Desplenter, Youri

English

Ghent University Academic Bibliography

606 Sixteenth Century Journal XLI/2 (2010)Elizabeth I’s supposed dreams and dreams about Elizabeth reported by her subjectsreflected cultural anxieties about royalty and rule.As Levin shows, interpretations of Renaissance dreaming found in contemporary textsand popular discourse were numerous and often contradictory. Thus, it makes sense thatthe text does not attempt to draw generalized conclusions about early modern dreaming.Like dreams, the book defies exact definitions and raises more questions than it answers,but its value is in how Levin’s work, as a combination of archival research, historiography,literary criticism, and cultural studies, takes part in a broad spectrum of scholarly conver-sations. The collection of historical material offered in this book will be useful in itself andwill lead researchers to explore further the records of dreams available in archival sources.Scholars from many disciplines will find it offers guidance and raises questions about sub-jects ranging from how to interpret dreaming in literary texts to how to understand: theroyal power of Elizabeth I and Mary, Queen of Scots; religion; motherhood; medicine;James I and the Gunpowder Plot; witchcraft and occultism; and Renaissance medievalism.At only about two hundred pages, with modernized spelling, a readable style, and an engag-ing collection of anecdotes, the text is as approachable for general readers and undergradu-ates as it is interesting for more advanced scholars; it would be a particularly useful teachingtool for graduate and undergraduate courses introducing students to Renaissance literature,culture, and politics.But the same characteristics that make Levin’s book helpful to a broad spectrum ofreaders will doubtless frustrate many scholars; the text surveys a wealth of previously undis-covered information from which to work rather than offering a precise, focused argumentabout the role of dreaming in early modern culture. Levin’s broad definition of dream-related discourse—which here includes witchcraft, visions, ciphers, nightmarish languageor images, and other such experiences—and the way in which the text follows tangents inorder to connect ideas about culture and dreaming will delight some readers and perplexothers. The close readings of literary texts are insightful but all too brief. I would encourageS JC readers, however, to see these characteristics as admirable features rather than problems.Lay Bibles in Europe 1450–1800. Ed. M. Lamberigts, and A. A. Den Hollander. L e u v e n :Leuven University Press, 2006. 360 pp. €79.00. ISBN 978-90-429-1785-9.REVIEWED BY: Youri Desplenter,  Ghent University, BelgiumAs stated in the preface, this study does not seek to offer a survey of vernacular Biblesin Europe from the late Middle Ages up to the nineteenth century. Rather, the sixteen con-tributions present the results of an international conference, organized in Amsterdam(2004) by Biblia Sacra, a joint Dutch-Flemish research group. The articles address someimportant evolutions and key figures in the history of the vernacular Bible. At first sight, thevolume looks quite heterogeneous, with its contributions arranged in chronological orderin three languages: English (13), German (2) and French (1). And these essays offer variousand sundry approaches, including the history of culture, the history of books, art history,and church history. Nevertheless, the articles contribute to the dual aim that also character-ized the conference; they stimulate the cooperation between several projects on Bible bibli-ography and present the results of recent historical research on Bibles.The first contribution, by Nikolaus Staubach, is an updated summary of an article hepublished in 1997, but it nevertheless opens the volume in an excellent way. The Bible forlaypeople—a Bible in vernacular—had been a desideratum for several medieval religiousreform movements. One of them was the Devotio moderna, which wanted to encourageBook Reviews 607Bible reading by laypeople. At the end of the fourteenth century, however, when the Devotiomoderna began to take shape in the Netherlands, not everyone was in favor of Bible readingby nonreligious people. Gerhard Zerbolt von Zutphen († 1398), one of the intellectualdesigners of the Devotio moderna, wrote a strong plea in favor of Bible reading by laypeople,as Staubach discusses in this first contribution. Several articles pay attention to Bible reading by laypeople in different periods in theNetherlands. Piet Visser for instance, discusses the importance of the printed vernacularBible for the Radical Reformation, in particular for the Dutch Anabaptists. To them, everymember of the congregation could and had to interpret the Word of God. This was ofcourse only possible if people had a (vernacular) Bible at their disposal. The public and theintentions of Bible translations are also central topics in the contribution by Frits G. M.Broeyer on the so-called Statenvertaling (1637), the first Bible translation prescribed by theProtestant government in the Northern Netherlands. Other groups of Christians who werein favor of Bible reading were the Dutch pietists, especially from the seventeenth century,and the Dutch Walloon churches, especially in the eighteenth.The volume not only proffers articles on the Bible strictu sensu, but also on relatedtopics such as the late medieval Lives of Jesus. In her contribution, Hinke Bakker discussesthe relationship between the illustrations in a printed Life of Jesus and those in a manuscriptprayer book. Other art historical contributions shed a light on the illustrations of theunpublished Italian Giolito Bible (sixteenth century); on the visual biblical culture of JeanMès (Lille; ca. 1590), a man who collected more than 450 Old Testament prints; and on theseventeenth-century biblical images and their audience.Of great importance for the study of early modern Bible translations are not only theprologues to the Bibles themselves, but also the prologues that accompany Latin Bible com-mentaries. In the writings of Desiderius Erasmus (†1536) or Jacques Lefèvre D’Étaples(†1536), for example, views on the vernacular Bible can be discerned, as the French contri-bution of Guy Bedouelle demonstrates. A very interesting article, which complements thatof Bedouelle, is the one by Wim François (“Vernacular Bible Reading and Censorship inEarly Sixteenth Century: The Position of the Louvain Theologians”). From his contribu-tion, it becomes clear that the theologians of the University of Leuven in the early sixteenthcentury, when it was still the only university in the Low Countries, were not stubbornlyagainst Bible reading in vernacular, as is often thought. They only stipulated that the ver-nacular Bibles had to be orthodox.The Statenvertaling as it was printed in the eighteenth century is central in the articleby August den Hollander. On the basis of the correspondence between the Dutch printerand a copperplate engraver from Basel, Den Hollander paints a picture of the eighteenth-century book trade.The volume closes with three contributions on Bible bibliography. The first one pro-vides a manual for the Web site http://www.bibliasacra.nl (last accessed 12 October 2009),where a bibliography is being composed of all Bibles printed in Belgium and the Nether-lands. In the second contribution, Bettye Chambers reflects upon her printed bibliographyof French Bibles. Just like the first two, the last article—on the collecting and cataloguing ofBibles in the Württembergische Landesbibliothek (Stuttgart)—argues in favor of digital Biblebibliographies like the one on http://www.bibliasacra.nl; last accessed on 6 April 2010.However, the author is even more ambitious and wants to see the creation of an interna-tional Bible cataloguing project.One of the major shortcomings of the volume is the discrepancy between its generaldesign and intention—it discusses a large period and is meant for academics with any kindof interest in the Bible—and its specialist topics and contributions. The authors should have608 Sixteenth Century Journal XLI/2 (2010)been urged to write for readers who are not necessarily specialists in their own particularfield of Bible study. Furthermore, not every author succeeded in defining his purpose andin formulating the results of his research in a clear and concise way (e.g., the contributionon Casiodoro de Reina’s vision of the Christian ministry, reconstructed through paratextualmaterial in the 1569 Spanish text of Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians). Nevertheless, thisvolume makes it possible, by bringing together results of research on medieval, early mod-ern, and modern vernacular Bibles, to view the research on Bibles of one period in aS JC broader context and to see the big picture.Censorship and Conflict in Seventeenth-Century England: The Subtle Art of Division.Randy Robertson. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2009. 272 pp.$75.00. ISBN 978-0-271-03466-9.REVIEWED BY: Calvin Lane,  University of IowaIn recent years historians and literary scholars have been highly concerned with thenotion of the “public sphere.” Driven by varying reads of the work of Jürgen Habermas,papers, articles, and books are appearing on the scene to consider social and political inter-action in early modern England, how ideas were communicated, perceptions shaped, andidentities negotiated. The issue of conflict, however, seems to be center stage. In this book,Randy Robertson tells us that the revisionists and the new historicists have both offeredmodels for understanding conflict in seventeenth-century England that are ultimately inad-equate. Both schools have asserted in their different ways that conflict was, as Robertsonputs it, more apparent than real. He argues instead that the appearance of consensus oftenmasked deeper conflicts, that political “parties” were usually not chasing after consensus,and that writers were inclined to divide their opponents under the illusion of seeking har-mony. This work is principally an examination of a series of authors whose works evince aparticular political and aesthetic method. From William Prynne in the 1630s to JonathanSwift at the turn of the century, these authors employed what Robertson calls the subtle artof division. He defines this as “the artful insinuation of divisive polemic into a discourseruled by the rhetoric of consensus” (27–28). In short, the language of consensus cannot betrusted beneath the surface of the political waters. The entry point for really seeing this,Robertson argues, is the contest over censorship. The author, quite soberly, wishes to recog-nize the very real power of censorship, but at the same time to see that this layered processhardly produced meaningful consensus. What it did help to produce, Robertson argues, wasa thriving public sphere.After a helpful introduction, complete with an explanation of the process of censor-ship, Robertson considers William Prynne’s criticisms of the stage in his Histrio-mastix(1633). Despite all the Caroline pretensions to peace in the 1630s, Prynne got his messageout, and an audience did hear him. Robertson argues that at the center of the Prynne con-troversy (one which included ear-croppings and face-branding) stood censorship and thatthis episode foreshadowed the midcentury crisis. He then moves to the cavalier poet Rich-ard Lovelace whose poem Lucasta (1649) deftly eluded the Puritan censors that hadreplaced the Caroline ones. More artful than Prynne, Lovelace produced a text with a gal-vanizing partisan message: one visible if the reader saw the clues. Robertson writes: “cen-sorship, like surgery, leaves marks, scars, traces; it also creates a curious beauty, abittersweet, unheard melody, so long as our ears are sensitive enough to hear it” (99).Switching from the cavalier Lovelace to John Milton’s critiques of the 1643 printing ordi-nance, Robertson argues that the author of Areopagitica (1644) exhibited polite tact only to

Lay Bibles in Europe 1450-1800

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Lay Bibles in Europe 1450-1800

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