Tropic of Venice by Margaret DoodyReview by: Rachel Hostetter SmithThe Sixteenth Century Journal, Vol. 39, No. 4 (Winter, 2008), pp. 1204-1205Published by: The Sixteenth Century JournalStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20479202 .

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1204 Sixteenth Century Journal XXXIX/4 (2008)

Tropic of Venice. Margaret Doody. Personal Takes. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylva nia Press, 2007. 374 pp. $32.50. ISBN 978-0-8122-3984-3.

REVIEWED BY: Rachel Hostetter Smith, Taylor University

If you have ever fallen under the spell of a particular place, the opening of Margaret Doody's Tropic of Venice will conjure up familiar pangs of longing and wistful memory. For those who know and love Venice, the book will undoubtedly call up responses of happy rec ognition and nodding approval. For historians, some of the characterizations in the book may cause occasional frustration and even adamant disagreement at times. This book, how ever, is not a history or guide (although it partakes of both) but a volume in a series "in which noted critics write about the persistent hold particular writers, artists, or cultural phenomena have had on their imaginations." As such, it investigates the images and impres sions that Venice generated in visitors as they compare with perceptions of Venice gener ated by Venetians themselves. Doody's title, Tropic of Venice, signals the way Venice exists predominantly in our memories and imaginations as a Brigadoon-like place that exists in its own time and space yet touches us directly with irrevocable consequences from time to time. Her book is, in her own words, "centrally a meditation, a speculation, about what Ven ice means to us in the West, and why it is or has become an irreplaceable idea" (18). The exploration of that "irreplaceable idea" directs the structure and content of the book to identify the tropes that have come to be associated with this unique city.

With the detail characteristic of the consummate storyteller that she is, Doody carries her reader back forty-odd years to her time as a student at Oxford, when she took a summer tour of Italy composed of the key cities of Rome, Florence, and Venice. The breathless tell ing of the hapless adventure that ensues sets the stage for the unexpected impact of her first encounter with Venice, an encounter that would be the beginning of a love affair. Although this recollection of her first experience with Venice constitutes only a few pages of the first chapter, the exhilaration and pace of this opening story establishes the context for how one must engage the investigation that follows and sets the tone for the rest of the book.

Rejecting the chronological structure of a history, Doody launches her investigation with a look at aspects of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that persist as the domi nant perceptions of Venice throughout much of the twentieth century-a city that repre sents that which is "incomplete, foolish, fleshly, and human, mere 'mirth and folly"' (25). Citing not only novels, poems, music, and film, but also a host of diaries and letters by vis itors, she takes the reader through an amazing array of cultural documents that reflect the seductive pull of post-Republican Venice-a decaying city where the profane prevails, and one can lose oneself for a day or for good. Packed full of fascinating detail from fashion to Florian's coffee house, Candide to Casanova, masking to Monteverdi, the poetry of the courtesan Veronica Franca to the Gothic visions of Friedrich von Schiller, the text convinc ingly paints a portrait of a city that lost both its autonomy and moral compass following the

Napoleonic occupation. To outsiders it is a place characterized by the spirit of Carne vale-that is carne-vale, the farewell to meat and all pleasure in one last fling, where nothing is off limits before the fasting of Lent. The slow but inexorable slide to death and decay con veyed in Thomas Mann's novel, Death in Venice (1912), captures this destructive yet seduc tive aspect of the idea of Venice that is made even more palpable in Visconti's film based on the novel.

After one hundred pages of exploring these more recent perceptions of Venice and their sources, Doody turns to a brief overview of the experience of visitors to Venice from the sixteenth through twentieth centuries, touching on such diverse personalities as

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Book Reviews 1205

Petrarch and Pietro Aretino, Erica Jong and Peggy Guggenheim, and revealing the love/hate relationship with the city that sometimes arises for those who are not native born. Finally, she turns to the consideration of the foundations and history of the Venetian Republic and the ideals and realities pursued by the Venetians themselves as they sought to establish a way of life in a place seemingly uninhabitable. It is here that we see the indomitable will of the Venetians, who continue to see themselves as a people set apart by God's intention and human forbearance to create a city like no other. And it is here that we see the ideals of "the middle way," virtue and justice, loyalty and self-sacrifice for the good of the state, as well as the audacity and crafty ingenuity that results in a city thriving with commerce, yet capable of holding off foreign invasion for a thousand years. Chapters focusing on the aesthetic dis tinctiveness and artistic giants of Venice celebrate the unique creative contributions of the lagoon Republic.

Venice, Doody concludes, is a place where the sacred and profane meet in a profound relationship. "Slime and viscous substance, polyglot crowds, the Orient, encrustation, reflective surfaces, broken lights and tesseration, water, mixed substances, the feminine, impurity, labyrinth, carnival mask, color" (293)-these are just a few of the tropes Doody identifies as key to understanding Venice. Doody's greatest insight comes in her recognition that Venice is "a highly spiritual city-of its own kind" that must be understood within a "theology of immanence" that apprehends the holy in relation to "the stuff of the world"(304). It is only within this framework that one can properly grasp what must other wise be seen as profound contradictions. Because of the wide range of material brought into view, Tropic of Venice requires an unusually broad familiarity with things related to Venice for readers to fully grasp the significance of what is being presented but rewards them with a distinct vision of the singular place that is the city of Venice.

Galileo in France: French Reactions to the Theories and Trial of Galileo. John Lewis . Bern: Peter Lang, 2006. xix + 276 pp. $76.95. ISBN 0-8204-5768-X.

REVIEWED BY: Derek Jensen, Brigham Young University-Idaho

The meat of Lewis's study can be found in chapters 4-6 and in the conclusion, where he discusses the impact of Galileo's work on French astronomical theory and observations. Before chapter 4, Lewis sets the background for French discussions of Copernicus's theory and later Galileo's work. France (in contrast to Rome) did not have an Inquisition to enforce decrees from the Pope. France also did not recognize the Index of prohibited books issued by the Vatican; and the French Parlements did not recognize the 1616 decree against Coper nicus's theory, nor the 1633 judgment against Galileo. As far as the religious and political atmosphere in France was concerned, then, one was rather free to discuss and accept Copernicus and Galileo.

Nevertheless, the French had mixed reactions to Galileo. Jean Tarde (1561-1636), an ecclesiastical administrator who had met Galileo personally on three separate occasions between 1614 and 1615, differed with Galileo on his opinion of the nature of sunspots. Whereas Galileo held sunspots to be on the surface of the sun, for Tarde the sun could not have blemishes because Louis XIV, the "Sun King" could not be associated with a blemished celestial body. Instead, Tarde argued that what appeared to be sunspots were small planets (which he named "Bourbon Stars") revolving at a close distance around the sun. In contrast to Tarde, Lewis paints Marin Mersenne (1588-1648) as Galileo's champion in France.

Mersenne translated into French two of Galileo's works as Les M6chaniques de Galilee in

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