| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 91.3

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 91.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Humanism and America: An Intellectual History of English Colonisation, 1500–1625. By Andrew Fitzmaurice. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003. x, 216 pp. $55.00, ISBN 0-521-82225-4.)

This is a brief book on a big subject, made bigger by Andrew Fitzmaurice's intent to overthrow at least two interpretative orthodoxies. The first of these is the historians' orthodoxy that the dominant Elizabethan and Jacobean intellectual justifications for empire were primarily commercial, political, and modern: they were expressions of the rise of the (English) state, of Protestantism, of economic nationalism, and of a desire to emulate the Spanish example. The second belongs to cultural studies and literature and comes to us here as postcolonialism: hardly an orthodoxy (as Fitzmaurice pithily observes, "post colonial theory is a field that claims no great degree of coherence," p. 171), but a field that generally has it that colonial discourse was not only intimately tied to conquest, subjugation, and possession but in some senses actually manufactured those things, as colonialism, then and for later generations. According to Fitzmaurice, we should think harder because early modern English writers thought harder, producing a textured and tensioned (nervousness is used often as an organizing concept) encounter between their culture and the New World. This book depicts and analyzes how, and why, Renaissance English writers both supported and opposed colonial ventures.

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