Seventeenth-century Collection Research Articles

The Library of Duke Wilhelm IV of Sachsen-Weimar and the Provenance of Fruchtbringende Gesellschaft Publications in the Herzogin Anna Amalia Bibliothek

Abstract In 2004, fire struck the Herzogin Anna Amalia Bibliothek (HAAB), particularly affecting its seventeenth-century collections, among them rich holdings of works associated with the Fruchtbringende Gesellschaft (Fruitbearing Society), the foremost seventeenth-century German cultural society. Scholars and librarians feared that unique copies of titles that Society members deposited or once owned, which represent valuable source material relating to early modern German and European thought and culture, were lost or damaged in the fire. This article examines the development and dispersal of the library of the second head of the Society, Duke Wilhelm IV of Sachsen-Weimar, and analyzes its Society connections and context, including the handling of deposit copies members sent to the Erzschrein, or Society archive. This library, as one of the predecessor libraries to the Ducal Library and ultimately the HAAB in Weimar, is a channel through which unique copies of Society works may have reached the HAAB. Through analysis of archival sources related to Wilhelm’s library and the Society in Weimar, application of bibliographic methods, and physical inspection of HAAB copies of Society titles for evidence of provenance, this article investigates their fate from a qualitative perspective in the wake of the library fire.

The Cambridge Companion to the Apostolic Fathers. Edited by Michael Bird and Scott Harrower

With a few exceptions, this is an excellent addition to the Cambridge Companions series, which according to the website furnishes ‘authoritative guides, written by leading experts, offering lively, accessible introductions to major writers, artists, philosophers, topics, and periods’. Accordingly, the volume does not intend to break new ground, but to orient readers to the Apostolic Fathers. It is divided into two parts. Following an introduction, the first nine chapters present focused essays on themes relating to the corpus as a whole, a strength of the collection not found in earlier introductions (S. Tugwell, The Apostolic Fathers [1989]; M. Günther, Einleitung in die Apostolisichen Väter [1997]; C. Jefford, The Apostolic Fathers: An Essential Guide [2005]; P. Foster [ed.], The Apostolic Fathers [2007]; W. Pratcher [ed.], The Apostolic Fathers [2010]), and an advance over R. Grant’s cursory discussion of a few of the same themes (The Apostolic Fathers [1964]). Chapters 9–17 are dedicated to each of the texts. 1 and 2 Clement are discussed together, as are Polycarp’s Letter to the Philippians and the Martyrdom of Polycarp, and the Epistle of Diognetus and the Fragment of Quadratus; Papias’s fragments are also given a chapter. The decision to group the first two pairs, perhaps based on economy of scale, is an unfortunate one: apart from the names, 1 and 2 Clement and Polycarp’s letter and the Martyrdom are unrelated. The introduction by Scott Harrower which orients readers to the Apostolic Fathers would have been strengthened by a discussion of what occasioned the creation of the collection in the seventeenth century (Clare Rothschild deftly reconstructs that background in ‘On the Invention of the Patres Apostolici’, New Essays on the Apostolic Fathers [Tübingen, 2017], pp. 7–34). Even as Harrower agrees that the collection is an artificial one, he tacitly endorses the untenable position that first warranted its creation, that the corpus deserves to be treated as a special case because its authors knew one of the 12 apostles or knew people who did (p. 2). That can be said with confidence only of Polycarp and of Papias although his fragments were not included in the seventeenth-century collection.

From the Ashes

In 2004, fire struck the Herzogin Anna Amalia Bibliothek (HAAB) in Weimar. The fire particularly affected its seventeenth-century collections, among them rich holdings of works associated with the Fruchtbringende Gesellschaft, the foremost seventeenth-century German cultural society. This article investigates the impact of the blaze, looking back over the decade that has elapsed since the event. Among the questions investigated are: what are the numbers of lost, damaged, and surviving volumes? What are the effects on the scholarly research community? How successful has the HAAB been in replacing lost Society editions? What roles have the HAAB’s duplicates and restoration efforts played in the editions’ continued accessibility? How has, in sum, the significance of the library’s Fruchtbringende Gesellschaft holdings been altered due to the damage inflicted by an early twenty-first century disaster?

La Rosa de Alejandría by Luis Vélez de Guevara

Reviewed by: La Rosa de Alejandría by Luis Vélez de Guevara Margaret Parker Luis Vélez de Guevara. La Rosa de Alejandría. Edición crítica y anotada de William R. Manson y C. George Peale. juan de la cuesta, 2018. 217 pp. the story of saint catherine of alexandria, the "Rosa de Alejandría" of the play by Vélez de Guevara, was immensely popular in Europe from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance and lived on into the nineteenth century in Spain. Her story is included in many Latin flores sanctorum and their vernacular progeny. She has been widely celebrated by Spanish writers, in anonymous manuscripts and early printed editions, in prose and verse, by a diverse array of authors over the centuries that includes Álvaro de Luna, Saint Teresa of Ávila, Lope de Vega, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, and Emilia Pardo Bazán. Several Jesuit colegio plays, most of them anonymous and unpublished, feature the Saint, and she is the subject of two plays with firm attributions by Pedro Rosete Niño and Luis Vélez de Guevara, the latter of which was previously accessible only in seventeenth-century collections of dramatic works. Now, thanks to the late William R. Manson and C. George Peale and to Juan de la Cuesta Hispanic Monographs, the Vélez comedia has been published in a beautifully presented edition. Saint Catherine is a legendary Saint whose story is set in Alexandria in the fourth century AD. In an early version of her passio, the young, beautiful, royal, and learned convert to Christianity hears of the emperor's order to sacrifice animals to the pagan gods. She confronts him, declares his religion to be false, and entreats him to accept her Christianity. Stunned by her beauty and amazed by her eloquence, he attempts but fails to refute her arguments and summons fifty sages from all over his realm to defeat her in public debate. She triumphs over them all, whereupon the emperor orders them burned alive and Catherine imprisoned. The empress and the emperor's chief adviser visit her in prison, where angels tend to her, and both are converted. Given a chance to renounce her religion and become empress, Catherine refuses. A wheel of torture is constructed and she is placed thereon, but when it turns, it is destroyed by lightening, killing many bystanders. The empress and chief [End Page 209] adviser announce their conversion and are killed. Catherine rejects a further offer from the emperor and is beheaded. Milk, rather than blood, flows from the wound, and angels deposit her body on mount sinai. The many versions of the saint Catherine narrative vary in multiple ways. The publication of the Vélez comedia is significant, as it presents the only printed text of a play on the subject and, while following the basics of the traditional story, it has very interesting differences. The editors have, again, produced a meticulous and readable edition, another in a long list of plays by Vélez de Guevara (thirty-eight at last count, with sixteen in preparation). The cover features one of the most beautiful of the many artistic representations of the Saint, a painting by Fernando Yáñez de la Almedina. The edition begins with a nota preliminar in which the editors thank the impressive list of entities and persons who contributed to the publication of the edition. The table of contents and a list of abbreviations follow. The introductory study, by Elisa Domínguez de Paz, is divided into five parts: an introduction, a treatment of the plot, a consideration of genre, structures, and performances of La Rosa de Alejandría, a discussion of a Jesuit source for the play, and an examinanation of its dramatis personae. The next section, by C. George Peale, describes the sole witness, in a seventeenth-century collection of Comedias escogidas, the complete title of which he reproduces. A copy held in the Biblioteca Nacional de España and that of the Vatican Library have different frontispieces, but the contents are identical. The text is marred by errors, for which he offers corrections in footnotes. He describes the editorial criteria, discusses...

Preserving on Paper: Seventeenth-Century Englishwomen's Receipt Books ed. by Kristine Kowalchuk

Reviewed by: Preserving on Paper: Seventeenth-Century Englishwomen's Receipt Books ed. by Kristine Kowalchuk Madeline Bassnett Kristine Kowalchuk, ed. Preserving on Paper: Seventeenth-Century Englishwomen's Receipt Books. University of Toronto Press, 2017. 374 pp. $34.95. "To make Surrup of Snailes" (135); "To make a Carrott Pudding" (231); "to mack a venison pasty" (312). These are the types of recipes (or receipts, in the vocabulary of the day) to be found in Kristine Kowalchuk's useful edition of three manuscript recipe books attributed to and owned by seventeenth-century women and held at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C. Carefully transcribed, these three books accurately represent their genre. They provide a medley of intermingled instructions for sweet and savoury cookery, medicinal remedies, and the occasional beauty and household product. They assume some previous knowledge of early modern kitchen practices, which makes them challenging for the modern reader, not to mention the aspiring historical chef. The recipe "To Colleer a pigge," from the book of Constance Hall, for instance, not only requires the cook to select a young pig, presumably easily plucked from the property's pig stall, but also to butcher him on the spot: "Take a good fat pigg of a month or fiue weeks old and kill him and dres him fit to rost." Similarly abbreviated instructions continue into the recipe itself, which advises the reader to take "a handfull … a littel … a few" of various herbs and spices, further trusting that the cook will know how to make the "thin water grewell" that serves as a base for further seasoning (216–17). Many of the recipes are attributed to a source—for example, "A Dyett drink, Lady Shirleys" in the book attributed to Lettice Pudsey (288–9); "Mr William ffens receat to make rare Inke" in that of Mary Granville and Anne Granville D'Ewes (104–5). And, despite the books' attachments to individual or family names, they are filled with a multitude of unidentifiable hands that break down our assumptions of authorial design and control. Kowalchuk's edition makes these defamiliarizing seventeenth-century collections available to adventurous modern cooks, but its audience is more likely to include those with an academic (whether theoretical or practical) interest in recipe books, women's writing, and food history and culture. Her semi-diplomatic transcription attempts to retain the distinctiveness of the manuscripts, reproducing original and often haphazard spelling practices, and preserving in-text markings such as the marginal manicules (or little pointing hands) that highlight the unique collection of ink recipes found in the Granville/D'Ewes manuscript. In the mini-introductions to each book, Kowalchuk offers available biographical information (Pudsey is notably difficult to trace), alongside an overview of [End Page 175] the styles and types of recipes. She has chosen to keep the recipe books themselves relatively clear of editorial apparatus but includes some of that apparatus elsewhere. Particularly helpful are the lists of named contributors to the recipe books provided in the introductions, which can help us to locate recipes in time, place, and within community networks. She also provides a detailed glossary for the terms (of which there are many) now unfamiliar to twenty-first-century readers. From "adarme" to "hoxy croxy" to "zedoary," this indispensable section is relevant to the period's recipe books more broadly and serves as a mini-dictionary. In the editions themselves, she is careful to identify the switch from Hand A to Hand B, even though these hands can rarely be tied to a named individual. Although the sparse use of footnotes makes for easier reading, a useful addition to the apparatus would have been a cross-referencing of repeated recipes, which would facilitate further comparative investigation of knowledge transmission and individual practice. Instructions on making "Shrewsbury Cakes," for example, appear in both Granville/D'Ewes and Pudsey (137, 312). In this instance, we have three versions of the recipe, as Pudsey's book provides an editorial intervention by the writer—"as I mack it" (312)—thus highlighting a comparison between standard and personal practice. More detailed editorial guidance would also help to define Kowalchuk's textual selection process: why, out of all the available...

Memory and Reward. Dutch Collections of Sermons and their Functions in the Memoria Tradition in the Female Convent of Jericho in Brussels (c. 1450-1650)

This article deals with commemorative aspects of the late-medieval prologues to the sermon collections preserved from the Brussels convent of Jericho. By composing these collections, Augustinian Canonesses Maria van Pee, Barbara Cuyermans and Janne Colijns, and the other anonymous sisters involved in the process, collectively made books that could not only be used to edify the convent but could also serve to recall, in an act of memoria, the priests who were responsible for their spiritual care, as well as the women who initially redacted the sermons (this last being due to information added posthumously). This culture of remembrance via sermon collections was maintained until long after the Middle Ages, as is shown by the prologue to the seventeenth-century collection of sermons written by Canoness Maria A. de Folije. Finally, the article connects these prologues and the sermon manuscripts to the broader literary, visual and liturgical memoria culture in the convent.

Fábula e Mito na Literatura Tradicional Portuguesa - Pequenas Totalidades

This article aims to study the inclusion of myth in Aesop’s Fables in order to re-evaluate the role of fable in the genre system of traditional literature. In the first part, we analyse several perspectives on the fable, ranging from the Middle Ages and Manuel Mendes da Vidigueira’s early seventeenth century collection, to the turn from the philosophical to the poetical fable in the aftermath of La Fontaine’s Fables, and the selection of fables in Teofilo Braga’s collection of traditional tales.The second part is a comparative study of the fable “June and the Peacock”, focusing mainly on the uses of mythological material incorporated in Manuel Mendes da Vidigueira’s fables in Braga’s collection. Our observations about the function of myth in fables leads us to argue that the fable in traditional literature tends to loose its characteristics as an autonomous genre and to be absorbed by the tale.

The politics of possession: The pretiosa collection of Hedwig Eleonora of Schleswig-Holstein-Gottorp, Dowager Queen of Sweden (1636-1715)

Dowager Queen Hedwig Eleonora's collection of pretiosa, housed in the late seventeenth century at Ulriksdal Palace on the outskirts of Stockholm, can be identified through two separate inventories. The two lists were drawn up simultaneously in 1719, almost four years after the death of Hedwig Eleonora. Both inventories were carefully compiled according to the testimony of the only two remaining relatives of the Dowager Queen: her granddaughter, Princess Ulrika Eleonora the Younger (1688-1741) and the Princess's nephew, Hedwig Eleonora's great-grandson, Charles Frederick (1700-1739), Duke of Schleswig-Holstein-Gottorp. In this article these inventories are analysed not only as records of a particularly rare late seventeenth-century collection, but also as legal documents that help us understand the political struggle for the Swedish throne, a complicated political situation that absorbed Sweden, in the aftermath of the death of the heirless King Charles XII (1682-1718).

Thinking with Cases: Specialist Knowledge in Chinese Cultural History (review)

Reviewed by: Thinking with Cases: Specialist Knowledge in Chinese Cultural History Yi-Li Wu (bio) Charlotte Furth, Judith T. Zeitlin, and Ping-chen Hsiung, editors. Thinking with Cases: Specialist Knowledge in Chinese Cultural History. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2007. xi, 331 pp. Hardcover $59.00, ISBN 978-0-8248-3049-6. How do people create and validate knowledge about the world in which they live? This question is central in the history of science. While early scholarship constructed a positivist narrative around the rise of experimental science in Western Europe, contemporary historiography insists that the rubric of science must include other multiple systems of knowledge production. This approach is particularly relevant to the historian of China, for while China followed a different intellectual trajectory from Europe, it nevertheless created a robust and vibrant scientific tradition of its own. Thinking with Cases makes an innovative and essential contribution to the field by examining the history of the Chinese case (an) and case-based knowledge production in five areas: law, forensics, medicine, religion, and philosophy. Besides its obvious value to scholars studying these specific disciplines, this volume greatly enriches our appreciation of Chinese epistemologies by analyzing a style of reasoning that was central to many fields of endeavor. It should also nurture cross-cultural inquiry by elucidating the Chinese iterations of a genre that appears in many other societies. What distinguished the case from an anecdote or a general narrative of events was its purpose: to be a public, systematically organized repository of knowledge that served as a guide to efficacious action in a given field of endeavor. Via the case, in other words, raw data was classified, assessed, and transformed into applied knowledge. The question of how people thought with cases is thus inseparable [End Page 176] from the question of what kind of thinking went into cases. Both aspects are illuminated in this ingeniously conceived volume. We see that collections of cases concurrently served as a locus for evaluating and contesting knowledge, as a description of best practices, and as a model of superior reasoning that expert practitioners evoked to establish their own authority and discredit the less skilled. The word an originated in the tray or table used to hold bureaucratic government documents (p. 5), and this volume similarly begins by examining case-based thinking in law. Scholars have previously overlooked the importance of Chinese legal cases in knowledge production, on the grounds that they did not act as binding precedents in the manner of Western case law. As Jiang Yonglin and Wu Yanhong show, however, seventeenth-century collections of legal cases served as crucial guidelines for crafting effective judgments that would uphold the letter of the law while also satisfying cultural norms of fairness. These legal cases originated in the official accounts that magistrates appended to their verdicts in order to justify their decisions. These accounts themselves were also the end result of a systematized process in which different kinds of information were transformed into legal evidence. Pierre-Etienne Will analyzes one key step in the process, the forensic examination of corpses. His discussion of nineteenth-century forensic case collections finds that they were sites of innovation where writers drew on their personal experiences to challenge what they considered to be out dated and incorrect guidelines issued by the imperial government. Yasuhiro Karasawa examines another facet of evidence production, namely how legal secretaries of the eighteenth to early nineteenth centuries turned oral depositions of witnesses and defendants into concise, standardized documents that then constituted the basis of judicial decisions. These official accounts of events and actors were shaped by the bureaucratic need for internal consistency, but they were also expected to embody the literary excellence of model civil service examination essays and the narrative skills of vernacular fiction. As was true with the investigating magistrate, the doctor drew on cases to sort out and classify potentially conflicting information in order to arrive at an insightful judgment. As in forensics, the case in medicine also helped to articulate improved solutions to shared problems. Charlotte Furth examines the classificatory and rhetorical styles of medical case collections from the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries, finding that they were heavily influenced...

The Old Norse Poetic Translations of Thomas Percy: A New Edition and Commentary by Margaret Clunies Ross (review)

MLRy 99.1, 2004 267 As always with multi-authored volumes, it is intriguing to note the similarities and differences among the contributors. For instance, in the case of Hegel, both Saul and Walker concentrate on the lectures on aesthetics; whereas, in the case of Nietzsche (al? ways much harder forcritics to place), Walker concludes that Die Geburtder Tragodie 'propounds an idea of aesthetic autonomy far more radical than the German idealist tradition envisaged' (p. 136), only for Robertson to describe the text as 'this powerful but fanciful work' (p. 159). Overall, however, a coherent account of the importance of philosophy for German-speaking countries emerges from these six chronologically arranged chapters. Although the story this book tells of the relationship between philosophy and literature is hardly new, it tells it clearly. So for anyone embarking on a course of study of modern German thought or who is looking for a point of orientation, it can be recommended, not least because it has few competitors. University of Glasgow Paul Bishop The Old Norse Poetic Translations of Thomas Percy: A New Edition and Commentary. By Margaret Clunies Ross. (Making the Middle Ages, 4) Turnhout: Brepols. 2001. xiii + 290pp. ?55. ISBN 2-503-51077-9 (hbk). Margaret Clunies Ross pursues her recent interest in Medidvismus in this highly accessible version ofthe translations made from Old Norse by Bishop Thomas Percy. These include the Five Pieces ofRunic Poetry published in 1763 and Percy's previously unpublished draft translations of certain fragments of skaldic verse, including verses from Vellekla, one of the most difficultof all skaldic poems, and his version of parts of the Battle of Brunanburh. Clunies Ross offers an admirably lucid introduction to the characteristics of skaldic verse, including the nature of the kenning system. This is strictly an edition rather than an account of the intellectual background to Percy's translations, for which the reader is referred to the editor's The Norse Muse in Britain (Trieste: Edizioni Parnaso, 1998). Here she gives an account of Percy as translator, undertaking his translations from the Norse in response to Macpherson's success with Ossian. Publishing the original texts ofthe fivetranslations at the end of the volume was intended as 'a riposte and counterweight' (p. 9) to Macpherson, the fraudulent nature of whose work Percy suspected. Percy's sources were the most important seventeenth-century collections of Norse poetry, a corpus of reasonably accurate Old Norse usually provided with facing Latin translations. Clunies Ross shows a strong sympathy with Percy as a translator working for a reading public not necessarily ready for the material he puts before them. Thus he uses circumlocutions for Valhalla, 'palace of the gods', and valkyries, 'beautiful nymphs of war', both of which he would employ confidently in his 1770 Northern A ntiquities?clearly these concepts were not yet widely under stood. Percy was blessed with a near neighbour in Northamptonshire, Edward Lye, who was the most able scholar of his day in comparative Germanic languages, on whose comments he relies greatly, though by no means slavishly. Clunies Ross suggests that although Percy's original publisher, Shenstone, was dead by the time Five Pieces was published, he had been successful in dissuading the bishop from publishing furtherwork. Skaldic (as opposed to eddic) verse was simply too difficultfor late eighteenth-century tastes, offeringacute problems of syntax as well as the complexities ofthe kenning system. The facsimile text includes some often splendidly misleading notes which Clunies Ross both corrects and tries to account for. The failure to recognize the negative particle -at, forexample, means the poet is made to assert that fightingis, rather than is not, like kissing a young widow. Percy is responsible forthe widespread eighteenthcentury belief that Vikings drank from the skulls of their enemies, taken froma note in 268 Reviews his source which failed to understand that 'curved trees of skulls' referredto drinking horns. The published pieces mostly have some connection with England; the action of the 'Dying Ode of Regner Lodbrog' and 'Ransome of Egill the Scald' takes place in England, while 'The Complaint of Harold' is that of Haraldr Sigurdarson, who died at Stamford Bridge. Hakon (commemorated in the 'Funeral Song of Hacon') was brought up...

Oeuvrecatalogus

AbstractThe seventeenth-century, probably Flemish, artist Abraham Casembroot (Bruges? before or in Ι593 - Messina Ι658) spent the latter half of his life in Sicily. His entire extant oeuvre was produced there, which is probably why he is so little known in the Netherlands. The painter lived in the east-coast port of Messina, where for the last nine years of his life he held the post of consul for the Republic of the United Netherlands. Some of the bulletins he sent to the States General in his consular capacity are kept in the Rijksarchief at The Hague. So are the documents which confirm his appointment in Ι649 and that of his successor and thus establish Ι658 as the year of Casembroot's death. Information about his life can be found in biographies of Messina artists. The most detailed account is by Francesco Susinno in his Vite de' pittori messinesi of Ι724, although later vite of Messina artists also devote a comparatively large amount of space to Casembroot. As a painter he was evidently held in considerable esteem in Messina, where he had five local pupils. Casembroot specialized in harbour and marine views and tempests; according to the vite his paintings were much in demand in both Sicily and the Netherlands. The well-known seventeenth-century collection amassed by Don Antonio Ruffo of Messina boasted no fewer than ten works by Casembroot, one of which was very likely the large canvas The Swordfish Catch, now in the Museo di San Martino in Naples. Incidentally, a hitherto unpublished document reveals that one of Casembroot's consular duties was to deal with the ship that in all probability had on board Rembrandt's Aristotle, commissioned by Ruffo. It is remarkable that currently only four authenticated paintings by Casembroot are known, plus a fifth which is attributed to him on convincing grounds. His imaginary harbours resemble those by less well-known Netherlandish painters in Italy such as Cornelis de Wael and notably Adriaen van der Cabel. For a long time the latter was thought to have been responsible for four large series of sketchbook drawings with Sicilian studies which were in the Kupferstichkabinett in Berlin until the I9305 and subsequently scattered. In I973 Hans Mielke observed numerous stylistic correspondences between sheets from this former Berlin series and a preliminary drawing by Casembroot for an etching. There is also a stylistic resemblance to other traceable sheets from the former Berlin series (a considerable number of which are now in the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge), some of which have been identified as preliminary studies for etchings by Casembroot. Consequently, three of the four Berlin series of sketchbooks previously attributed to Van der Cabel must now be established as Casembroot's work. Compared with Casembroot's paintings, his etchings and drawings exhibit more obvious personal stylistic characteristics, which Mielke had already observed in the nervous lines and the distinctive manner in which the small human figures are depicted; this enables reliable attributions to be made now. Mielke also demonstrated that Van der Cabel made use of drawings by Casembroot for his own etchings, and he is quite likely to have owned drawings by Casembroot. Casembroot's best-known work is a series of etchings of views of Messina and the surrounding countryside which he dedicated to the collector Lucas van Uffelen. Preliminary drawings for this series and for an authentic painting have survived. Casembroot utilized the drawings he did from nature in his sketchbooks as preliminary studies for etchings and paintings. Surviving sheets show small figures engaged in various activities, topographical sketches and accurate studies of local ships. The artistic quality of Casembroot's oeuvre is not particularly high. Its current significance is largely due to the topographical depictions of Messina and its environs, which look completely different today as the result of natural disasters. Despite his lengthy sojourn in Sicily, Casembroot remained a recognizably northern painter. His subject-matter displayed typically Dutch features which were uncommon in Messina, where local painters generally confined themselves to history pieces. With his harbour and sea views Casembroot seems to have discovered a gap in the market, which may account for his success in Messina.

Enchantment and Disenchantment: Love and Illusion in Chinese Literature

In a famous episode of the eighteenth-century masterpiece The Dream of the Red Chamber, the goddess Disenchantment introduces the hero, Pao-yu, to the splendors and dangers of the Illusory Realm of Great Void. The goddess, one of the divine women in Chinese literature who inspire contradictory impulses of attachment and detachment, tells Pao-yu that the purpose of his visit is disenchantment through enchantment, or enlightenment through love. Examining a range of genres from different periods, Wai-yee Li reveals the persistence of the dialectic embodied by the goddess: while illusion originates in love and desire, it is only through love and desire that illusion can be transcended. Li begins by defining the context of these issues through the study of an entire poetic tradition, placing special emphasis on the role of language and of the feminine element. Then, focusing on the dream plays by T'ang Hsien-tsu, she turns to the late Ming, an age which discovers radical subjectivity, and goes on to explore a seventeenth-century collection of classical tales, Records of the Strange from the Liao-chai Studio by P'u Sung-ling. The latter half of the book is devoted to a thorough analysis of The Dream of the Red Chamber, the most profound treatment of the dialectic of enchantment and disenchantment, love and enlightenment, illusion and reality. Originally published in 1993. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

REVIEWS OF EXHIBITIONS

‘Suleyman the Magnificent’: British Museum, London, 18 February‐30 May 1988‘Mr. Cartwright's Pictures: A Seventeenth Century Collection’: Dulwich Picture Gallery, 25 November 1987‐28 February 1988‘Armada 1588–1988’: an exhibition at the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, 20 April‐4 September 1988 and at the Ulster Museum, Botanic Gardens, Belfast, 12 October 1988‐8 January 1989 Organized by Stephen Deuchar; catalogue by M. J. Rodriguez‐Salgada et al. (Penguin Books) ISBN 0–14‐010301‐5.‘Parliament and the Glorious Revolution 1688–1988’: Banqueting House, London, 1 July‐1 October 1988 Accompanying leaflet by Neil Kirk, ‘Parliament and the Glorious Revolution 1688–1988’(HMSO) ISBN 0–1170‐1‐3919; list of exhibits by H. S. Cobb and D. J. Johnson published by House of Lords Records Office.

REVIEWS OF EXHIBITIONS

‘Suleyman the Magnificent’: British Museum‘Mr. Cartwright's Pictures: A Seventeenth Century Collection’: Dulwich Picture Gallery‘Armada 1588–1988’: an exhibition at the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich‘Parliament and the Glorious Revolution 1688–1988’: Banqueting House, London

Comedia and Trauerspiel: On Benjamin and Calderón

COMPAEATIYE drama 1 Volume 16 Spring 1982 Number 1 Comedia and Trauerspiel: On Benjamin and Calderon Anthony J. Cascardi Nowhere but in Calderon could the perfect baroque Trauerspiel be studied. Walter Benjamin Walter Benjamin’s Ursprung des Deutschen Trauerspiels (The Origin of German Tragic Drama) is a dense and difficult book. “Conceived,” as its dedication evasively states, in 1916, written in 1925, and published three years later, the work is the single full-length book by a critic whom Frank Kermode could hail as “matchless in intuitive power.”l Benjamin specialized in aphorisms, essays, and, as one translated collection calls itself, “reflections.” These are widely known to a broad segment of readers. His essays on Proust and Baudelaire are masterpieces of lyrical prose; his study of Karl Kraus is a trenchant analysis of modem narrative. His essays on photography, as all his work, are marked by a deep vein of philosophic concern. Indeed, none was as philosophical as the Ursprung, a book Benjamin sub­ mitted as his University Habilitationsschrift, the rough equivalent ANTHONY J. CASCARDI is Assistant Professor of Spanish and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley. 1 2 Comparative Drama of a dissertation. Rejected by various departments as inappro­ priate or incomprehensible, the text remains among the lesserknown of Benjamin’s writings. On the one hand, it deals with relatively arcane materials, with the Trauerspiel (the term is significant) of the German Baroque—the work of Gryphius, Opitz, Sigmund von Birken—with late seventeenth-century collections of heraldic emblems, with occultist tracts and odd word lists; on the other, it is grounded in a philosophy strongly flavored by German Romanticism (there are major debts to Schopenhauer, Novalis, Nietzsche), yet directly anticipating the dialectical materialism of the so-called Frankfurt School to which Benjamin would later be tangentially related. It was, in fact, the opening section of the Ursprung that proved seminal in the development of Theodor Adorno’s thought. Walter Benjamin is also a thinker in a long line of Germans with a profound admiration for and interest in the Spanish comedia. On these grounds, Benjamin warrants comparison to Schlegel, Goethe, and Tieck. The Ursprung is to be sure not the only text in which he trained his powers of thought on the Spanish Baroque theatre. The essay “ ‘El mayor monstruo, los celos’ von Calderón und ‘Herodes und Mariamne’ von Hebbel” is a characteristic investigation of what Benjamin called the “melodrama of fate,” the Schicksalsdrama. As in the Trauerspiel book, Benjamin focuses intensely on the privileged function of objects and on the workings of fate in the Herod plays. Through­ out his work, he finds that the German plays are particularly poignant, but circumscribed in their range of sadness and melancholia. In comparison, the Spanish court and martyr plays of Lope, Tirso, and Calderón are superior in sheer poetic effect, in delicacy of motive, in intricacy of execution. Stylistic features like these are worth noting because Benjamin is a staunchly aesthetic thinker; convinced that there is a significance to the inner hollowness of the Baroque world, he turns consistently to what seem superficial aspects of style. But in addition, Ben­ jamin’s own style is of a density and syntactic weld that could only be matched by the supremely ordered verse of a Calderón. In Susan Sontag’s words, Benjamin’s style of thinking and writing is like “freeze-frame baroque. . . . It was as if each sentence had to say everything, before the inward gaze of total concentration dissolved the subject before his eyes.”2 Why the concern with Trauerspiel and not tragedy? The Anthony J. Cascardi 3 distinction is crucial to an understanding of whatever special variations on the tragic pattern of feeling that the Spanish comedia and late Renaissance and Baroque drama may, on the whole, contain. The first distinctions are categorical. Tragedy deals with myth. Its metaphysical foundation is that of ritualistic and heroic sacrifice. It is transcendental in thrust. Not so the Trauerspiel. As its name signifies, the Trauerspiel opens onto a realm of sadness and mourning rather than to the devastating wretchedness of painful destruction felt in ancient tragedy. Its action works in and through history, not myth (“The...

T. A. Birrell. The Library of John Morris: The Reconstruction of a Seventeenth-Century Collection. London: British Museum Publications Ltd., 1976. xxiv+83 pp. £12.

T. A. Birrell. The Library of John Morris: The Reconstruction of a Seventeenth-Century Collection. London: British Museum Publications Ltd., 1976. xxiv+83 pp. £12.

A Seventeenth-Century Collection of Religious Poetry

A Seventeenth-Century Collection of Religious Poetry

Sidney and Languet

nOSTERITY HAS tended minimize Sir Philip Sidney's political r aspirations. Perhaps under influence of what is sometimes called Sidney Myth, it has preferred virtuous Astrophel the great counsellor of state' A new edition of his correspondence will undoubtedly indicate where his biography should be supplemented and stress relevance of surviving Languet letters. Meanwhile, some preliminary conclusions can be drawn from a seventeenth-century collection of Languet papers in Bibliotheque Nationale. It includes eight unpublished letters, five of which relate Philip Sidney's Grand Tour (1572-1575), three that of his brother Robert (I578-I587).1 It is surely remarkable that after his escape from Paris in 1572 Sidney should associate with few people whom he had not been introduced by Hubert Languet. His best friend and traveling-companion in Italy, Philip Louis, count of Hanau and Miinzenberg, was no exception. Two of Languet's letters German count, written from Vienna on January 15 and February 9, 7574, and very similar in tone his Sidney letters, emphasize this.2 Not surprisingly, Languet is extremely pleased have foreseen young men's friendship. He points out how alike his two Philips are in age, intellect, and inclination, and for three whole pages he encourages them work and travel together and build up a lasting relationship. The January letter also includes his wish that together they may travel from Vienna to Sarmata [i.e., Poland] there salute Vistulan nymphs and see whether lily of France3 takes root in Polish soil-for it is a thing of which men will speak for some time come. For nearly two years Languet's English protege was constant companion of this Protestant nobleman who, like himself, had been in Paris at time of Massacre. An orphan since IS6i but too young succeed his father, he resided with Sidney in Padua while an