One of the perennial problems for Renaissance professors interested in furthering student research is how to incorporate scholarship into the classroom. In literary studies, some good resources are available. For instance, Cambridge University Press offers a “companion” series, each volume of which consists of original essays providing overviews of various subjects associated with a writer, a group of writers, a genre, or a movement. Moreover, the Norton Critical Editions pair literary texts with major interpretations of the texts, as well as a general sense of the history of their reception. While both of these sources have their uses, neither aims to immerse readers in the wider sea of Renaissance studies as a whole. To achieve such an immersion, many professors must cobble together course packets (and face copyright issues) or send their students to the library (and deal with interlibrary loan delays).

Reconceiving the Renaissance, a critical reader from Oxford University Press, attempts to fill this publishing gap by collecting in one volume significant critical statements about some of the most pressing topics in Renaissance studies. Emerging from teaching experiences shared by the four editors at Queen’s University Belfast, the anthology includes excerpts from some of the most well-known and influential scholarship of the past three decades. The editors argue that there has been a sea-change in Renaissance studies during this period, and that as a result, the Renaissance has been “reconceived” as an “intensely fraught and turbulent period, in which constructions of class, race, and gender were negotiated, in which doubts and anxieties freely circulated, and in which the very idea of Englishness was thrown into question by local and newly global perspectives” (1). As this quotation suggests, the driving force behind this shift has been theory, which has influenced not only the critical methodologies of those who write about the Renaissance, but also the texts they read and the sorts of questions they ask. The editors make sense of these shifts by organizing the book according to six broad categories at the center of critical debates: “Textuality,” “Histories,” “Appropriation,” “Identities,” “Materiality,” and “Values.” Each category is further divided into various subtopics (e.g., “Theorizing the relationship between text and history,” “Centres and Margins,” “Reading the subversive potential of texts,” etc.), and the selected materials offer several perspectives (not always competing) on each subject.

Taken as a whole, Reconceiving the Renaissance provides a useful tool for the aforementioned professors looking for a way to engage students with contemporary scholarship. Indeed, its primary virtue is that it brings together in one place generous selections from the likes of Stephen Greenblatt, Jonathan Goldberg, Bruce R. Smith, David Scott Kastan, Valerie Traub, Patricia Parker, Louis Montrose, Gail Kern Paster, and numerous others. Moreover, the choice and range of the selections provides enough material to whet the appetites of readers to read the essays in their more complete, originally published form. In this sense, the volume lives up to its promise to act as a primer for major trends in Renaissance studies.
Despite the usefulness of the range of scholarship included, however, the anthology is not without its faults, the most significant being its synecdochical approach to describing Renaissance studies—a tendency to take the part (the most obviously “theorized” part) for the whole. One has the distinct impression, while reading the “General Introduction” and the introductions to each section, that the editors felt a considerable pressure to show how radically the Renaissance has been reconceived since the 1980s. Indeed, occasionally the editors give the impression of being so fascinated by certain scholars, questions, assumptions, and approaches that they are apt to ignore the larger and more varied expanse of the field.

What I am calling the part-for-the-whole approach leaps out most immediately in the editors’ preference for scholarship on drama—especially Shakespeare—to scholarship on non-dramatic literature. The critics who receive the most space more often than not are writing about Shakespeare. On the surface, this choice may not appear all that significant, until one ponders its implications in regard to the central claim of the volume to represent Renaissance studies in totem. In the Textuality section, for example, the editors argue for the instability of Renaissance texts and authors, using Shakespeare’s plays as their primary evidence. As is well-known, during the past twenty years, some Shakespeare scholars have argued that while Shakespeare composed his plays, the other members of his company shaped them during the transition from initial composition to dramatic performance. Later printers and editors functioned as additional collaborators in the transmission of the texts to us, centuries later.

 
The editors of Reconceiving the Renaissance extend the collaboration argument to Renaissance authorship generally: “In the wake of the recognition that making texts is a collaborative process,” they argue, the older belief in recovering a text that is “closest to the author’s ‘original intentions’” “has become almost untenable: no edition can resurrect the author, since there is no author to resurrect, nor can ‘original intentions’ operate as a point of reference” (14). The trouble with this claim, in an anthology that purports to represent the current state of Renaissance studies as a whole, is that it oversimplifies a discussion that becomes increasingly complex as we move out of Shakespeare to consider other writers and other genres. The existence of multiple versions of some texts is by now a commonplace in Renaissance studies; widespread acceptance of the “death of the author” is not. By suggesting that all texts are unstable as well as unbound by authorial intention, the editors in effect silence some significant scholarly endeavors.

 
To cite one example, the ongoing John Donne Variorum Project, now more than twenty years in the making, aims to reconstruct texts of Donne’s poems that are as close as Donne’s lost original holographs as the evidence allows. The variorum textual editors assume the importance of authorial intention; otherwise, why bother laboring to deduce the original placement of commas or the original spellings of words? Yet one cannot call them “throwbacks” to a previous scholarly age because they are at the cutting edge of textual editing. In fact, they were among the first to argue for the multiple presentation of texts in cases where the original textual transmission suggests legitimate competing versions of a text. Here is a case in which the implicit dichotomy of the “new” and the “traditional,” a dichotomy upon which the rhetoric of revisionism rests, breaks down. For every critic who attempts to radicalize the Renaissance, perhaps ten other scholars practice a contextual scholarship that looks more “traditional” in its attempts to recover the Renaissance. Their work is more nuanced than the word “traditional,” in its most pejorative, “theorized” sense, would allow; still, it does not fit easily within the implicit argument of this anthology.

Of course, Selection and Partial Representation are the parents of any anthology. As long as readers keep this lineage in mind, Reconceiving the Renaissance can be a valuable teaching tool. Page for page, dollar for dollar, one would be hard-pressed to find an anthology with so many intriguing selections of Renaissance criticism not confined exclusively to a single author or issue. The book would prove a useful textbook to supplement upper division Renaissance courses or introductory graduate seminars.