Konrad Eisenbichler

Desire and discipline : sex and sexuality in the premodern West

The history of sexuality is one of the newest and fastest-growing areas of scholarly and popular interest. This collection of original essays looks at sexuality in the long stretch between the twelfth and the early seventeenth centuries - a period that remains relatively unexplored, yet one that has deeply informed contemporary ideas about sex. The volume grew out of a conference at the University of Toronto on human sexuality in the medieval and early modern world. Featuring works by world-renowned scholars, it presents a broad cross-section of current research and a diversity of theoretical, methodological, and disciplinary boundaries, including legal history, art history, textual analysis, codicological analysis, and feminist theory. Some essays focus on the universal values of the Church, and highlight the intellectual and religious homogeneity that characterized Europe for much of the period. Others are more localized and look at a specific social and historical context. As a whole the collection points to the ongoing tension between societys desire to control sexuality and peoples need to express it. Informed by contemporary trends in scholarship, including feminism, gay studies, post-colonialism, and deconstruction, these essays introduce scholars to some of the riches that are only now being unearthed in this young discipline.

Benvenuto Cellini: Sculptor, Goldsmith, Writer (review)

and especially by the tabernacle door mentioned above, painted by Gentile for the hybrid Byzantine reliquary that Bessarion had presented to the Scuola della Carita. J. M. Rogers enumerates Mehmed II’s interests in Western culture, evidenced in his purchases and commissions, and Alan Chong carefully reconstructs Gentile’s activities in Istanbul. The authors have chosen to intermingle the catalogue entries between the pages of the essays, rather than following the more standard system of dividing the volume into two parts, one for longer essays and one for specialized entries. Furthermore, inserted between these sections that mix narrative and catalogue style, two additional divisions are inserted, comprising small groups of catalogue entries on “Images of Mehmed” and on “Bellini in Istanbul.” The reasons for this rather unusual organization are not explained, but the result is somewhat confusing. While it may have been an attempt to bring the objects closer to the specific essays that pertain to them, it is in fact disrupting to have the narrative of the essays interrupted, and the reader is likely to skip over the entries to read the continuation of each essay. The mixture also highlights some perhaps unnecessary duplication of information between the essays and the catalog entries. This slightly awkward organization, however, does not diminish the importance of the enterprise. The topic of this catalogue is unusually challenging in its complexity. The conquering of Byzantine Constantinople by the Turks in 1453 and the ensuing intertwining of Byzantine and Ottoman culture in Istanbul is confusing enough. To investigate the Venetian relationship to this world adds another layer that teaches us even more about the phenomenon of cultural exchange. The essays and catalogue entries in this volume do a very useful job in bringing the many threads of the relationship to our attention and in the process giving Gentile Bellini some much-deserved attention. MARTHA DUNKELMAN Canisius College

The Tessera of Antilia. Utopian Brotherhoods and Secret Societies in the Early Seventeenth Century. Donald R. Dickson

Johann Valentin Andreae has been as unlucky in his defenders as in his detractors. He became so dismayed by the reception of “Rosicrucianism” — he called it a ludibrium, a humorous plaything — that he spent much of his life distancing himself, becoming one of the first to repudiate the “vulgar alchemy and sectarian lunacy” thought to characterize the Brotherhood. Frances Yates’s The Rosicrucian Enlightenment (1972) no doubt caused him to rotate in the grave, and her sponsorship again obscured Andreae’s real aims and contribution to seventeenth-century intellectual and religious culture. Now he has the good fortune to be a central subject of this comprehensive reappraisal, which situates his life and work freshly in the complex webs of idealistic and purposeful brotherhoods and societies of early modern Europe. In a tour de force of scholarship, Donald R. Dickson reveals an extraordinary culture of intellectual and religious exchange, operating over decades and throughout Protestant Europe (and beyond, to the North American plantations), pursuing spiritual, social, and scientific betterment in, at times, acutely hostile circumstances. The Tessera of Antilia investigates the activities of numerous remarkable societies and networks with persistence and sophistication, and it demonstrates their significance in the creation of some central institutions of the modern world. As well as drawing on extensive printed materials, Dickson has undertaken formidable research in major manuscript repositories. He cites extensively, and with the assurance of long familiarity, materials in German, Latin, and English. The difficulty of knitting together these collections of correspondence and exchanged tracts should be recognized, as should that of reconstructing the social and intellectual contexts of the correspondents. Even more impressive is the