The Places of Early Modern Criticism ed. by Gavin Alexander, Emma Gilby and Alexander Marr (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Places of Early Modern Criticism ed. by Gavin Alexander, Emma Gilby and Alexander Marr Brent S. Gordon and SJ Gavin Alexander, Emma Gilby, and Alexander Marr, eds., The Places of Early Modern Criticism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021), 289 pp., 18 ills. This volume contains fifteen entries centered on the concept of criticism in the early modern world. Originating from a conference at the University of Cambridge’s Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences, and Humanities in 2015, the overall project has a two-pronged aim: to contextualize the concept of criticism within early modern intellectual culture and, in so doing, to argue for the existence of literary and artistic criticism in Europe beginning in the sixteenth century. The contributors to this volume all seek to both situate and identify early modern criticism through the application of spatial analysis in their various investigations. Usage of the term criticism—deriving from the Greek word for the act of judging or distinguishing—was in flux during the early modern period, and the contributors thus have to address both what criticism meant in the period and what practices associated with criticism (in the modern sense) took place then. Broadly, the term is used throughout the volume to describe thinking about the nature of writing and the visual arts themselves, through or in response to particular examples. The volume as a whole thus proposes the development of a topology of criticism that discusses rhetoric and writing with terms drawn from the visual arts. It offers vignettes of various conceptions of criticism and the spaces where it took place, rather than proffer an argument over how the notion of criticism developed across the early modern period. The impression the reader is left with is of early modern criticism as being rather rhizomatic, developing in one way at one location, sometimes spreading and branching off, sometimes stopping short after one thinker and movement. The question of where criticism took place, geographically, institutionally, and relationally, is presented in this volume as fundamentally a question of what criticism was understood to be. Some of the contributors look to poems themselves as sites of criticism. Others look to particular locations such as printing shops, salons, and theaters, or to more official spaces such as notarial offices and courts as typifying the notion that criticism was being defined as something of an institution in its own right. Still others understand early modern criticism as existing in conceptual or embodied spaces. The first entry in the volume is provided by Chris Stamatakis and focuses on poems in early Tudor England as spaces of intertextual memory that operate as expressions in a critical conversation among themselves. It can be read profitably with the entry offered by Francesco Lucioli on the 1532 poem Orlando Furioso, the various reworkings of which Lucioli reads as a form of literary criticism, and with that by Michael Hetherington, which analyzes how the developing language used in late sixteenth-century literary criticism attempted to reflect the phenomena of poetry. Gavin Alexander provides an analysis of poetic meter in Elizabethan England, conceiving of the poem as not a single site of criticism but as composed of a series of interconnected places. [End Page 203] While some of the contributors focus on pieces of literature in and of themselves as sites of criticism, others examine particular physical locations as spaces of critical engagement. These include the entry by Katie Chenowith on the role of correctors in printing shops as critics, that by Lorna Hutson on the role of the stage in expressing the critical engagement of Shakespeare’s compositions with classical tropes, and the entry by Stijn Bussels on poetry connected to Amsterdam’s town hall in the seventeenth century as a critical expression of space. Connected to the theme of physical locations of criticism are two of the more unique contributions to this volume. Rodrigo Cacho Casal provides the only entry whose scope extends to European spaces in the New World, using criticism composed in the Spanish Americas as a vehicle to explore the literary connections between the Americas and Europe in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Departing from a focus on...