Perspectives on Early Modern and Modern Intellectual History: Essays in Honor of Nancy S. Struever and Rhetoric and Law in Early Modern Europe

Renaissance Quarterly, Spring, 2002 by Wayne A. Rebhorn

Joseph Marino and Melinda Schlit., eds., Perspectives on Early Modern and Modern Intellectual History: Essays in Honor of Nancy S. Struever

Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2000. xiii 509 pp. $99. ISBN: 1-58046-062-3.

Victoria Kahn and Lorna Hutson., eds., Rhetoric and Law in Early Modern Europe

New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001. ix 355 pp. $40. ISBN: 0-300-08485-4.

Collections of essays pose problems for reviewers as for readers. Not only do the contributions they contain vary in quality, sometimes quite significantly, but they also go off in many different directions, often so many that any sense of unity is lost. Even when a collection is organized about a topic, that topic may be defined in an exceedingly broad manner, as is the case with the first of the volumes to be reviewed here; or the stated subject may be lost sight of by some of the contributors, as is the case with the second. Nevertheless, these two collections have the virtues of their defects: if they lack a certain coherence, they compensate by offering a number of very fine essays on important topics. Both books testify to the richness of scholarly work on the period being done in many fields.

Perspectives on Early Modern and Modern Intellectual History is a Festschrift which does indeed honor Nancy Struever, whose work has had a large impact on a variety of fields within Renaissance studies. This variety is reflected by the range of essays included in a very compendious volume. The first of its three parts, "Renaissance Humanism," contains ten essays. This part defines its subject quite loosely, starting off with pieces that investigate canonical Humanist authors such as Bruni and Valla, but ending with essays on Ariosto and Shakespeare that have almost nothing to do with Humanism. There are essays in this section by Edward Cranz on the difference between Cicero's and Leonardo Bruni's conceptions of the studia humanitatis, by Thomas Izbicki on Nicholas of Cusa, by Charles Trinkaus on Machiavelli and Humanist anthropology, by Christine Smith and Joseph E O'Connor on the classical library assembled by Pope Nicholas V, by Joseph Marino on Castiglione's ideal courtly language, by Marjorie O'Rourke Boy le on communication by visual signing, and by Elizabeth Watson on Ariosto's Cinque canti. One of the more rewarding pieces is Salvatore Camporeale's essay on the debate between Lorenzo Valla and Poggio Bracciolini aver how to revive the culture of the ancient world, a debate revealing Valla's more thoroughgoing historicism which was to have a major impact on Erasmus' biblical scholarship. In a fine article, "Caterina of Siena and the Legacy of Humanism," Jane Tylus presents Saint Catherine as a bridge between an older Humanism, which was a male bastion and stressed civic involvement, and a newer one, which embraced a more feminized form of piety involving the public performance of charitable acts, a traditionally female activity. Finally, in a magisterial essay, Thomas Greene writes about ceremonial closure in Shakespeare's plays, noting how he uses ritual-like events as his plays end in order to create a temporary community for the audience and how, as people became less responsive to ritual in the seventeen th century, playwrights stopped writing ceremonial closes -- a sign of the demystification of the liturgical sign that separates early modern culture from all former societies which organized themselves around ritual occasions.

The second section of the Struever Festschrift contains live essays by art historians, including Melinda Schlitt's analysis of two frescoes by Vasari and Salviati as examples of what she calls a "rhetoric of exemplarity," Elizabeth Cropper's demonstration that aspects of the querelle des anciens et des modernes were anticipated in Alessandro Tassoni's Pensieri diversi of 1608, and Mary Pardo's complex piece that starts as an attempt to identify the "Masaccio" referred to in the dedication of Alberti's Della pittura and winds up as a richly detailed, historical contextualizing of that treatise and a striking interpretation of Alberri's notion that the goal of painting is the establishment of a civil relationship between the beholder and the artist. In a mote theoretical essay, Karen-Edis Barzman defines early modern spectacles as illusionistic discursive fields in which power manifests itself, but in which it may also be contested, and illustrates her ideas by examining paintings by Masaccio and Correggio, the city-planning of Rome, and the placement of ex-votos in churches. Finally, there is Michael Ann Holly's "The Rhetoric of Remembrance," the most theoretical piece in the collection. In it Holly argues that all historical writing is marked by melancholy, or what Freud called unresolved mourning, because it is animated by the hope of recovering the past while aware of the impossibility of doing so. Holly analyzes the work of Michael Baxandall as exemplary because he recognizes that the narrative reconstruction of the past is always mediated through language and by our location in the present, and that any description of a work of art is a representation not so much of the work itself as of our thinking about it.