Women, Rhetoric, and Drama in Early Modern Italy. Alexandra Coller. London: Routledge, 2017. xii + 282 pp. $149.95.
allows one not only to better understand ideas about Sinn developed in a given era, but also to shed light on the specificity of the epoch itself. The choice of the topics mirrors this task by focusing on transitional figures (e.g., Petrarch between Augustine and humanism), on shifting moments in literary genres (e.g., allegory in Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata and in Marino’s Adone), and also on more nuanced definitions of a given epoch (in this last case I would single out Florian Mehltretter’s essay on the hidden sources of the conception of symbol in the French Enlightenment). It is a path of research that German scholarship has been constantly following in the last decades, reflecting often upon the notion of “epistemological rupture” conceived by Gaston Bachelard and then adopted by Michel Foucault, whose name not by chance appears in Franz Penzenstaldler’s essay on the new kind of interest in classical mythology that arose in the French Renaissance, and in Klaus Hempfer’s contribution on allegorical readings of the epic in sixteenth-century Italy. Referring already in the title to the consequences for the theory of interpretation of the allegoresis, Hempfer’s study highlights another important goal of the book—namely, to establish a dialogue between the historical research on the specific problem of allegory/allegoresis and the theoretical reflection upon the transhistorical categories that scholars use in their research. This is probably the most valuable feature of the book, the one that makes it possible to read it as a collection of separate essays each dedicated to an independent topic not even limited to the Renaissance (the last study, for example, is about Elio Vittorini’s Conversazione in Sicilia), and also as a collective attempt to define through a historical approach categories that have challenged theorists from the Middle Ages up to modern and postmodern philosophy. The topics (and also the length) of the essays being extremely diverse, the fact that the volume lacks a comprehensive bibliography is certainly justifiable. However, an index would have been helpful in unifying the themes of the collection, and, more importantly, a bibliography at the end of each article would have made the search for references easier. That lacuna notwithstanding, this is a valuable book whose essays both individually contribute to their fields and collectively provide a model for historically and theoretically grounded research.