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SARAH MAZA
1 Quoted in Brook Thomas, The New Historicism and Other Old-Fashioned Topics
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991), 6–7.
2 See Morris Dickstein, “Literary Theory and Historical Understanding”, Chronicle of Higher
Education (May 23, 2003), section 2, 7–10.
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1980s, by the journal Representations.3 Along with Greenblatt, the editorial board
of Representations included some of the best-known and most influential cultural
historians of the late twentieth century: Natalie Zemon Davis, Lynn Hunt, and
Thomas Laqueur.4 More broadly, the trend in the humanities embodied by
Representations was similar to moves made in social-scientific disciplines in the
later twentieth century away from grand systems and towards the individual, the
particular, and the contingent.5
The commonalities between the New Historicism and the New Cultural
History are striking. Both took shape largely in studies of the same time and
place, early modern Europe from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries; both
evinced a strong interest in similar subject matter, including marginality, popular
and festive culture, gender, sexuality, and crime and violence; and they invoked
the same roster of intellectual authorities, including Marx, Benjamin, Raymond
Williams, Clifford Geertz and Michel Foucault. While the initial group of scholars
and their followers are generally respectful and appreciative of one another, their
endeavors remain to this day quite separate, and have generated, for instance,
almost no published collaborations across fields.
For the purposes of this essay, I focus on the work of Stephen Greenblatt
as the founder and quintessential representative of the movement known as
New Historicism, though obviously in the quarter-century or so of its existence
it has had countless adherents and generated some markedly different kinds
of scholarship.6 My ultimate goal is, of course, not to give a full account of
3 Thomas, The New Historicism, 117–18. See also the description of the journal and its
founders in Catherine Gallagher and Stephen Greenblatt, Practicing New Historicism
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 1–5.
4 This new form of scholarship was given its name with the publication of Lynn Hunt, The
New Cultural History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), a volume which grew
out of a high-profile conference at Berkeley in the mid-1980s. The volume, which includes
contributions by Hunt, Laqueur and others, is dedicated to Natalie Davis.
5 Edward Muir and Guido Ruggiero, eds., Microhistory and the Lost Peoples of Europe
(Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), vii–viii. Muir points to such
comparable developments as microlinguistics, microsociology, and the turn towards the
case study in ethnology (Jane Goodall) and neurology (Oliver Sacks).
6 Some recent works which illustrate both the diversity and the enduring influence of
New Historicism include: Jonathan Goldberg, Sodometries: Renaissance Texts, Modern
Sexualities (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1992); Gail Paster, The Body
Embarrassed: Drama and the Discipline of Shame in Early Modern England (Ithaca, NY:
Cornell University Press, 1993); Garrett Sullivan, The Drama of Landscape: Land, Property,
and Social Relations on the Early Modern Stage (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press,
1998); Valerie Traub, The Renaissance of Lesbianism in Early Modern England (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2002); Wendy Wall, Staging Domesticity: Household Work and
English Identity in Early Modern Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).
stephen greenblatt, new historicism, and cultural history 251
7 Stephen Greenblatt, Learning to Curse: Essays in Early Modern Culture (New York and
London: Routledge, 1990), 3.
8 Stephen Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in
Renaissance England (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1988), 19.
9 Hunter Cadzow, “New Historicism”, in The Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and
Criticism (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), 535; Frank Kermode,
“Art Among the Ruins”, New York Review of Books 48 (July 5, 2001), 47.
10 Lynn Hunt, “History as Gesture; or, the Scandal of History”, in Jonathan Arac and Barbara
Johnson, eds., Consequences of Theory (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press,
1990), 97.
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terms: Greenblatt and company may seem evasive about what they are doing, but
they are clear about what they are not doing.11 The movement’s historicism was
a departure from twentieth-century critical traditions, most importantly from
New Criticism and Poststructuralism, which treated literary texts as aesthetically
autonomous units unrelated, for critical purposes, to the contexts in which
they originated. To Greenblatt and others shaped by the politically engaged
and socially aware academic culture of the 1960s and 1970s, the importance of
connecting literary texts to history seemed sufficiently self-evident as not to
warrant extensive discussion.
Not so with the new in the movement’s label. Greenblatt and other New
Historicists are explicit about rejecting all previous forms of historical criticism.
Their complaint about traditional literary historicism is that it flattens and
impoverishes texts by reducing them to “reflections” or instantiations of their
contexts. The charge holds as true for liberal humanist critics like E. M. W. Tillyard
as it does for those inspired by Marxism, from Ian Watt to Fredric Jameson. Such
“old historicist” moves as proposing a sixteenth-century “Great Chain of Being”
worldview as a key to understanding Shakespeare, or reading texts as expressions
of the rise (Watt) or contradictions (Jameson) of capitalism, are rejected on
the grounds, first, that they make texts monological by assigning them a single
primary meaning, and second, that they assume for literature the passive role
of ideological reflection. Furthermore, traditional uses of history are “totalizing”
in their explicit or implicit view that, for instance, the sixteenth-century belief
in “order and degree”, or the eighteenth-century premium placed on individual
autonomy, were assumptions shared by a whole culture, or at least by a whole
literate class within a culture. Finally, traditional historicism rests on the belief in
a distinction between text and context and in the implicit subordination of the
former to the latter.
The challenge New Historicists faced was, therefore, the following. On the one
hand, they were committed to rejecting a view of literary texts as timeless and/or
self-contained objects of examination. On the other hand, the models available
for historical criticism reduced literature to the role of passive conveyor of a
single dominant meaning. The program of New Historicism became to devise
an approach to literature which made it possible to hold two divergent views,
on the one hand “literature is not timeless, transcendent and autonomous” (a
traditionally materialist position) and on the other hand “literature is not a
passive reflection but an active force in the historical world” (a stance usually
connected to idealism). The challenge was to find a way of connecting literary
11 On the dual negative definition, see Cadzow, “New Historicism”, 535; Thomas, The New
Historicism, 35–8; H. Aram Veeser, ed., The New Historicism (New York: Routledge, 1989),
ix–xvi.
stephen greenblatt, new historicism, and cultural history 253
12 Stephen Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1991), 7.
13 From his review of Gallagher and Greenblatt, Practicing New Historicism, in “Touches of
the Real”, London Review of Books (May 24, 2001), 25.
14 Louis Montrose, “Professing the Renaissance: The Poetics and Politics of Culture”, in
Veeser, ed., New Historicism, 20.
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for ship or “boards” for stage, in the same way as a work of literature is said
to encapsulate a whole historical period. Recourse to chiasmatic constructions
signals a rejection of the concept of historical totality which, for New Historicists,
either does not exist or cannot be known.15 The conscious rejection of totality or
wholeness shapes Greenblatt’s essays, which are characteristically built around
the conjunction of two texts, or textual fragments, one literary and another non-
literary. This chiasmatic approach is telegraphed in the titles of his books and
essays, many of which are conflations of the poetic and the prosaic, as in Marvelous
Possessions, Shakespearean Negotiations, “Fiction and Friction” or “Martial Law
in the Land of Cockaigne”.
A striking example of how Greenblatt creates understanding from unlikely
juxtaposition is the essay “Marvelous Possessions”, the centerpiece of the book of
the same name. The essay opens with an excerpt from Christopher Columbus’s
account of his first voyage, a passage in which he describes taking possession
of the first islands he discovered “by proclamation made and with the royal
standard unfurled, and no opposition was offered to me”.16 No (verbal: y no me
fué contradicho) opposition was offered to Columbus, of course, since even if
the islands’ inhabitants were present they had no idea what he was saying, and
Greenblatt identifies the phrase as a speech-act, a legal ritual which conferred
ownership on the Spanish crown. But Columbus’s speech-act must perforce
recognize the possibility of contradiction even as it denies that any such thing took
place, just as he describes seizing the lands and persons of natives while showering
gratuitous gifts upon them. Greenblatt places these paradoxes in relation to the
Christian rhetoric of one of John Donne’s ‘Holy Sonnets’: “Take mee to you,
imprison mee, for I / Except you’enthrall mee, never shall be free, / Nor ever
chast, except you ravish mee.”
Where more predictable readings of Columbus’s narrative might underscore
the hypocrisy or instrumentalism of Christian imperialism, Greenblatt uses
Donne’s sonnet to draw a homology between two cultural paradoxes: just as
the essence of erotic or religious desire is its own constant frustration, so the act
of colonial possession can never be complete both because it must acknowledge
another and because the very essence of the “marvelous” is to be always beyond
grasp: “Something happens to the discourse of the marvelous when it is linked
to the discourse of the law: the inadequacy of the legal ritual to confer title and
the incapacity of the marvelous to confer possession cancel each other out, and
both the claim and the emotion are intensified by the conjunction.”17 Greenblatt’s
balancing act in this essay is a fine example of his method. By bringing together
15 Thomas, The New Historicism, 7–9; Simpson, “Touches of the Real”, 26.
16 Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions, 52.
17 Ibid., 81.
stephen greenblatt, new historicism, and cultural history 255
a historical narrative and a religious poem, he produces a jolt of insight into the
cultural and emotional logic behind the symmetries of baroque language while
carefully eschewing any broader historical or literary claim. While he provides
a fair amount of information about sixteenth-century imperialism and Spanish
legal practices, the essay’s payoff comes from textual juxtaposition rather than
contextual information.
This refusal to systematize, this self-conscious reliance on literary and
historical “fragments”, constitutes New Historicism’s bid to set “history” free
from “historicism”. The fragments appear to be chosen at random, but critics
have pointed out that they are cunningly selected so as to create a resonance
between the social and the literary.18 Sometimes the connections appear to be
genuinely random, as in the Columbus and Donne example above, but in other
instances it seems clear that a chip of historical information caught the critic’s
eye because it resonated with elements of a literary work, as when accounts
of sixteenth-century cross-dressing among French peasant women are brought
to bear upon a reading of Twelfth Night.19 Although his essays are brilliantly
varied, many of Greenblatt’s pieces follow a characteristic pattern, with close
analysis of a non-fictional text, usually “exotic” or “marginal” in nature, followed
by a parallel decoding of a canonical literary work. One of his most famous
articles, “Invisible Bullets”, for instance, opens with a reading of passages of a 1588
description of Virginian Indians by Thomas Harriot. Atheism in the sixteenth
century, Greenblatt argues, was “thinkable only as the thought of another”, so it
is through the culture of the indigenous Americans that Harriot is able to pen
cynical descriptions of the use of religion as political power. Typically, Greenblatt
shows the simultaneous imposition and subversion of religious power in Harriot’s
text, then uses the Harriot framework to read Shakespeare’s Henrician plays as
similar manipulations of appearances, texts which empty out and undermine
royal legitimacy even as they construct it.20
But what, then, is the status of the “history” that forms half of the New
Historical chiasmus? In their recent coauthored work, Gallagher and Greenblatt
advance a quasi-magical view of its function, something they label “the touch of
the real” and which brings to mind Greenblatt’s occasional descriptions of literary
critics as shamans or conjurers. In many self-descriptions, New Historicists do
indeed appear as alchemists trying to make gold out of unlikely concoctions: as
18 See for instance Walter Cohen, “Political Criticism of Shakespeare”, in Jean E. Howard
and Marion F. O’Connor, eds., Shakespeare Reproduced: The Text in History and Ideology
(New York and London: Methuen, 1987), 34–8.
19 Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations, chap. 6. See Kermode, “Art Among the Ruins”,
46–7.
20 Greenblatt, Shakespearean Negotiations, chap. 2, quote p. 22.
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Gallagher and Greenblatt explain, the very point of bringing together literary
and historical texts is that they “make sharply different claims upon the actual”,
that illumination will spring out of their very incommensurability. Both the
literary and the non-literary acquire deeper resonance when they are made “to
be each other’s thick description”.21 Sometimes the conjurer’s magic seems to
work to the benefit of the non-literary: “The conjunction can produce almost
surrealist wonder at the revelation of an unanticipated aesthetic dimension in
objects without pretensions to the aesthetic.”22 But lurking around the edges of
Gallagher and Greenblatt’s manifesto is the suggestion that the literary text is, in
the end, the great beneficiary, with “the real” as the medium of enchantment: “We
wanted the touch of the real in the way that in an earlier period people wanted the
touch of the transcendent.”23 In other words, a beautiful high-canonical princess
lies sleeping, exhausted by every possible internalist reading. Enter her savior
who is not a prince, but someone more like the bulbous and flatulent Shrek, and
who will shake the beauty awake while conferring on her the kiss of unmistakably
democratic “reality”. Like the canon-busting and computer-animated Shrek, this
is a tale for postmodern times.
Greenblatt’s approach to “the real” has evolved over time, and it is mostly in his
more recent work that he has invoked the powers of wonder and the magic touch
of reality. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, his inclinations were more materialistic,
if not in most of the conventional senses of academic “materialism”. In 1988, in the
essay which opens Shakespearean Negotiations, Greenblatt explained a strategy
for connecting society and literature which he tagged “the circulation of social
energy”. “Social energy” is an entity graspable only in its effects, “in the capacity
of certain verbal, aural, and visual traces to produce, shape and organize collective
physical and mental experiences. Hence it is associated with repeatable forms of
pleasure and interest, with the capacity to arouse disquiet, pain, fear, the beating
of the heart, pity, laughter. . .”, and so on.24 Although Greenblatt would surely
dispute it, this sounds suspiciously like a newfangled version of what used to be
called “the enduring power of a work of art.” Of course the point is that “social
energy” can originate from the realms of both art and non-art, and that the aim
of New Historicism or Cultural Poetics is to trace the circulation, the exchanges
which flow in both directions between those realms.
Two examples of “the circulation of social energy” can be found in Greenblatt’s
early essays. One is the cardinal’s hat displayed in the library of Christ Church,
Oxford, identified as having belonged to Wolsey, the founder of the college.
Wolsey did not donate the hat to the college; instead it was bequeathed to a
succession of descendants and eventually sold in the nineteenth century to the
daughter of the actor Charles Kean, who wore the hat while playing Wolsey on
stage, before the headgear made its way back to Christ Church.25 This miniature
account of the hat’s adventures suggests that “social energy” can be imagined
as a spiraling slide through which an “object”, not always as tangible as the hat,
progresses, bouncing off “art” and “the social” on either side and sometimes
looping back to the beginning—in this case with the cardinal’s hat reconnected
to the college. The idea of “Wolsey”, fetishized in the hat, provoked powerful
enough associations for the educated British elite to keep the object moving
between realms for three centuries.
The circulation of social energy can occur in a wide variety of forms and media.
Greenblatt’s Shakespearean training and interests orient him especially towards
the stage, and when he outlines the most common types of cultural exchange and
circulation, he finds his examples most readily in the playhouse: appropriation,
especially of language; purchase, as of props, costumes, or story rights; symbolic
acquisition of social energy, as when social practices are represented on stage.26
All of these are being simultaneously acquired back by the public either in direct
ways, like paying to watch plays, or in less tangible ways, as when a person models
her behavior after a stage character. But Greenblatt’s other examples range widely
in time and place, to include such instances as the writings by, about and between
Norman Mailer and the convicts Gary Gilmore and Jack Abbot in the 1970s and
1980s; villagers in Bali recording and then watching, thanks to a VCR, their own
religious ceremonies; and a Coca-Cola stand in Mexico transformed by its owner
into a replica of Mayan architecture.27
Notions of circulation, appropriation and exchange seem to place Greenblatt
in the tradition of Marxian critics of “bourgeois aesthetics” like Walter
Benjamin and Walter Benn Michaels, who highlighted the exchange value—
direct or through reproduction—of works of art.28 But Greenblatt repudiates the
“totalizing” perils of Marxism, and his orientation is definitely postmodern rather
than Marxian—he is not interested in systems of production and exploitation,
but in what for a traditional Marxist are the secondary matters of commerce,
mediation, and consumption. In this respect, Greenblatt’s departure from
materialist literary criticism is similar in origin to what is known as the study
of “material culture” in historical writing today. Reacting in part against what
became known as the “linguistic turn” in the 1970s and 1980s (an interesting if not
29 See for instance John Brewer and Roy Porter, eds., Consumption and the World of Goods
(London: Routledge, 1993); Daniel Roche, The Culture of Clothing: Dress and Fashion
in the Ancien Régime (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994) and A History of
Everyday Things: The Birth of Consumption in France, 1600–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2000); Lawrence Brockliss and Colin Jones, The Medical World of Early
Modern France (Oxford: Clarendon Press / New York: Oxford University Press, 1997); Ken
Alder, Engineering the Revolution: Arms and Enlightenment in France, 1763–1815 (Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997); Rebecca Spang, The Invention of the Restaurant: Paris
and Modern Gastronomic Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000).
30 As argued in Roche, The Culture of Clothing, and Jennifer Jones, “Repackaging Rousseau:
Femininity and Fashion in Old Regime France”, French Historical Studies 18 (1994), 939–68.
stephen greenblatt, new historicism, and cultural history 259
is certainly not alien to the model that Greenblatt adopts; but the outcome, in this
approach to culture, is punctual rather than systemic. The distance between New
Historicism and the usual practice of history is to a large extent deliberately staked
out, since the aim of New Historicists is precisely to get away from traditional
“historicism”—by which, as my opening quote suggested, they may or may not
mean the practices of mainstream historians.
The criticisms of conventional history that Greenblatt advances most
frequently are all closely related: that history over-tames the past by cramming it
onto the Procrustean bed of some grand scheme or other; that it leaves little room
for contingency or agency; and that it has no place for the bizarre, the marginal,
or the inconceivable. Greenblatt’s rejection of traditional historicism follows
from the same logic that led poststructuralists like Paul de Man to turn away
from history: the reasoning that historicism was an artifact of modernity which
led to the privileging of a single dominant narrative, that history as normally
practiced generated stable visions and predictable stories with no room for
contingency. Standard “contextual” explanations of works of art proposed a
single interpretation based on a consensus about dominant historical patterns,
thereby closing off other readings and robbing both the text and the social of their
self-contradictory complexity.31 Thus in his 1990 Learning to Curse, Greenblatt
writes:
The historical evidence . . . conventionally invoked in literary criticism to assist in the
explication of a text seemed to me dead precisely because it was the enemy of wonder: it
was brought in to lay contingency and disturbance to rest. I do not want history to enable
me to escape the effect of the literary but to deepen it by making it touch the effect of the
real, a touch that would reciprocally deepen and complicate history.32
At the heart of the New Historicist approach to the past lies a fundamental
tension, in full view in Greenblatt and Gallagher’s recent Practicing New
Historicism. On the one hand the volume opens with ringing challenges to
something called “history”, a scowling censor which exercises a “stabilizing
and silencing function . . . in analyses that [seek] to declare the limits of the
thinkable and the sayable”, and decrees “that certain things in a given period
were beyond conception and articulation”. New Historicism, the authors write,
“remains committed to the value of the single voice, the isolated scandal, the
idiosyncratic vision, the transient sketch.”33 The theoretical difficulties posed by
this approach to the past could be summed up by pointing out that the expression
“isolated scandal” is an oxymoron, since a scandal is an inherently social event—it
34 Ibid., chap. 1.
35 Ibid., 26. The quote is from Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York:
Basic Books, 1973), 19.
36 Gallagher and Greenblatt, Practicing New Historicism, 40–41.
37 Ibid., 17.
stephen greenblatt, new historicism, and cultural history 261
38 For two other stimulating recent accounts of the anecdote and its function, see David
Simpson, The Academic Postmodern and the Rule of Literature: A Report on Half-Knowledge
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), chap. 2, and Lionel Gossman, “Anecdote and
History”, History and Theory 42 (May, 2003), 143–68.
39 Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions, 2.
40 Joel Fineman, “The History of the Anecdote: Fiction and Fiction”, in Veeser, ed., The New
Historicism, 56.
41 Gallagher and Greenblatt, Practicing New Historicism, 49.
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If for literary critics like Greenblatt the anecdote seems like a step forward, a
liberation from the weight of “totalizing grand narratives”, for most historians
petite histoire feels like a step backward. Just as literary critics understandably
reject middlebrow gushing over Great Literature as “bourgeois aesthetics”, so
historians are legitimately wary of a form, the anecdote, that threatens to
reduce history to a People magazine of the past. Gallagher and Greenblatt seem
oblivious of the longer range of disciplinary development in history; they reject
grand narratives as extensions of nineteenth- and twentieth-century nationalist,
socialist or whiggish programs, obfuscating the fact that such mid-twentieth-
century innovations as histoire totale and quantified social history, large in scale
as they were, originated from a desire to make history more democratic and more
inclusive.
Greenblatt and others are certainly aware of the anecdote’s resurgence in the
writings of New Cultural Historians, since some of the most prominent historians
of this stripe—Davis, Hunt, Laqueur—were their colleagues and co-editors in
the heyday of Representations. But under the pen of New Cultural (or New Social)
Historians the anecdote serves a function quite different from its use in either
traditional history or literary criticism. They use it very much as does Geertz, as
a point of entry into a broader cultural system.
Thomas Laqueur’s Making Sex, for instance, a book whose themes and
approach are superficially much akin to New Historicism, opens with a
quintessentially “Greenblattian” anecdote. It is the story, reported in 1752, of
a beautiful innkeeper’s daughter who dies and is the object of a young monk’s
necrophilic lust—she then revives from apparent death and is discovered to be
pregnant. When the story was retold fifty years later, commentators assumed
without question that a passive, corpse-like woman could have conceived—
no orgasm was necessary.42 The juxtaposition of two versions of the anecdote
serves to dramatize the book’s thesis that understandings of women’s sexual
nature shifted in the later eighteenth century from a “one-sex” model (women
as identical in kind but lesser forms of men) to a “two-sex” model (women as
qualitatively different). Where a Greenblattian critic would use this anecdote to
puncture the cultural fabric, Laqueur’s approach is very much that of a cultural
historian. He derives meaning from the distance between two versions of the
same story and, like a cultural anthropologist, uses each instance of the tale as a
point of entry into a different worldview.
The “New Cultural History” which took shape in the 1980s literally alongside
New Historicism also relies centrally, in many cases, on anecdotes. But the
anecdotes that have become classics in the historical profession—of apprentices in
42 Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), 1–3.
stephen greenblatt, new historicism, and cultural history 263
Literary New Historicists engage with the past using methods very much
their own, and very different from those of even the historians closest to them
in training, outlook, and field. They are determined to connect the aesthetic
and “the real”, thus marking a distance from Deconstruction, New Criticism,
and “bourgeois aesthetics”, while at the same time they resist the materialist
“flattening” of works of literature into ideology. The outcome as represented
by the work of Stephen Greenblatt is, as he himself admits, not a theoretical
43 Robert Darnton, The Great Cat-Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History
(New York: Vintage, 1984), chap. 2; Carlo Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms: The
Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller, trans. Anne and John Tedeschi (Baltimore, MD:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980); Natalie Zemon Davis, The Return of Martin Guerre
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983).
44 Fineman, “The History of the Anecdote”, 61.
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45 For instance, Greenblatt’s essay “Fiction and Friction” reads Twelfth Night in the context
of a view of sex according to which women are lesser, or “inside out”, versions of men,
and where gender difference is a lot more slippery than in a post-Enlightenment world.
Shakespearean Negotiations, chap. 3.
46 For an excellent discussion of these issues and an interesting attempt to resolve them, see
Gabrielle Spiegel, “History, Historicism and the Social Logic of the Text in the Middle
Ages”, Speculum 69 (1990), 59–86.
47 Ibid., 75.
48 I thank Ed Muir for pointing out to me the disciplinary implications of Spiegel’s point.
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