750 Reviews of books

5 will certainly be the point of reference on the concept for English-speaking art
historians for the foreseeable future. The remaining chapters addresses the various
strategies that Barocci used to imbue his paintings with vaghezza, that is, how he used
sensual appeal to lure the spectator into his pictures. Earlier artists – notably Mich-
elangelo – had of course used beautiful nude bodies to do just this, but such practices
faced increasing censure from the church, fearing they would distract less discerning
viewers from the message of salvation and fuel Protestant criticisms against images.
Barocci cultivated instead a ‘chastened vaghezza’ by creating images that exerted a
sensual allure on the viewer but were without the risk of indecorousness.
The material presented in Part 2 is among the strongest of the book, and will do much
to give the reader a greater appreciation of the sensitivity, complexity, and, indeed,
allure of Barocci’s art. However, the editorial decision to divide the book into two parts
means that there is some repetition of ideas in this section, and divisions that leave it up
to the reader to synthesize the full implications of the argument. The part of the book
that discuss the origins and conception of Barocci’s celebrated Madonna del Popolo, for
example, is separated by some seven chapters from the discussion of its colour.
Nonetheless, the implications of Lingo’s work are far-reaching. At the very least, he
has allowed us to see Barocci through contemporary eyes – not as a forerunner of the
Baroque or as a latecomer to Renaissance tradition, but as a cognizant and highly
attentive artist who, rather than passively being ‘influenced’ by the achievements of
Renaissance tradition, critically engaged, modified, critiqued, and transformed that
heritage into something at once intimately familiar and dazzlingly new.
One question that looms over the text – and one that Lingo was perhaps wise to avoid
so as not to distract from his primary argument – is the implications of his thesis for
those other great reformers of Cinquecento art, the Carracci. Indeed, in both cases one
sees the same rejection of the maniera of Vasari or Bronzino matched with a deliberate
effort to unite the traditions of Raphael, Titian, and Correggio with the ‘maniera divota’
of Perugino or Francia. In other words, Lingo’s view of Barocci offers a parallel – and
indeed earlier – solution to the same crisis, and the overlapping narratives certainly
must at the very least complicate our understanding of the Carracci reform.
This broader question aside, Lingo’s reassessment of Barocci’s art and legacy could
not come at a better time, with a major exhibition of Barocci and his followers
anticipated in Urbino, St Louis and London in 2012, and this stimulating and original
work will surely play a central role in shaping the discussion which will surround
this event.

Portland State University, Portland, Oregon Jesse Locker

Nancy Selleck, The Interpersonal Idiom in Shakespeare, Donne, and Early Modern Culture.
Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. 240 pp. £50.00. ISBN 978-
1403999061 (hb).

The image of ‘Martha Reproving her Sister Mary’ appears at once provocative and
utterly at home on the cover of Nancy Selleck’s The Interpersonal Idiom in Shakespeare,
 Reviews of books 751
Donne, and Early Modern Culture. The confrontation between a busy Martha, and Mary
at her mirror, opens a world of binary relations: physicality and abstraction, depen-
dence and autonomy, objectivity and subjectivity. All of these are engaged in the book,
which offers a timely re-examination of Renaissance articulations of selfhood and the
fundamental dyad of self and other.
Selleck effectively reproves early modern scholarship for its chronic neglect of the
presence of others in early modern culture following a longstanding, and somewhat
narcissistic, fascination with autonomous selfhood. ‘Subjectivity’, she maintains, ties
even new work on intersubjectivity to a one-person model of experience that blinds
critics to the more radical understanding of self readily available in the period’s
language of selfhood. Her main premise is that the Renaissance recognized selves as a
function of other selves. The ‘self’ she locates in various Renaissance texts becomes a self
only interpersonally as it is objectified for others. These are not the others that ‘historicist’
literary criticism has led us to expect (threatening strangers, ciphers of otherness):
Selleck directs attention to more familiar, even intimate, others, who constitute a basic
social context. Nor is this objectification as we commonly think it: it appears here not
as a threat to selfhood, but as its basic and natural framework. The Renaissance ‘self’
is typically an object, a thing. But one ‘has’ a self, in Cressida’s borrowed phrase, only
in as much as it ‘resides’ with significant, proximate others, in their experience. The
friend or lover as alter ipse is the quintessential case of this other-focused process. It is
when the self is made an object of another that the other emerges, tentatively, as a
subject. Before it is imagined as a property of the self, selfhood is a thing improvised,
negotiated, shared in a social fabric, that exists only in a process of ‘ongoing exchange
between contingent selves’ (3).
Compelling as this theory is, Selleck’s book is not oriented toward what the Renais-
sance knew about selfhood (the possibilities of an interpersonal self emerging in
psychoanalytic theory and research are confined to an epilogue). Its focus being not
the interpersonal self but the interpersonal idiom, it examines the way specific speak-
ers strive to articulate selfhood in language, which starts with a thorough
re-examination of English early modern (and modern) vocabularies of identity.
Selleck takes Shakespeare and Donne as her primary authorities and test cases,
with some attention also paid to Spenser and Jonson. But it is important for her
argument that these exemplary voices belong to particular speakers engaged in a
debate abut language and selfhood. She aims to recover a moment before the
language settled into a single, naturalized mode of conceiving identity and shows
these writers resisting conventions of subjective authority that were available in the
period, though, her chapter on word use suggests, not yet dominant. Their efforts
testify to the problems and complexities of forging a dialogized, interpersonal
identity.
Selleck ranges through a rich, if familiar, mix of texts, embracing devotional litera-
ture, polemics from the querelle des femmes, and treatises on medicine, faculty psychol-
ogy, and optics, as well as drama and lyric poetry, which are opened up to each other
through an ingenious discussion of humoral theory. Chapters explore the psychophysi-
ology of acting and the humoral body, premodern visual theories of mirroring and
lyric subjectivity, and women’s perceived inconstancy as a problem of human identity.
752 Reviews of books
The unfolding of her argument is slow, but surprising. To change the way words are
heard, requires fine distinctions and judicious repetition and Selleck’s writing is often
as dense as it is weighted. Long, unremittingly careful chapters revisit both terminology
and material (often from a small core of particularly amenable Shakespearean plays)
and the reformulation of points can feel more confusing than illuminating. But her
circuitous approach leads into unforeseen places, ending with a strikingly fresh and
in-depth reading of the complex field of woman’s constancy. A detailed index helps
the reader find ways back through her argument, the intricacy and concentration of
which reveal the book’s origins in a PhD thesis. The end product is a strange mixture
of restraint and ambition, but does not disappoint on either count.
Far more than a study of ‘the interpersonal’ in Renaissance texts, The Interpersonal
Idiom offers to help us recover a lost way of speaking and thinking about the self that
is not locked in an unproductive self-other dyad. Anyone encountering the Renais-
sance language of ‘selves’, ‘persons’, ‘characters’, ‘properties’, ‘parts’ will find useful
insights gathered together in her chapter on word use. Scholars of all periods working
with a modern discourse of subjectivity, identity, and the individual may also want to
examine her arguments. With its combination of theoretical sophistication and sensi-
tive specific reading, the book speaks most clearly to academics engaged with similar
texts and questions, but it will certainly be of broad interest to others working in the
period. Students bewildered by an unhappy, alienating legacy of structuralist and new
historicist thought about self and other may also be excited, and challenged, by her
work. While Selleck’s argument emerges from engagement with proximate others,
whose importance she notes, and is clearly expressive of a general mood in academia
(trumpeted as an ‘interpersonal turn’, 15), the originality and power of her
re-evaluation of the question of the self has the potential to initiate new research and
thinking in various fields and periods. The final value of this work will reside with those
others.

Queen Mary, University of London Colette Gordon