The Cambridge History of Early Modern English Literature

Modern Language Review, The, Jan, 2006 by Smyth Adam

The Cambridge History of Early Modern English Literature. Ed. by DAVID LOEWENSTEIN and JANEL MUELLER. Cambridge, New York, and Melbourne: Cambridge University Press. 2002. xi 1038 pp. 100[pounds sterling]; $140. ISBN 0-521-63156-4.

In this handsome volume, editors David Loewenstein and Janel Mueller aim to provide 'basic information about [ ... ] [early modern] writing [ ... ] while exemplifying fresh approaches to the [ ... ] writing of literary history' (p. 1). The principal 'fresh approach' they seek to enact is the familiar notion, often linked to New Historicism, that 'literature is at once an agent and a product of its culture, simultaneously giving expression to and taking expression from' its contexts (p. 1). The volume sets out to 'dissolve' the 'restrictive [ ... ] distinction between "text" and "context"' (p. 1) in order 'to [ ... ] challenge monolithic views of power and representation' (p. 8).

Undoubtedly, in terms of disseminating that 'basic information', the volume is a success: with the publication of this collection, a foundation stone has been set down. The volume divides into five sections: a consideration of the material conditions of writing, reading, and publishing, and then four chronological slices from the Tudor era until the Commonwealth. Within each section, chapters consider the institutions of literary production: the court, London, the Church, the theatre, the household. There are no chapters on single authors; instead, each chapter ranges across a diversity of material--literature is understood in its broadest sense as 'all knowledge [ ... ] transmitted in written form' (p. 6)--and so authors recur across various discussions. Old friends crop up in new places.

The chapters are, almost without exception, cogent, sometimes masterful, summaries of the state of scholarship, written by the scholars one would hope to see involved (Martin Butler, David Scott Kastan, Barbara Lewalski, Harold Love, Arthur Marotti, Nigel Smith). There are absolutely no surprises: indeed, many of the chapters are synopses of their authors' longer works. Lawrence Manley's 'Literature and London', for instance, is his magnificent Literature and Culture in Early Modern London (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), in miniature. But it is not really the function of this volume to surprise. As a register of early modern literary studies at the turn of the century--like those epitomes of history and classical learning published in the seventeenth century--this Cambridge History is a valuable resource.

If the collection succeeds in 'general coverage' (p. 1), the ambition to read literature as 'at once [ ... ] agent and [ ... ] product' is less systematically achieved. Mueller's chapter on the Church demonstrates how productive this methodology can be, as she shows an acute sensitivity to the particular languages of the religious prose of William Tyndale, Simon Fish, and others--demonstrating how texts both 'giv[e] expression to and tak[e] expression from'. Other chapters, however, defy this ambition, and read literature as a passive register of context, an adornment to a pre-textual reality. David Loades on national identity presents a narrative of high politics driven by ruling personalities. When Loades makes the magnificently problematic claim that 'The partnership between the realm and the monarch was a little like that between a horse and a rider' (p. 214), it feels a long way from the editors' assertion that the 'Cambridge History [ ... ] breaks down the background/foreground dichotomy' (p. 4) 'to [ ... ] challenge monolithic views of power' (p. 8). In collaborative projects there is inevitably a gap between theoretical claims and contributing chapters; while these inconsistencies do not fundamentally undermine the achievement of this state-of-the-nation collection, they are significant since the editors' stated ambition is to embody 'recent [ ... ] methodological developments in English literary studies' (p. 1).

ADAM SMYTH

UNIVERSITY OF READING