Marcy L. North. The Anonymous Renaissance: Cultures of Discretion in Tudor-Stuart England. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2003. xii + 309 pp. $37.50 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-226-59437-8.
Reviewed by Jennifer Richards (School of English, University of Newcastle upon Tyne)
Published on H-Albion (February, 2004)
The Anonymous Renaissance is an ambitious, encyclopaedic study of the history of anonymity in early modern print and manuscript culture. It explores the varied and flexible functions of anonymity in a culture that valued "discretion"; accordingly, it is not interested in resolving mysteries of authorship. Indeed, Marcy L. North is acutely aware of the problems of posthumous naming. The attribution of authorship on the title page or binding of a modern edition of early, anonymous works, she explains, is not necessarily an improvement. With this act of recovery we lose the experience of "one of the most powerful and evocative frames for a text" (p. 8), and we also lose insight into the complex and collaborative nature of much early modern book production and reception.
One of the more far-reaching aims of this study is to unravel the traditional literary-historical divide between medieval and early modern authorship. North is contributing to a critical debate that has set out to challenge modern notions of autonomous authorship. Naming is not a sign of "authorial consciousness," she advises, nor does anonymity signal the medieval author's "indifference" (p. 2). She is alert to how debates about authorship are too often implicated in defining a transition between epochs, and she offers to correct this: the shift from an oral to a print culture does not signal the emergence of the unique individual. On the contrary, in the sixteenth century inherited practices of anonymity continue to facilitate social authorship.
It is appropriate, then, that the book should begin, in chapter 1, by establishing the various alternatives to individuated authorship which were available to both medieval and early modern writers. In the sixteenth century, anonymity was a highly marketable print convention, and one that was open to collective manipulation. At the same time, though, North understands that some modern habits of literary criticism--with their sensitivity to textuality--accommodate the strategies for interpreting anonymity available to contemporary readers. In chapter 2, she uses these strategies to consider how George Gascoigne's self-conscious use of initials in his anthology A Hundreth Sundrie Flowers makes the author a character in the fiction.
The book ranges widely and details the many different forms that anonymity might take: these include initials, the signatures "Ignoto" and Anon, anagrams, Latinized names, and pseudonyms. Anonymity might serve different functions. Perhaps the most familiar explanation of its utility is the protection it offers to a libelous or seditious author. In chapter 5, however, North explains that this was just one of the intentions of the contributors to the Marprelate tracts. These pamphleteers used their pseudonyms as "weapons" (p. 133). Readers of the Marprelate tracts were invited to view their disguised authorship as collective rather than individual; the warning implied in this to the bishops seeking their suppression is that "there will be hundreds of Martins and no Martin" (p. 143).
Anonymity could also be used to shape the idea of the female author, albeit in complicated ways as North explains in chapter 7. We might expect anonymity to grant women writers a degree of freedom, but it can also work to undermine the female voice. Anonymity can disguise the gender of an author in ways that frustrate critics seeking to expand the canon of women's literature. It can be very difficult to distinguish between works that might have been written by women and those which are almost certainly authored by men; the "most important lesson" of any attempt "may lie in the defeat" (p. 214). In many writings that assume a female voice anonymity can be a marker of shame rather than of modesty, and so serve an antifeminist agenda which understands women's speech as "sexually transgressive." In erotic writings, for instance, anonymity may help to construct the "fantasy" in which "real women" naively share their desires (p. 230). None of this denies that women writers might not usefully exploit the same gestures of discretion as their male counterparts. But it does point to the need to evolve a new methodology which can re-evaluate the notion of "'difference' that we expect from women's literature and women authors" (p. 255).
The Anonymous Renaissance is a substantial and scholarly achievement. It depicts a diverse and lively world of early modern writers, printers, and readers. Refreshingly, it gives equal weight to marginal writers as well as to their better known peers, to Catholic polemic as well as Protestant (chapter 4), to manuscript as well as print (chapter 6). This book presses on literary scholars the importance of a prevalent feature of early modern print and manuscript culture, a feature which is too easily overlooked or taken for granted. This is a significant achievement. However, there is no sustained consideration of that area signalled in the book's subtitle, "cultures of discretion" and this would have been welcome. Modesty, humility, and other gestures of discretion require differentiation as they have their own complicated histories. Sometimes the reader has to work their way through a wealth of examples only to arrive at a fairly minor adjustment to an established paradigm. North's study in chapter 3 of Edmund Spenser's use of anonymity in The Shepheardes Calender mostly "affirms" rather than "complicates" the "stigma of print" (p. 99). The Calender is once again paired with George Puttenham's Arte of English Poesie, the more famous example of "ambitious anonymity" (p. 104). But these are minor criticisms. This is a very good book.
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Citation:
Jennifer Richards. Review of North, Marcy L., The Anonymous Renaissance: Cultures of Discretion in Tudor-Stuart England.
H-Albion, H-Net Reviews.
February, 2004.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=8952
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