Reviews of Books

In the introduction to her provocative and insightful study of early modern English colonial writing, Rebecca Ann Bach describes her project as follows: "Colonial Transformations takes as its object the material reality of cultural transformation, including its operations in texts. This book is centrally about how texts of all sorts contributed to and described the material transformations of England, Ireland, Virginia, and Bermuda into a new Atlantic world" (p. 26). By "transformation," Bach refers to a number of distinct, albeit related, colonial phenomena, some of which were anticipated and even encouraged by England's earliest advocates of overseas endeavor. Organizers of such ventures envisioned a variety of "colonial transformations": they lured potential adventurers with the promise of social and economic advancement, they pledged to convert native inhabitants into willing vassals of the English crown, and they aspired to remake nature itself, with "trees awaiting their transformation into masts that will enable further sea travel, further discovery, further production of commodities for English consumption" (p. 24). Other transformations, however, were neither anticipated nor welcome. Far from creating vassals, English colonial policy had quite the opposite effect of turning peaceful natives "into Indians armed with English weapons" (p. 18). Perhaps most interestingly, colonial projects gave rise to chronic fears that the English themselves would lose their identity as civilized, Christian people in the process. What Bach discerns in Virginia recurred everywhere: anxiety "that the colony would, because of the transformation of the English therein, become not a new England but a new Virginian Indian nation, containing and transforming the English themselves" (p. 21).

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As Bach sees it, English colonialism was always driven rhetorically by the promise of social, economic, cultural, or religious transformation. All of these desired changes were ultimately harnessed to England's powerful and pervasive desire to transform what she calls a "fantasized [notion of] English union" (p. 16) into a reality. Since transformation was as much a colonial as an imperial phenomenon, Bach easily moves back and forth across the Atlantic, exploring a variety of texts that explicitly or implicitly take colonial activity as their subject. The first chapter offers a fascinating reading of Edmund Spenser's Amoretti (1595), a sonnet sequence "that has been seen as Spenser's most personal" (p. 37) poetry. Most literary critics have read these love poems, written in 1594 as Spenser was courting his future wife, Elizabeth Boyle, as the poet's articulation of a private or domestic self. Bach disagrees. In her view, this "realm of Spenser's writing . . . has been most clearly cordoned off from Spenser the planter and colonist is implicated in a colonial fashioning of both Ireland and the planter's personae" (p. 37). Situating the Amoretti in a new imperial context, Bach contributes to a larger revisionist project among Spenser scholars. No longer do we see Spenser merely as a Tudor-Stuart poet dedicated to the cultivation of courtly and Christian virtues; his verse now articulates and enacts a vision of empire. Bach links the Amoretti to Spenser's colonial activities in two ways: first, following the lead of recent scholarship on English importations of the Petrarchan sonnet form, Bach argues that the sonnet, generally speaking, lends itself--linguistically and structurally--to the articulation of the tensions and conflicts inherent in the colonial undertaking. Second, through a series of careful and thorough close readings, Bach finds in the Amoretti a thematic resonance between Spenser's articulation of romantic love and his activities as a functionary in England's colonial government: "The Amoretti's lover finds himself in the planter's predicament: surrounded by hostile natives who refuse subjection and battling the settler's impulse to join the culture he has to live with and depend upon. Both externally and internally, planters like Spenser feared betrayal, and regardless of their actual depredations as landlords and invaders, they represented themselves as innocent men seeking peace" (pp. 56–57). For historians interested in Spenser's career in Ireland, this powerful reading should prompt renewed attention to a text they have largely ignored.

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