A study of this kind, which reads a large selection of disparate works through one concept, runs the risk of streamlining the subject matter, especially when its presenta- tion is so stringent, logical, and (almost) mechanical. Smid is aware of the potential problem and the book’s relaxed philosophizing conclusion does much to eliminate such worries, though some may find it too radical in its suggestions about the imagina- tive freedom with which we might approach future historicist literary research. A more serious problem is that this book leaves the reader wanting more—which is meant both as a compliment and as a criticism. One hundred and ninety-two pages is not sufficient to address the medieval forebears of early modern imagination theory, the deeper impli- cations of the statement that “language is constituted by the imagination” (166), the role the imagination plays in esoteric world views (alchemy, cosmology), and the full impact of visual-verbal forms on the imagination, an issue too briefly outlined in chap- ter 5, on emblems. More could be said about imagination, imagery, and image. It is to be hoped these things can be addressed in a sequel. As for what this book actually does, it provides a valuable reminder that “if we are to classify a text as imaginative then the first question should be, by which historical standard?” (185). This book is an excellent introduction to one particular historical standard. Svenn-Arve Myklebost, Høgskulen i Volda doi:10.1017/rqx.2018.105 Timely Voices: Romance Writing in English Literature. Goran Stanivukovic, ed. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2017. x + 362 pp. $110. This is a welcome collection of essays, ably edited, firmly oriented toward the future of criticism on romance. Despite the superb works on romance by Patricia Parker, Barbara Fuchs, and Helen Cooper, for example, the very frequency of critical recourse today to these same few volumes indicates the need for an expanded canon of theories, approaches, explanations, and attitudes to romance. This is especially the case for undergraduate and graduate students seeking to get a handle on this notoriously mer- curial genre. Timely Voices is a worthy addition to that canon. Its fourteen essays travel across time as well as models of romance, from Old Irish literature to Jane Austen, giv- ing substance to Steve Mentz’s formulation of romance as a “polygenre.” Insisting on the transnational, transhistorical, and even interdisciplinary character of romance, the editor foregrounds romance writing and romance thinking as perhaps the most flexible form of creative process for the ages. A strong and at times provocative introduction from Goran Stanivukovic describes the collection’s interest in romance as “strategy” and “resource,” always ripe for reinven- tion. Stanivukovic presents the volume’s conceptual framework as being rooted in the idea of influence, but “where influence is seen not as imitation but as testing the limits, RENAISSANCE QUARTERLY388 VOLUME LXXII, NO. 1 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. 06 Apr 2021 at 01:53:11, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use. https://www.cambridge.org/core or even the limitlessness, of the creative imagination” (5). The title of the collection comes from Spenser, though it is, sometimes counterintuitively, invoked for a sense of romance writers reaching across time to past and future. And yet the collection itself is a timely one, in the more conventional sense, as both an introduction to and overview of romance and its possibilities across the centuries (but primarily early modern), while also introducing new kinds of potential approaches. Facing in both directions so con- certedly, this book is a relatively rare creature. Adding to the volume’s usefulness, an afterword by Patricia Parker provides a generous literature review of approaches to romance from the generation of Vinaver and Frye to the most recent important mono- graphs, many by contributors to this collection. Beyond the introduction, we meet a mixture of innovative essays with richly reward- ing forays into the less traveled byways of romance (incident, domestication, the every- day) with more traditional, narratological or taxonomic approaches whose innovation lies in their westward expansion of the networks of the European romance tradition to encompass early medieval works from Wales and Ireland. Despite the emphasis on romance as “strategy” and “resource” in the introduction, there is nonetheless some divergence among authors in terms of how they discuss romance as a genre, mode, style, structure, writing strategy, or discourse. But all of them share a strong sense of romance proliferation as a defining principle both of its writing and reading, of “move- ment as a resource of romance writing” (62); romance does not simply contain but sus- tains multitudes. Highlights for me include a sophisticated essay by Colin Lahive on the continuity but variety of Milton’s uses of romance as part of his theological thinking; Nandini Das’s engagingly written essay on the uses of the everyday as part of the superstructure of wonder we commonly adduce of romance; and Helen Cooper’s lovely essay on the knight and the hermit—deceptively simple in its focus but elaborating a really useful survey of pre- and post-Reformation romance. Steve Mentz shows typical verve in pull- ing together a new theory of “polygenres” from Bruno Latour’s actor-network theory, Caribbean poet Édouard Glissant’s model of “relation,” and literary critic Caroline Levine’s affordance-based model of genre systems, together with an illustrative case study: Pericles—an “outlier” in Shakespeare’s canon since its omission from the First Folio, but in this formulation, emblematic of the plural genre systems of the entire early modern tradition. A striking feature of the collection is its willingness to analyze romance thinking into the nineteenth and twentieth century, in Marcus Waithe’s essay on the uncanny in William Morris and David Jones, and Sara Malton’s piece on the financial romance of Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey. Another useful tendency is the authors’ interest in taking stock of the reputation of romance in its own moment— for example, as a form closely associated with women, as the essay by Hero Chalmers explores, or in the “teasingly absent presence” (222) of Heliodorus’s Aethiopica in sev- enteenth-century English drama. REVIEWS 389 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. 06 Apr 2021 at 01:53:11, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use. https://www.cambridge.org/core I would recommend this book as much to scholars of romance in all its guises as to students seeking ways into the scholarship of this vital, enduring literary form. Jane Grogan, University College Dublin doi:10.1017/rqx.2018.106 Lying in Early Modern English Culture: From the Oath of Supremacy to the Oath of Allegiance. Andrew Hadfield. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017. xvi + 368 pp. $80. The historical frame for Andrew Hadfield’s new book on lying is 1535, the Oath of Supremacy, to 1606, the Oath of Allegiance. The importance of oaths to early modern England makes the case for the importance of lying, as world-changing assertions of truthful language will in practice imply a proliferation of qualifications to such language. By devoting the first two chapters to each oath, respectively, Hadfield avoids a narrative of progression and instead makes space for the mapping of a wide field of cultural and literary texts, taken on as case studies. The result is an excellent, and impressively var- ious, study of the culture of lying, revealing a period in which lying became “central to the imagination” (309). A predecessor to this book, which many readers will know, is Perez Zagorin’s Ways of Lying: Dissimulation, Persecution and Conformity in Early Modern Europe. Zagorin focuses on religious controversy, and Hadfield picks up on several key ideas, overlapping in discussions of Nicodemism and equivocation, for example. But Hadfield develops a broader perspective. One chapter is on “The Religious Culture of Lying,” but subse- quent chapters are titled: “Rhetoric, Commonplacing, and Poetics”; “Courtesy, Lying, and Politics”; “Testimony”; and “Othello and the Culture of Lies between Conscience and Reputation.” Among the literary figures handled are Thomas More, William Baldwin, Erasmus, Montaigne, Spenser, Nashe, Sidney, Marlowe, Jonson, and in the final chapter devoted to Othello, Shakespeare. Early modern accounts of lying and truth can be located relative to two patristic the- ories. On one side is Augustine, who developed a taxonomy of lies but maintained that all kinds are always a sin. On the other side is Jerome, who admitted the useful lie, pos- sible in certain circumstances and to be evaluated according to the intentions of its speaker. Based on challenging stories in scripture (e.g., the Hebrew midwives in Egypt or Paul’s rebuke of Peter for not eating with the Gentiles), these two theories shape how England thinks about oaths, as well as the speaking of religious and political truth. They form poles in the confrontations between Tyndale, who takes Jerome’s position that dissembling is not always a sin, and More, who takes the Augustinian posi- tion, aligning himself with a more rigorous approach to oaths and temporal religious authority. The theoretical laxity of the useful lie, set against the imperative to swear RENAISSANCE QUARTERLY390 VOLUME LXXII, NO. 1 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. 06 Apr 2021 at 01:53:11, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use. https://www.cambridge.org/core