De Republica Anglorum: Or, History with the Politics Put Back

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and “De Republica Anglorum: or, History with the Politics Put Back” (they are found in Elizabethan Essays [1994] and should be read in conjunction with the commentary collected in John F. McDiarmid, ed., Monarchical Republic of Early Modern England [2007]). As it turns out, these two major historians of Puritanism, who have both contemplated the subject at length (but not it alone), have inde- pendently come to analogous conclusions. Hall and Collinson share the same emphasis on voluntarism in places where it would not be expected, the same ability to synchronize the doings of a particular lo- cality with the workings of the upper reaches of the larger society, the same boldness of imagination and gleefully untidy organization. The arguments of both men are provocations: beginnings, not summings up. As such, they deserve to be taken up by the rising generation as their predecessors’ careers approach their own end times.

Stephen Foster is Distinguished Research Professor Emeritus of His- tory at Northern Illinois University and the author of The Long Argument: English Puritanism and the Shaping of New England Culture, 1570–1700 (1991).

Denman Ross and American Design Theory. By Marie Frank. (Lebanon, N.H.: University Press of New England, 2011. Pp. xiv, 322.$85.00 cloth; $39.00 paper.) Thoroughly researched, comprehensive, and engagingly written, Denman Ross and American Design Theory reveals the life, times, and “pure design” theory of early twentieth-century artist Denman Waldo Ross. Making full use of Ross’s teaching materials, letters, and diaries as well as his students’ lecture notes, Marie Frank sheds light on a man who maintained afﬁliation with the conservative Society of Arts and Crafts in Boston yet collected paintings by the avant-garde British designer Arthur Heygate Mackmurdo. Marie Frank’s treat- ment of this connoisseur, writer, teacher, and design theorist should appeal to a broad audience on multiple levels. The book is a biog- raphy of an individual obsessed with beauty and his contemporaries’ perceptions of it, and the book is a sociocultural history of Boston that demonstrates how its many institutions provided a milieu that enabled Ross to devise and promote his theory. The book is an intel- lectual history that demonstrates the impressive network of thinkers and theorists among whom Ross circulated, and it is a chronicle of how a younger generation built upon his legacy and dispersed

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his convictions about the role of beauty and design in everyday life. The theme of paradox runs throughout this monograph, character- izing not only Ross’s personality but also his theories and the envi- ronment in which he worked. For instance, Frank argues that though Gilded Age Boston was “anachronistic and conservative” (pp. 2–3), Ross and his Bostonian network played a critical role in the devel- opment of twentieth-century American modernism. A classicist who extolled the virtues of Plato, Aristotle, and the Renaissance, Ross nevertheless emphasized the importance of abstraction, objectivity, and geometry, anticipating the approach taken later by the European avant-garde. “Ross’s ability to combine seeming opposites,” Frank ex- plains, “incurred both ardent devotion and scathing criticism” from followers and friends (p. 13). He did nothing halfway, demanding as much of himself as he did of his students, associates, and culture in general. However, as Frank says, “Ross made the practice and appre- ciationofartnot...ameans to its own end but [a] means toward a liberal education that improved the individual and, through the individual, society” (p. 242). Such leanings provide one justification for Ross’s support of Boston’s Society of Arts and Crafts and its campaign for design reform. Frank’s book is a model of lucid organization and careful scholarship: the introduction’s sampling of tantalizing details about Ross’s life, times, and work leaves the reader eager to delve into the body of the text. Though Ross earned his doctorate in history, the first chapter tells us, his greater passions were art history, painting, traveling, and collecting. His father’s death in 1884 and a subsequent inheritance gave Ross the freedom to pursue these interests. Chapter 2 outlines the specifics of Ross’s theory of “pure design” as well as his goal “to define, classify, and explain the phenomenon of Design” (p. 81). Though reviewers criticized A Theory of Pure Design for its dry tone when it was published in 1907, Frank’s account of the theory’s origins is fascinating for the way in which it elucidates how Ross explored the interrelationships of symmetry, harmony, tone, space, and geometry in a way that might fuel the designer’s imagination, while fostering discrimination and judgment. The ensuing chapters enrich our understanding of Ross’s theory by placing it within a broad, international context. Chapter 3 examines how the emerging psychology of perception helped shape Ross’s conviction that scientific fact must undergird discrimination and judgment, and the following chapter explores the emergence

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of geometry as a universal design language at the dawn of the twentieth century. The fifth chapter looks at the course Ross taught at Harvard—“the first design theory course in an American architectural curriculum” (p. 178)—and the impact of his theory on students. Ross’s use of physical objects from his immense collection of decorative arts and textiles to illustrate certain principles was an especially innovative aspect of the course. The final chapter addresses Ross’s widespread influence on art educators, design reformers, and museum curators. As Frank says, Ross’s reformist notions “appealed to early twentieth-century art educators eager to extend the value of art practice in a general curriculum, Arts and Crafts artisans eager to counter mass production and in- dustrialization, and museums eager to define their purpose” (p. 242). The pedagogy he disseminated through his classes—the list of students enrolled in his summer course reads like a “who’s who” of major figures and communities associated with the Arts and Crafts movement—shaped the curricula of leading art, design, and architecture schools across the country. His reach extended not only to museum personnel up and down the East Coast but also to those in the Midwest. However, despite this early acceptance, Ross’s theory lost its luster in the 1920s. As Frank concludes in the epilogue, art appreciation gave way to art history; design reformers’ recommendation to study history and nature lost favor as modernists embraced the Machine Aesthetic. The unification of art, craft, architecture, and design fragmented as specialization increased. Frank says, “At the same time that [Ross’s] pedagogy contributed to the reception of abstract art, it also seemed wedded to tradition. . . . [Its] inclusiveness . . . stood in complete opposition to the modernist rejection of the past and the sameness of the international style” (p. 249). So firm was Ross’s conviction in the rightness of his theory that he was unable to adapt it to a new age. Denman Ross and American Design Theory excels not only in its content but also in its clarity and structure. It is not without its flaws: in this first printing there are the inevitable, but happily few, typographical errors and misspellings, and some individuals—English designer and philosopher William Morris and Boston architect and critic C. Howard Walker—deserve more than just a passing reference. Nevertheless, this book is a fine critical analysis of a man and a theory. Both still have, as Frank expertly points out, relevancy today to theorists, cultural historians, design practitioners, and educators.

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Beverly K. Brandt is the author of The Craftsman and The Critic: Deﬁning Usefulness and Beauty in Arts and Crafts–Era Boston (University of Massachusetts Press, 2009). She teaches design history, theory, and criticism at The Design School at Arizona State University.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman: New Texts, New Contexts. Edited by Jennifer S. Tuttle and Carol Farley Kessler. (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2011. Pp. viii, 266.$49.95.) Jennifer S. Tuttle and Carol Farley Kessler open their edited collection on Charlotte Perkins Gilman with a call for feminist recovery work that will not only expand upon but also revisit and renovate pre- vious understandings of women’s writing. In Gilman’s case, the first part of this project is already well under way. Three book-length bi- ographies and more than seventy critical essays have been published in the past five years alone, and a dozen new editions of her works have appeared since the late 1990s. The need to renovate our critical paradigms, however, persists, for a large majority of the new criticism still focuses on Gilman’s iconic short story “The Yellow Wallpaper” and utopian feminist novel Herland; and this recent scholarship still tends toward the same gender political themes for which these works were enshrined forty years ago under the aegis of second-wave feminism. With Charlotte Perkins Gilman: New Texts, New Contexts, Tuttle and Kessler have set out to answer their own feminist call by offering readers a collection that brings attention to neglected works and aspects of Gilman’s career and that reconsiders her canonical texts in light of new questions, connections, and conversations. Charlotte Perkins Gilman comprises eleven essays by established and new Gilman scholars, organized into sections titled “Overviews,” “New Texts,” and “New Contexts.” Anchoring the collection, Tuttle and Kessler’s introduction develops links among the arguments to come and situates them within the larger field of Gilman studies— its perennial concerns, its new preoccupations, its aporia. Two “Overviews” essays follow—a biographical piece by Denise D. Knight, editor of Gilman’s diaries, and a bibliographic survey by Catherine J. Golden that links dominant trends in Gilman scholarship to de- velopments in the women’s movement and academic feminism. The latter is especially effective in building on the editors’ introduction by highlighting and historicizing problems that later essays will pursue.

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