The Protestant Reformation in Sixteenth-Century Italy. Salvatore Caponetto , Anne C. Tedeschi , John Tedeschi
As that might suggest, Braden's own thread is stretched very thin indeed. Yet it is the chapter on Sor Juana to which I would send a student, far sooner than most of the earlier material. Braden has "striven for an approach which will make the phenomenon of Petrarchism intelligible as a whole" (xii), and twenty-nine pages of notes to what is in fact a rather short book show that he has read widely in European Petrarchist writings and related amorous works, and is familiar with much scholarship in other languages. But his method is essentially narrative and thematic; in the Petrarch chapter this works, based as it is in a solid beginning and a conclusion of great insight. In the central chapter on Petrarchism, however, there is an unnerving lack of control over the material; thus in the space often pages (72-82) we move from Chaucer to Poliziano to Boiardo to Spenser to Cervantes, and because Braden's instinct is to narrate and thematize rather than argue a case, our grip on his original position is quickly lost. This lack of argumentative control also afflicts the final chapter, where above all the excellent brief account of Sor Juana's writings surely should lead us back to to that early insight about isolation from the unimagined. Braden's final words are "What it is like to be in love this way is the elite experience of which the poets write. What it is like to be the object of such love is perhaps no less than the ordinary experience of being human: imagine that this is how God feels about us" (161). Unhappily, we have been left with no sure pathway along the route by which he reached that point. GERMAINE WARKENTIN University of Toronto