Showing like a Queen: Female Authority and Literary Experiment in Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton. Katherine Eggert
exemplify the principles of material transformation that animate his hierarchical yet meritocratic and monist universe." (132). Schoenfeldt provides here, among other tilings, a fascinating account of the role of excrement in heaven, in the creation, and in the preand postlapsarian worlds, offering the useful idea that Milton links the "patterns of eschatology to the rhythms of scatology" (156). An afterward provides a balanced assessment of what might be gained from taking the more wholistic medical theories of the early modern period more seriously than critics have tended to do. In sum, Bodies and Selves provides some salutary correctives to existing critical assumptions about how the early modern body and self were constituted and it offers readings of major texts that reconstruct their obsession with digestion and temperance. MARY THOMAS CRANE Boston College