ⫹ 228. $38. Tracing its appearance from Homer to Aristotle and Cicero, Mr. Welsh slices and dices the concept of honor as moral recognition in typical philosophical fashion, passing through a series of dichotomies that bring him to his point: honor is connected to respect, respect to self-respect, and self-respect to identity. Respect, in turn, is always a reflection of one’s position in society—hence honor is not self-referential but the product of a determinate group: ‘‘selfrespect , no matter how sized, is always already respect.’’ While Mr. Welsh derives his concepts from modern sociology , anthropology, and psychology, he pays ample tribute along the way to eighteenth-century thinkers, Locke and Adam Smith, in particular, as precursors of Rousseau and Kant. Two specific problems frame his discussion. First, what is the relationship of honor to hierarchy and obedience? Second, how is an ethics of obedience reconcilable with independent identity? For Aristotle, the answer to both problems is to link honor with good actions , and, since good actions seem to rely on resources, the word ‘‘noble’’ as opposed to ‘‘base’’ comes into play. Moreover, good actions are those taken for their own sake, without regard to consequences or utilitarian purposes: ‘‘The identity, indeed the character, of the doer is the focus of attention.’’ Thus, Aristotle also argues, the loss of respect 272 (honor) ‘‘affects one’s identity, the sense of who one is.’’ From Aristotle to modern thinkers, it seems clear that ‘‘we cannot, if left each to his own devices, reach a secure estimate of our own moral character. . . . The sense of one’s own worth is, for human beings, a group accomplishment .’’ Cicero’s contribution to this discussion is primarily to reinforce the importance of public approval: ‘‘individual moral agents [do not] determine on their own what is an end in itself. By custom and habit of respect the group to which the individual belongs or aspires provides rules, and an ongoing process of respect may modify as well as confirm these.’’ This very brief summary of Mr. Welsh’s ruminations on honor will surely awaken in eighteenth-century scholars applications to some familiar enterprises in its poetry, drama, and fiction— and, of course, its moral philosophizing. And indeed, after two intervening chapters on Shakespearean honor, and an interlude on Mandeville and Montesquieu, Mr. Welsh turns to the eighteenthcentury novel. If Locke, perhaps reluctantly , edged his world a bit closer to the notion that honor, along with its determinants , virtue and vice, were all socially constructed entities, Mandeville wholeheartedly embraced that notion; honor and virtue are...
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Sep 15, 2014
Vera Cuntz-Leng 
