The Anonymous Renaissance: Cultures of Discretion in Tudor-Stuart England.

Tribble, Evelyn B.

The Anonymous Renaissance: Cultures of Discretion in Tudor-Stuart England By Marcy L. North Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003

Marcy L. North's The Anonymous Renaissance makes an extremely important contribution to studies of early modern print culture, authorship, and canon formation. Carefully argued and readable throughout, North's book challenges teleological arguments about anonymity through a meticulous examination of the evidence for attribution practices in the Renaissance.

North argues that histories of the book have tended to equate the advent of printing with the decline of anonymity, with the latter mode consigned to medieval practices prior to the emergence of a concept of possessive authorship. Such assumptions also inform the highly influential theoretical work of Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault, whose arguments about authorship, according to North, "perpetuated another questionable but very popular assumption, that anonymity is the original state and natural characteristic of all writing" (38). Throughout the book, North argues against what she terms "a binary history of early authorship" (3), claiming instead that "early modern authors and book producers utilized anonymity as an alternative source of authority, privilege, control, text presentation, and even identity" (33). Rather, "print opened up new possibilities for anonymity" (29). This is a provocative claim, but one that North buttresses with a plethora of evidence taken from texts ranging from printed miscellanies, to religious controversies, to manuscript commonplace books. North stresses throughout the "functionality" (5) of anonymity. Far from a mere "bibliographic inconvenience" (5), anonymity was a flexible and useful mode that was employed in a wide variety of settings in the Renaissance.

North surveys these contexts throughout seven chapters. Chapter 1, "Medieval Anonymity and the 'Modern Author,'" follows upon the introduction in establishing the historical and methodological parameters of the study. North challenges the common tendency of scholars of the early modern period to posit the medieval period as a convenient other, a backdrop against which the early unfolding of modernity plays out. Indeed, medieval anonymity is itself a convention, often used knowingly, and it not simply a point of departure for the early modern period. Sometimes anonymity is an accident, but at other times it is a deliberate practice, a "conscious gesture" (52).

Chapters 2 and 3 treat "Ignoto and the Book Industry" and "Printed Anonymity and its Readers." The first is a discussion of the variety of agents who used print to construct anonymity through" conventionality" and" ambiguity" (58). Arguing that both attribution and anonymity are collaborative choices made by a variety of agents involved in book production, North here examines the evidence of title pages and other paratextual markers of authorship. She argues that title pages provide new modes for anonymity as well as new modes for attribution. Following this section is an entertaining and instructive section on the use of initials as attribution, a common practice that should not be read transparently. In the printed miscellany The Phoenix Nest (1593), initials are social rather than individuating markers; they "combine the best of identity and discretion" (72). Similarly the use of pointedly anonymous signing conventions such as "Ignoto" have their own complex significations and demonstrate how the title page can be used for a variety of rhetorical functions. Certainly the name of the author became increasingly common on the title page, particularly in circumstances in which the name could sell the book. This point is well known, but North's contribution here is to stress that anonymity could be just as marketable as signed authorship, and that many attribution practices in fact existed between attribution and naming: anagrams, initials, Latin names, and pseudonyms are all examples.

Yet this device was not without its detractors, and these are taken up in the next chapter. North identifies three types of such detractors: those who viewed anonymity as a "dangerous new convention"; those who justified "elite and courtly conventions of anonymity," and, finally, the example of Andrew Maunsell, who attempted a full catalog of English books and thus was faced with practical difficulties of attribution. The first set of examples is taken from religious controversy, where anonymity is equated with cowardice, and the second from literary productions, including Spenser's The Shepheardes Calendar and Puttenham's The Arte of English Poesie (published, it must be noted, anonymously). These latter texts provide examples of what North nicely calls "ambitious anonymity" (108), the use of anonymity to both conceal and reveal the complex social affiliations of the text. These arguments are convincing, if not strikingly original. The real payoff of this chapter comes in the original and exciting examination of Andrew Maunsell's 1595 Catalogue of English Printed Books. Maunsell's catalog is an alphabetical listing of all books, old and new, save for recent books written by "fugitive Papistes" (110). "Books which are without authors" are cataloged either by title or by "matter" or by both (110). Where initials only are available, the printer provides blank spaces for filling in the full names, should they become known. North notes Maunsell does not equate "old" books with anonymity, in part because so many of the "new" books are also anonymous. Anonymity is not treated as a particular problem and Maunsell "gives us a sense of the ease with which anonymity conventions fit in with those of naming" (115). As North admits, the evidence from Maunsell could be marshaled against her argument, since the blank spaces do seem to construct anonymity as a lack, to be remedied as possible. Taken together, however, the three sections of this chapter demonstrate the ubiquity of anonymity, and its diverse functions within a complex system of attribution.

Chapters 4 and 5 discuss the uses of anonymity in religious controversies, Catholic and Protestant. It must be said that the brief chapter 4 seems somewhat repetitive of the material in the first section of chapter 3 about the moral valence of anonymity, although the point is here expanded to include a discussion of the awareness of the usefulness of the complexity and ambiguity of anonymity. Chapter 5 extends this discussion into Puritan controversies, particularly the infamous Martin Marprelate controversy. The Marprelate controversy is a special case because of sharply delineated voice of the pseudonymous Martin. As North argues, "Along with Piers, Colin, and Pasquil, Martin came to symbolize a distinct authorial personality that functioned independent of an actual author's name" (134). She concludes that "in this case, anonymity is an identity" (157). I found the distinctions between anonymity and pseudonymity a bit hard to grasp here. North argues that the Marprelate tracts are distinct "because they authored anonymity with such flair, humor, and self-consciousness" (158), but surely this is a description of the effect of pseudonomity, the taking of a distinctive name for satiric purposes. While I admire North's determination not to create a taxonomy of anonymity, the practice of pseudonymity seems to me enough of a special case to merit more sustained treatment than it receives in the book.

The last two chapters are particularly valuable and make extremely important contributions to the study of canon formation, particularly around the lyric and issues of gender. North deliberately leaves the discussion of manuscript anonymity for the latter sections of the book, in an effort to "dispel any myths that anonymity always originates in manuscript and sneaks into print as an unwelcome guest" (159). As North demonstrates, anonymity and attribution existed in fluid modes of exchange, with compilers of manuscript collections sometimes omitting attributions from named printed works. North focuses on the "conventions of anonymity" (160) that structured literary coterie culture, arguing that the dialogue between "identification and discretion" (161) was essential to its construction. This chapter poses a "theoretical conundrum" (162) in that it is necessary to attribute in order to fully understand anonymity. This conundrum is in my view more apparent than real. Thankfully North does not dismiss the importance of the scholarship of attribution, but she uses this work in the service of understanding the "social dynamic" of attribution practices rather than identifying particular authors. Accordingly, North focuses her attention on the attribution practices of compilers rather than on authorial identification.

A similar strategy marks the final, and most original, chapter: "Reading the Anonymous Female Voice." If, as the popular saying goes, "Anonymous was a woman," how does one determine which "anons" are gendered female? As North points out, much work on this question has been structured by somewhat dubious assumptions, most notably the idea that one can determine with precision a "female voice." North thus identifies a kind of theoretical impasse 'whereby the identities that enable us to analyze the function of anonymity partly distort our view of that function" (220). Her solution is elegant: she poses instead the question of the relationship between anonymity and gender and asks how anonymity "creates the illusion of female authorship." This method produces some interesting results and allows North to examine a number of genres that have been ruled out of court by anthologies seeking so-called authentic female voices. These include the anonymous lament, the seductress poem, the rebuff/reply poem, and the defense of women poem. These have often been excluded from the emerging canon of female-authored poems because of "commonsense" judgments that such poems are likely to be male ventriloquism of the female voice, a suspicion particularly strong for seductress poems that seem to play to male fantasies. Similarly, there has been a reluctance to accept "anonymous poems that are gendered paratextually" (249). North concludes this important chapter by positing a new methodology that extends Margaret Ferguson's argument about interpreting in the absence of clear gender identification: "we must learn to interpret without knowing for certain that the author is a woman, but also, I would add, without assuming that the author of a less feminine voice is male" (255). To do so, it is necessary to question internal markers of the feminine and repudiate the assumption that "all women authors will speak for and as women" (255). North thus attempts to disarticulate the female voice from female authorship. Anonymity, then, should be seen not as an "obstacle between the voice and the author but as a function of both conventions" (256).

North's work will be highly influential in the field of early modern print culture, but it also makes important contributions to studies of periodization, early modern religious discourse, authorship studies, canon formation, and gender studies. She combines strong writing and argumentation, clear methodology, fine close reading, and impressive archival work, and the reader of The Anonymous Renaissance comes away with a radically altered sense of the significance of "anon."

Reviewer: Evelyn B. Tribble