L'exercice de l'âme vertueuse. Marie Le Gendre , Colette H. WinnCabinet des saines affections. Madeleine de L'Aubespine, Colette H. Winn
breech. If Zayas reluctantly accepts patriarchy, as Brownlee asserts, her novellas also reveal a longing for powerful institutions that might control petty family tyrants. The second chapter offers close readings of five novellas in order to demonstrate Zayas's concept of character as a "changing conglomeration of subjectpositions" (33). Although the novellas in which women are victims of violence have received most critical attention, Brownlee constructively points out that Zayas's female characters encompass not only innocent victims, but resourceful avengers, lascivious adulteresses, and cruel sadists. Her intraand extra-diegetic characters alike defy stereotypical formulations of gender, race, sexuality, and class. One of her male narrators, for example, proves to be the best apologist for women, while one of the women narrators is the most misogynistic. Chapter three considers the impact of an expanded reading public on Zayas's narrative and proposes that the pornographic details of some novellas may be the result of new private reading practices, which afforded readers secret, transgressive pleasures. Brownlee acknowledges that Zayas was a shrewd marketing strategist who exploited her audience's appetite for broadside sex and violence, but she disagrees with historian Jose Antonio Maravall, who characterized her as an exploitative, reactionary, popularizer. The escapism of her fiction, Brownlee implies, is of a different kind — readers are invited to explore alternative subjectivities and to interrogate social norms. In her final chapter Brownlee analyzes how Zayas complicates the Renaissance exemplum. In the frame story of Zayas's second collection, Los desengahos amorosos, the hostess, Lisis, obliges her female guests to tell a story illustrating the perfidy of men against women. But as Brownlee reveals, the "exemplary" narratives, rather than clarifying and concretizing the assertions made by the narrators at Lisis's behest, offer instead a Baroque excess of interpretive possibilities. This is a balanced and thoughtful book that wisely urges us to read Zayas attentively and avoid rushing to grand generalizations that are all too often confounded at the next turn in Zayas's narrative labyrinth. ALISON WEBER University of Virginia