EVENTEENTH- ENTURY EWS SPRING - SUMMER 2018 Vol. 76 Nos. 1&2 Including THE NEO-LATIN NEWS Vol. 66, Nos. 1&2 SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY NEWS VOLUME 76, Nos. 1&2 SPRING-SUMMER, 2018 SCN, an official organ of the Milton Society of America and of the Milton Section of the Modern Language Association, is published as a double issue two times each year with the support of the English Departments of Texas A&M University. SUBMISSIONS: As a scholarly review journal, SCN publishes only commis- sioned reviews. As a service to the scholarly community, SCN also publishes news items. A current style sheet, previous volumes’ Tables of Contents, and other information all may be obtained via our home page on the World Wide Web. Books for review and queries should be sent to: Prof. Donald R. Dickson English Department 4227 Texas A&M University College Station, Texas 77843-4227 E-Mail: [email protected] http://scn.sites.tamu.edu ISSN 0037-3028 SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY NEWS EDITOR DONALD R. DICKSON Texas A&M University ASSOCIATE EDITORS Livia Stoenescu, Texas A&M University Michele Marrapodi, University of Palermo Patricia Marie García, University of Texas E. Joe Johnson, Clayton State University WEBMASTER Megan N. Pearson, Texas A&M University EDITORIAL ASSISTANTS Megan N. Pearson, Texas A&M University Ava Robicheaux, Texas A&M University contents volume 76, nos. 1&2 ........................... spring-summer, 2018 Anne James, Poets, Players, and Preachers: Remembering the Gunpowder Plot in Seven- teenth-Century England. Review by Brent Nelson ........................... 1 Angela Andreani, The Elizabethan Secretariat and the Signet Office: The Pro- duction of State Papers, 1590-1596. Review by Dennis Flynn ........... 5 Catherine Gimelli Martin, Milton’s Italy: Anglo-Italian Literature, Travel, and Reli- gion in Seventeenth-Century England. Review by John Mulryan ....... 8 David Marno, Death Be Not Proud: The Art of Holy Attention. Review by Darryl Tippens ................................................................ 12 Judith Scherer Herz, ed., John Donne and Contemporary Poetry: Essays and Poems. Review by Nicholas D. Nace ............................................... 18 William E. Engel, Rory Loughnane and Grant Williams, eds., The Memory Arts in Renaissance England: A Critical Anthology. Review by Anita Gilman Sherman .................................................. 25 Sarah C. E. Ross, Women, Poetry, & Politics in Seventeenth-Century Britain. Review by Lissa Beauchamp Desroches ......................................... 30 Owen Davies, ed. The Oxford Illustrated History of Witchcraft and Magic. Review by Jessica L. Malay .............................................................. 37 Jacob F. Field, London, Londoners and the Great Fire of 1666: Disaster and Recovery. Review by Ty M. Reese ...................................................... 42 Craig Spence, Accidents and Violent Death in Early Modern London, 1650-1750. Review by Larry Bonds.................................................................... 44 Johann Valentin Andreae, Reipublicae Christianopolitanae descriptio (1619). Christenburg: Das ist: ein schön geistlich Gedicht (1616), ed. and trans. Frank Böhling and Wilhelm Schmidt-Biggemann. Review by Donald R. Dickson ....................................................... 50 Henriette de Coligny, comtesse de La Suze. Élégies, chansons et autres poésies, ed. Mariette Cuénin-Lieber. Review by Adrianna M. Paliyenko ..... 53 Louise Bourgeois, Midwife to the Queen of France: Diverse Observa- tions. Translated by Stephanie O’Hara. Ed. Alison Klairmont Lingo. Review by Barbara A. Goodman ..................................................... 56 Alistair Malcolm, Royal Favouritism and the Governing Elite of the Spanish Monarchy, 1640-1665. Review by Carl Austin Wise ....................... 59 Alain Dufour et al., Correspondance de Théodore de Bèze. T. XLIII (1603-1605). Review by Jill Fehleison ................................................................. 62 Nicole Reinhardt, Voices of Conscience: Royal Confessors and Political Counsel in Sev- enteenth-Century Spain and France. Review by Brian Sandberg ........ 65 Dalia Judovitz, Georges de La Tour and the Enigma of the Visible. Review by Heather Mcpherson ...................................................... 69 Giancarla Periti, In the Courts of Religious Ladies: Art, Vision, and Pleasure in Italian Renaissance Convents. Review by Allie Terry-Fritsch ....... 72 Xavier F. Salomon and Letizia Treves, Murillo: The Self-Portraits. Review by Livia Stoenescu .............................................................. 77 Brian Howell, The Curious Case of Jan Torrentius. Review by Megan N. Pearson ......................................................... 80 Neo-Latin News ................................................................................... 83 reviews 1 Anne James. Poets, Players, and Preachers: Remembering the Gunpowder Plot in Seventeenth-Century England. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2016. 412 pp. with 8 illus. $85. Review by Brent Nelson, University of Saskatchewan. The story of the Gunpowder Plot and its importance and remark- able endurance in the English calendar are well known. Less well known, it turns out, is the remarkable cultural industry it spawned in the political manipulations and negotiations of the long seventeenth century. Anne James’s magnificent study tells the story of the complex interplay between government attempts to maintain an official version of these events in the public memory and the inevitably divergent interpretations, both official and non-official, literary and non-literary, that sprung up around the Plot’s anniversary remembrances. James’s main contribution to scholarship on the Gunpowder Plot is her focus on genre—specifically, how this contested event led to generic adap- tation and modification—with a secondary interest in audience and reception, specifically, how these representations enabled audiences to engage in the interpretation and meaning-making opportunities of these annual commemorations. Thus, a third interest is to see these forms of cultural engagement as eruptions of a nascent public sphere (building on the work of Rebecca Lemon and others), where interest and engagement by the public in political events is assumed, but where representation of these events often escapes official control by the state, leading to generic adjustment and modification and opportunities for various public voices to present differing versions of these events and their meaning for the English nation. After laying a clear roadmap for her study in an introductory chapter, James establishes historical context in chapter two, outlining the way in which King James developed a culture of commemoration to disseminate a providential view of England’s Protestant history and identity. This history begins with Queen Elizabeth and her govern- ment’s use of printed material, alongside other public channels (chiefly the pulpit), to contain and control public knowledge and opinion on key moments of national deliverance in forging a national memory through occasional acts of thanksgiving. North of the border, in re- sponse to a threat of his own in the Gowrie conspiracy, King James 2 seventeenth-century news of Scotland adopted and adapted this tradition, adding the crucial element of annual celebration. In merging and consolidating these traditions in the Gunpowder Plot anniversary within the national calendar and collective consciousness, James saw opportunity to me- morialize the founding of a new national identity in a unified England and Scotland. Attempts to shape public memory through sermons, liturgies, and official printed accounts, however, were from the start undermined by competing voices in print and pulpit that engaged and involved the public in remembering and interpreting political events. While King James was able to knit these English and Scottish traditions in the annual Gunpowder Plot remembrances, he and his successors were not so able to maintain an official narrative or control the form and tack these remembrances would take. Chapter three demonstrates King James’s failure to control the narrative of events with an examination of how the theatre evoked, alluded to, and invited reinterpretation of the Plot and its aftermath (in particular the spectacle of the plotters’ trials) and raised questions about the motives of the conspirators and the response of the King and his advisors. This chapter looks at how the trials and official representations of them were shaped by dramatic convention (particularly tragedy), and in turn, how the stage itself adopted and adapted its own theatri- cal conventions to interrogate that official narrative. James examines three plays written and performed within a year of the Plot—John Day’s The Isle of Gulls, Ben Jonson’s Volpone, and Thomas Dekker’s Whore of Babylon—and how they responded to the Plot and to each other, the first two adopting a satiric mode to echo suspicions of Cecil’s motives and handling of the Plot, and the latter resurrecting Eliza- bethan allegory to question James’ role and efficacy in managing the Catholic threat. Critique of this failure to contain the threat posed by the conspirators is the central theme in the author’s extended analysis of Jonson’s Catiline, his Conspiracy. In Sylla’s ghost, which opens the play, Jonson adapts the conventional ghost of Elizabethan theater as an elusive specter of ambition-fueled rebellion and destruction whose threat is expressed in