Jack Goody, Renaissances

Jack Goody. Renaissances: The One or the Many? Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. x + 322 pp. + 8 color and 2 b/w pls. index. append. chron. bibl. $78 (cl), $27.99 (pbk). ISBN: 978–0–521–76801–6 (cl), 978–0–521–74516– 1 (pbk). As more scholars in the humanities and social sciences incorporate a global perspective into our research and teaching, many of us find ourselves revisiting basic issues of methodology. We worry about the transportability of local schemes of periodization, the perils of over- generalization in writing comparative studies, and the difficulty of moving beyond the classic humanistic framework of “the West and the Rest.” Renaissances: The One or the Many? is Jack Goody’s latest intervention in these issues, part of an ongoing attempt to remedy what he describes as a prevailing ethnocentrism and teleology in the writing of history. Renaissances is essentially one long argument. While the Italian Renaissance was unique in European history, Goody maintains, it is just one example of a general sociological phenomenon that has occurred in many literate cultures. A written record provides a culture with a means of reading its own past, which can result in an efflorescence of scientific and artistic knowledge. This combination of “looking back” and cultural rebirth is what Goody calls a “renascence.” After an introduction that lays out the basic elements of this thesis, Goody examines examples of cultural efflorescence paired with “looking back” (at one’s own cultural history) or “looking around” (at knowledge from other cultures) in Islam, Judaism, India, and China. Additional chapters recount the non-European contributions to the flowering of European medical knowledge in early modern Montpellier, focusing on Islamic influences, and argue for the global importance of secularization in undermining the dominance of “hegemonic religion” and making renascence possible. Strictly speaking, Renaissances is not a book about the Renaissance: it is instead a comparative study of the phenomenon of sociocultural rebirth throughout world history, both within and outside of Europe. It largely consists of local case studies (some written with Stephen Fennell) that serve as historical laboratories in which Goody tests his thesis, usually by making a high-speed road trip through the history of the literate culture of a particular area of the globe, while keeping an eye out for the major factors he identifies as critical to renascence. Literacy is the seed of cultural efflorescence, he argues, as it provides the means and materials for “looking back.” Economic prosperity and trade nourish the soil by providing leisure time for study of the past, and by fostering commercial relationships that produce contacts with other cultures. These contacts, along with technologies like paper and printing, increase the circulation of both goods and knowledge. Cultures do not fully blossom, however, until they come out of the shadow of the religious hegemony of monotheistic creeds — which (according to Goody) tend to limit the creation of knowledge in the arts and sciences — and into the light of secularism. Not all of these factors occur in all of the cases that Goody explores, and but together they function as a basis for his comparisons. Goody’s prose is elegant, his erudition is astounding, and he rigorously argues his case with clarity and courage. He succeeds more often than not in his effort to replace a Eurocentric account of world history with a more balanced comparative perspective, and he convincingly demonstrates that the Renaissance in Europe was shaped by non-European cultures, which themselves experienced parallel and striking renascences. Despite this, not all readers will be persuaded by Goody’s arguments. Some will worry that the narrative depends on and reifies conceptual binaries, rather than challenging them: arts/sciences, East/West, reason/faith. Some will feel that the ghost of Joseph Needham haunts these pages, as Goody occasionally gets bogged down in proving the non-Western origins of ideas and technologies in his efforts to provide a corrective to Eurocentrism. Some readers may be skeptical of the use of Orhan Pamuk’s fiction to discuss the history of figurative imagery in the Islamic world (118–20 and occasionally thereafter), or take issue with Goody’s characterization of religious hegemony in literate cultures. Read the book anyway. Renaissances makes a strong case for reexamining the way scholars in the humanities and social sciences think about the history of Europe in the world, and it will teach you something regardless of your academic specialty. It is rare to find a monograph that is so passionately argued, and motivated by such a clear authorial vision. Whether the reader agrees or disagrees with Goody’s approach, the book will provide a basis for lively discussion of the issues at stake. It would make an excellent text in graduate or upper-level undergraduate seminars in comparative history, world history, or early modern studies. CARLA S. NAPPI University of British Columbia Federica Anichini. Voices of the Body: Liminal Grammar in Guido Cavalcanti’s Rime. Interkulturelle Begegnungen 6. Munich: Martin Meidenbauer, 2009. 197 pp. append. bibl. €39.90. ISBN: 978–3–89975–131–4. Fedrica Anichini’s volume on Guido Cavalcanti’s poetry, the Rime, is an excellent scholarly work. It summarizes and analyzes previous attempts to explain, clarify, and untangle its many difficulties and obscurities, while providing an exegesis of Cavalcanti’s lyric poetry through the scientific texts that furnished the actual vocabulary of this poet and poetry. These are “the voices of the body,” the terminology for which is provided by Avicenna’s Liber Canonis de medicinis cordialibus cantica, with the aid of the linguistic theories and speculative grammar of the Modists. The author pursues the notion that “sighs and tears are the most recurrent voices of the body echoing throughout the Rime” (80). She gives specific examples throughout Cavalcanti’s poetry, while using as a point of reference the canzone “Donna me prega”. Anichini gives medical explication and analysis for Cavalcanti’s peculiar choice of terms, including sbigottimento, tremore, paura, martiri, as well as significant verbs such as ridere, ancidere, morire, piangere, and others, which are found in the major canzone, as well as in the so called “rime minori”. This work — erudite, extremely well documented, clearly and smoothly written — is an extraordinary tool for the profound comprehension of Cavalcanti`s body of poetry and is a valuable tool for teachers or students of all Italian lyric poetry, whether Sicilian, Stilnovistic, Cavalcantian, or Dantean, because the limpid scientific-medical analysis and explanation of the so-called obscure and philosophical poetry of Cavalcanti illuminates the whole period. The “Appendix” (147–84), taken from the 1584 Giunta edition of Avicenna’s Liber Canonis, allows the reader to check and refer to the exact terminology, vital in the understanding and conceptualization of Cavalcanti’s poetics, including accidentia, anhelitus, animalis (virtus), cerebrum, complexio, cor, imaginativa, intellectus, ira, lachrimae, melancholia, and spiritus. Henceforth readers and scholars will have to consult Anichini’s volume in deciphering Cavalcanti’s poetry. The book contributes greatly to an understanding of Cavalcanti’s poetry as grounded in a belief that perfection is a realm of earthly reality. Citing Verbeke, Anichini states that, “the perceiving subject becomes similar to the form of the perceived object, and in doing so achieves perfection” (62). Cavalcanti`s poetry can be seen as a living proof of this notion, as demonstrated in Anichini’s work; Anichini’s justified belief is that Dante, Boccaccio, and many others after them had created the aura of obscurity surrounding the name of this poet, perhaps intending to be self promotional or self-serving. Anichini points to the extremely important role of the Bolognese scientific and cultural milieu in Cavalcanti’s formation, but also returns to the Sicilians, such as Jacopo da Lentini and Rinaldo d’Aquino, in order to reconnect the language of tears, sighs and trembling to the body language of Cavalcanti’s poetry and even to Dante’s, which leads the author to establish a demonstration of “love connecting logic and physics” (124). The last chapter, dealing with Dante and Guido, is exemplary in establishing this relationship, including what the author calls “the rupture” between the two. This is enhanced and demonstrated by the elements of tears in both poets. What this reader finds unconvincing and perhaps extreme is the notion that Filippo Argenti in Inferno 8 is “the figura of Guido Cavalcanti” (135). This is a bold and hyperbolic reading. The Florentine villain whom Dante labeled “spirito bizzarro” and “spirito maledetto,” as a figura of Guido is pure conjecture. The one who weeps, “uno che piango” (and one must establish what this means because “piango” may have an ambiguous meaning, as one who pays for the sin or seeks pity through tears) is also described as “un pien di fango,” “brutto,” and “lordo tutto” (“covered in mud,” “foul,” and “wholly filthy”) whom finally the pilgrim Dante dispatches saying “Via costà con li altri cani” (“Away there, with the other dogs” Inferno 8.31–42). Would Dante have so characterized his “primo amico” — even though intellectually separated by the “rupture” Anichini well establishes, and whom he later refers to as “Guido vostro” — and worse still

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