Content area
Full Text
Sustaining Literature: Essays on Literature, History, and Culture, 1500-1800: Commemorating the Life and Work of Simon Varey, ed. Greg Clingham. Lewisburg: Bucknell, 2007. Pp. 317. $59.50.
Simon Varey's intellectual, social, and personal vitality made his death at the age of fifty-two particularly difficult to accept. Sustaining Literature, edited by his friend Mr. Clingham, is a commendable effort to celebrate a lovable man and an excellent scholar, and it is a valuable contribution to scholarship in its own right. As with most Festschriften, its essays are uneven in quality, depth, scope, and subject, but none is negligible. Mr. Clingham gathers the nineteen essays into four categories: scholarship and reminiscence; Augustanism; fiction; and history and culture. They engage some of the topics that interested him most.
In his elegant Introduction, "Finding Time, Making Memory," Mr. Clingham suggests (not convincingly) that the common thread of the essays is "the nature of literary evidence." The only contributor who knew Varey in England, he recalls their Cambridge days and records Varey's complex and fascinating character, his essential decency, and his distinctive clarity. In "Simon Varey: A Reminiscence," Jerry Beasley recounts personal memories; Alexander Pettit's "Remarks on Simon Varey and His Work" concisely and appreciatively surveys Varey's contribution to eighteenthcentury scholarship. He admits that Varey's Dutch and Spanish scholarship is beyond his capacity, but the Spanish scholarship, at least, is addressed by two essays that describe Varey's work on the Thesaurus of Francisco Hernández, an important description of American plants and animals. (The Hernández work generates the picture of an armadillo that somewhat surprisingly decorates the cover of the festschrift.) The Thesaurus itself exists in several different languages, and its history and distribution engage another of Varey's interests - the history of the book. The classifications in the Thesaurus represent a pre-Linnaean effort to wrest the natural world into order, and they engage the sorting capacities of the various languages Hernández uses. Dora B. Weiner and Katharine E. Donahue's "The Doctors Simon Varey and Francisco Hernández...