Most who read Renaissance literature know the admiration and envy that the epic—or sometimes merely its manner—inspired in readers alert to the possibilities of imitation and parody; fewer focus on the georgic, although Virgil himself wrote in that genre. No wonder that Edmund Spenser found it irresistible to write an epic with the hero of its first book (on holiness) named George. Virgil would smile. Katie Kadue's wittily learned study should inspire an increased awareness of the genre as well as pleasure in witnessing how the author snatches the georgic from the fields and woods into the kitchen and storehouse, collecting and exploiting material by Rabelais, Spenser, Montaigne, Marvell, and Milton.
This intelligent book is not perfect. Its flaws include a paucity of needed dates and a seeming compulsion, one shared by many younger academics, to summon a mob of modern scholars who could well have been demoted to humbler footnote references. An editor might have urged her to remember that readers might desire more of her own clever thoughts and see her own useful citations (honesty compels me to note that I am among the few not cited). Similarly, some spellings would make better sense if modernized or explained. The word “violl” (1) can be readily understood as vial, but some readers might have a vexed nanosecond of wondering how stringed instruments are suddenly relevant. Others might welcome more on the translators. Surely Florio deserves a nod in the chapter on Montaigne. While its willingness to look across the Channel to France is welcome, a longer book might also have glanced more often at Italy or Spain.
Nevertheless, her book should interest and please many readers of Renaissance literature, not least because of its shift of attention away from plowed fields, shaded dialogues, and talkative egos to kitchen discussion and preservation. After all, epics and indeed most genres would be impossible without the (probably) female efforts to feed and support their authors and to prepare all the fruits, vegetables, meats, and pastries that maintain their lives. Even Homer had to dine. Domestic Georgic is especially clever for its ingenuity in showing how male voices can be made relevant to female ones. The author's insights freshen the pastoral and georgic by adding domestic working space to that genre's forests, fields, and gardens. Kadue thus enlarges the range of the genre so that she can at once understand its depth and variety and also imagine how Renaissance thoughts on sexual love relate to the environment.
After an introduction preparing us for what Bacon calls the “Georgics of the mind,” a literary venture helped forward by allusions to Erasmus, Virgil, and others, comes “Rabelais in a Pickle,” an entertaining study ignoring whether Rabelais at least planted book 5, however much it grew with others’ hoes and rakes. He was fascinated by our humor and our fluid humors, as is an admiring Kadue, who calls vinegar “over-altered wine” that can “preserve perishable foods.” A thought on parentheses is in “a qualifying parenthetical” (43–45). The next chapter, “Spenser's Secret Recipes,” explores “Life Support in The Faerie Queene,” although husband might be used more precisely. Few Spenserians will find nothing to admire and learn (my vexation with the frequent suppression of the is generational). Although hardly elegant, calling Adonis Venus's “arm candy” (75) makes clever sense. Chapter 3 takes an empathetic look at Montaigne and his “ambivalent mania for the most minor acts of mesnage”; I am unconvinced that he was “a blogger avant la lettre,” but reading these pages is a laughing joy and I wish I could quote many. Just one: “even his refusals to manage external pressures require syntactical management on the page.” Nice. Then come Marvell and his Eve, whose “apple is confected into a sinful dessert” (112), and more energetic prose with a “translation safely shelved in parentheses” (121). We end with Milton and, again, a lack of useful dates (did nobody at the University of Chicago Press ask her for a date?), a plethora of modern names, and stylistic brilliance: Eve reaches with a “rash hand” and then comes “plucking, eating, in a frenzied asyndeton, without any tempering, without even a pause for a conjunction” (142). The conclusion is likewise written with soul-pleasing wit. After a long, interesting note and a full bibliography plus index, we are through. This book will long live in this grateful reviewer's memory.
