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Challenging Humanism: Essays in Honor of Dominic BakerSmith. Ed. Ton Hoenselaars and Arthur F. Kinney. Newark, NJ: University of Delaware Press, 2005. 335 pages.
Challenging Humanism is a collection of essays that should appeal to a cosmopolitan variety of scholars at work in the Renaissance, but it will have a special appeal to Sidney scholars. In part, this appeal extends from the book's dedication to Dominic BakerSmith, whose labors as a facilitator of Sidney studies were significant, both as one of the organizers of the Leiden quatercentenary conference in 1986 and as the co-editor of two influential collections of essays associated with that conference, Sir Philip Sidney: 1586 and the Creation of a Legend (1986) and Sir Philip Sidney's Achievements (1990). Beyond the quality of the essays published in them, both volumes were distinguished by their appropriate international assembly of papers by American, English and Dutch academics-appropriate, of course, for Jan van Dorsten's successor at the Sir Thomas Browne Institute in Leiden and for the subject of those papers Philip Sidney, a figure whose life and death were impacted so profoundly by Anglo-Dutch politics, patronage, and friendship. One signal achievement of Challenging Humanism is its similarly cosmopolitan inclusion of essays by scholars from that same Anglo-Dutch network (now globally Americanized): eight of the fourteen essays are by academics from the Netherlands, a good reminder of how much Sidney studies benefits by its continuing ties to Continental scholarship.
More important, Challenging Humanism should have particular appeal to Sidney scholars because of the centrality of its subject matter to the interpretation of Philip Sidney and the Sidney circle: an assessment of the meaning and value of the studia humanitatis for the makers of Renaissance literature. Few terms are so vexed by complications and contradictions as "humanism," from the culturally familiar association of the humanist with the humane (people kind to small animals, children and fools) to the culturally confused equation of the humanist with ungodly secular modernism (that unholy trinity of Darwin, Marx, and Freud). Scholarly discussions have a history no less complicated or fiercely contested, whether Arnoldian or Foucauldian, whether "humanism" is placed in the service of communications reform and political renewal (see Habermas) or appropriated to an ideological assault upon bourgeois subjectivity in the twilight...