Book Review

Europe: Early Modern and Modern

The purpose of this book is to show how one may "negotiate an entry into history through literature" (p. xiii). Lauro Martines is too good a historian to substitute literary theory for a deep knowledge of the sources, and he writes with exceptional elegance. Yet his enterprise is hardly novel. Literary texts, no less than diplomatic correspondence or tax records, are historical artifacts and have long been grist for the historian's mill. Hence, in order to break new ground, the scholar must reveal fresh methods of achieving this goal and/or use a specific body of literature to advance historical knowledge in significant fashion. Martines's book does not succeed in the former and does the latter only marginally.

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In a sequence of chapters, Martines tries to show how Italian poetry can illuminate and, in turn, be illuminated by the culture of the neighborhood, the ethos of patronage, links between prayer to the Virgin Mary and secular love poetry, the relationship of love and marriage, the phenomenon of suicide and alienation among writers, the mentality of cruelty, issues of seduction and family space, the forms of political memory, and the crisis of the French invasion of Italy in 1494, worthy subjects all. One can also toss in as reoccuring themes anticlericalism, physicality, and the use of extraordinarily graphic language. Nonetheless, Martines's approach is so impressionistic that one finishes each section with some plausible and interesting aperçus but no sense of a new thesis proved or a theme convincingly illustrated. Some of the chapters work well in isolation as suggestive papers, but they fail to coalesce to tell us something coherent about the Italian Renaissance or give us a golden interpretative thread.

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