Ovid and the Renaissance Body by Goran V. Stanivukovic (review)

954 Reviews to syphilis. Plague and pox are firsttreated from the perspective of medical history, then analysed as recurring metaphors forthe state ofthe state. Thomas Dekker quietly emerges as the hero of these chapters. In detailed and careful discussions of his The Wonderfull Yeare (1603) and Workefor Armorours (1609) and of his and Middleton's The Honest Whore, Part I (1604) and Part II (1605, pub. 1625), Healy demonstrates the ingenuity with which Dekker the reformer uses the two illnesses most preoccupying and afflictinghis contemporaries in order to anatomize the social and religious ills of his day. In the section on the pox, her readings of Measure for Measure and Per? icles in the light of Erasmus's The Young Man and the Harlot are suggestive; and her painstakinganalysisofWilliarnBullein's^D^/o^rw^a^m5^/zeJF^^^rP^^7ew^(i564) in the section on bubonic plague should help redeem that work fromcritical obscurity. The third of the medical conditions Healy considers, the 'glutted, unvented' body, does not conform as happily to the pattern she has established fortreating plague and pox?largely because this body seems always, primarily, to have been an allegorical construct. Considering it as a 'somatic phenomenon' proves well-nigh impossible. Moreover, while the four chapters on bubonic plague and syphilis deal with Eliza? bethan and early Stuart England, the single chapter devoted to the luxurious, insatiable body leaps ahead to the England of Charles I, the Civil War, and the Restoration. The material Healy presents here is rich and intriguing, but there is too much of it to be dealt with in any depth. It cries out forfurther(perhaps book-length) development. An opening theoretical section is nowadays obligatory, and Healy accordingly pro? vides one. This brief introductory chapter lacks the sustained argumentative en? gagement that gives the chapters on plague and pox their strength. One longed for the author to pause over terms crucial to this study: 'fictions', 'mythology', 'spirit', 'supernatural', 'epidemic', and, most crucially, 'health'. (What did the early modern period understand by good health?) The firstchapter, still in introductory vein, sets out distinctions between Galenic and Paracelsian conceptions of the body, in the pro? cess reviewing fourteen books of regimen published between 1528 and 1621. (The last date belongs to Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy, puzzlingly included among the various and more humble 'Castels' and 'Havens of Health'.) Given the distance between early modern and modern medical understanding, this material is welcome; it largely disappears from view, however, in succeeding chapters. Yet the Paracelsian notion of a disease entity,as opposed to humoural imbalance, could have been use? fully invoked in considering the appearance of a 'new' disease like the pox; and the manifold meanings of 'regimen', aired only in the penultimate chapter, might have provided a structural frame for the entire book. This criticism is not to deny the substantial achievement of Healy's book, however, which is to join what early modern studies have too often put asunder, 'the foul ragand -bone shop' of the body, and the rhetorical artifices of 'pure mind'. After reading Fictions of Disease, one can truthfully say of even the most fleeting Shakespearean reference to a 'pil'd pate', I see it feelingly. University of Exeter Karen L. Edwards Ovid and the Renaissance Body. Ed. by Goran V. Stanivukovic. Toronto, Buffalo, NY, and London: University of Toronto Press. 2001. vii+ 281 pp. $65; ?45. ISBN 0-8020-3515-9. In his introduction to Ovid and the Renaissance Body Goran V. Stanivukovic asserts that the vivid corporeality of Ovid's poetry, with its 'ambivalence, anxiety, pain and pleasure' (p. 6), provided a literary resource which enabled Renaissance writers to engage forcefully with issues of selfhood and the body. The body which MLR, 98.4, 2003 955 is most in evidence in this introductory piece is a straw man, a composite of all earlier commentators on the Renaissance Ovidian tradition?'a pretheoretical phase of scholarship on Ovid' (p. 9)?whose disjecta membra are disdainfully scattered to the four winds. Whereas A. B. Taylor's Shakespeare's Ovid: The 'Metamorphoses' in the Plays and Poems (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000) is mere 'source criticism', Ovid and the Renaissance Body heralds a...

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