3
to prevent their insertion. A significant number of tales were reprinted from the preceding century with no attempt to date the originals; others are evidently translations, though again with both authors’ and translators’ names unrecorded. Foreign works, originally in English or French, were appropriated and domesticated, with only the exotic settings giving away their possible origins, oriental tales proving especially popular with the reading public. In general the cuento was briefer than the more literary novela, the form cultivated by Cervantes, and the label was equally applied to texts in verse.The shorter cuentos tended to be close to oral forms and their traditional subject matter, while in the eighteenth century the longer, novelesque stories reflected the popular taste for the sentimental. As elsewhere the form was constantly renewed in terms of themes, structures, motifs and means of transmission. The resurgence of the short story in eighteenth-century Spain reflected the increasing cultural vitality of the period, with important compilations published in the 1740s and new outlets being created for single stories of varying length as the periodical press took off in the 1760s. In journals such as the elite culture Correo de Madrid (Madrid Post) brief moral tales or rasgos often seemed to act as fillers, though contemporary evidence shows them to be popular with readers. Provincial periodicals seem to have operated a kind of syndication approach, in an era when intellectual property rights were undeveloped and competition between journals was not an issue because of the high costs of distribution. Late in the reign of Carlos III (1759-1788), when literary culture had become more sophisticated as styles and tendencies were debated in academies, coffee-houses, pamphlets, and more especially the literary press, some serious theoretical discussion of the cuento began. The Colección de novelas y cuentos of 1789 ventured to sketch out a poetics of the genre in its prospectus, and went on to claim that cuentos could often fulfil, and equally effectively, the role of history books. Titles such as Noches de invierno (Winter Nights), Tertulia de la aldea (The Village Gathering) or El Café revealed the conditions in which such works might be read, usually aloud. The simplest forms, sometimes a mere paragraph in length, were used to convey humorous anecdotes, in a recognisably folk tradition. The more ambitious stories dealt with the themes of love, religion and morality, politics, and fortune. Stories where fantasy played a major part generally portrayed virtue rewarded and evil punished. The closure of non-governmental periodicals in 1791, in the repressive wake of the French Revolution, cut off a principal outlet for publishing short stories, though several important collections appeared in the 1790s, a decade which marked a high point in the publication of translations of major French and English novels in Spain. This excellent edition by Marieta Cantos fills a significant gap in the provision of expertly edited texts of eighteenth-century Spanish literature; the extensive introduction makes a compelling case for the importance of a genre previously undervalued or overlooked in cultural histories of early Bourbon Spain. Philip Deacon University of Sheffield Pictures and Popery: Art and Religion in England, 1660-1760. Clare Haynes. Aldershot: Ashgate. 2006. 185. 41 b. and w. illus. £55. hb. 0-7546-5506-7. Pictures and Popery seeks to explain two related, though quite different, aspects of English visual culture in the century or so after the restoration of Charles II. First, it 164 BOOK REVIEWS © 2008 British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies

Pictures and Popery: Art and Religion in England, 1660-1760 – By Clare Haynes

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to prevent their insertion. A significant number of tales were reprinted from thepreceding century with no attempt to date the originals; others are evidentlytranslations, though again with both authors’ and translators’ names unrecorded.Foreign works, originally in English or French, were appropriated and domesticated,with only the exotic settings giving away their possible origins, oriental tales provingespecially popular with the reading public.

In general the cuento was briefer than the more literary novela, the form cultivated byCervantes, and the label was equally applied to texts in verse.The shorter cuentos tendedto be close to oral forms and their traditional subject matter, while in the eighteenthcentury the longer, novelesque stories reflected the popular taste for the sentimental.As elsewhere the form was constantly renewed in terms of themes, structures, motifsand means of transmission. The resurgence of the short story in eighteenth-centurySpain reflected the increasing cultural vitality of the period, with importantcompilations published in the 1740s and new outlets being created for single stories ofvarying length as the periodical press took off in the 1760s. In journals such as the eliteculture Correo de Madrid (Madrid Post) brief moral tales or rasgos often seemed to act asfillers, though contemporary evidence shows them to be popular with readers.Provincial periodicals seem to have operated a kind of syndication approach, in an erawhen intellectual property rights were undeveloped and competition between journalswas not an issue because of the high costs of distribution.

Late in the reign of Carlos III (1759-1788), when literary culture had become moresophisticated as styles and tendencies were debated in academies, coffee-houses,pamphlets, and more especially the literary press, some serious theoretical discussionof the cuento began. The Colección de novelas y cuentos of 1789 ventured to sketch outa poetics of the genre in its prospectus, and went on to claim that cuentos could oftenfulfil, and equally effectively, the role of history books. Titles such as Noches de invierno(Winter Nights), Tertulia de la aldea (The Village Gathering) or El Café revealed theconditions in which such works might be read, usually aloud. The simplest forms,sometimes a mere paragraph in length, were used to convey humorous anecdotes, ina recognisably folk tradition. The more ambitious stories dealt with the themes of love,religion and morality, politics, and fortune. Stories where fantasy played a major partgenerally portrayed virtue rewarded and evil punished.

The closure of non-governmental periodicals in 1791, in the repressive wake of theFrench Revolution, cut off a principal outlet for publishing short stories, thoughseveral important collections appeared in the 1790s, a decade which marked a highpoint in the publication of translations of major French and English novels in Spain.This excellent edition by Marieta Cantos fills a significant gap in the provisionof expertly edited texts of eighteenth-century Spanish literature; the extensiveintroduction makes a compelling case for the importance of a genre previouslyundervalued or overlooked in cultural histories of early Bourbon Spain.

Philip DeaconUniversity of Sheffield

Pictures and Popery: Art and Religion in England, 1660-1760. Clare Haynes.Aldershot: Ashgate. 2006. 185. 41 b. and w. illus. £55. hb. 0-7546-5506-7.

Pictures and Popery seeks to explain two related, though quite different, aspects ofEnglish visual culture in the century or so after the restoration of Charles II. First, it

164 BOOK REVIEWS

© 2008 British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies

Page 2: Pictures and Popery: Art and Religion in England, 1660-1760 – By Clare Haynes

explores the seemingly paradoxical enthusiasm for ‘Catholic art’ among the elite of anavowedly Protestant country. Second, it investigates the ambiguous and at timestroublesome relationship between the established Anglican Church and the pictorialarts.

The emphasis of the book is very much on the former. All but one of the chaptersare concerned with the reception of religious art produced by the designated‘old masters’ of Catholic Europe. Haynes vividly relays the cultural dilemma thatEnglishmen faced on the Grand Tour upon entering an Italian church to find oneor other masterpiece of Western art steeped in the ‘sights, sounds and smells ofcontemporary Catholicism’. She then focuses on the reputation and interpretation ofRaphael’s celebrated tapestry cartoons following their installation in the King’sGallery at Hampton Court in 1699, before dealing with the collection and display ofreligious art within the elite domestic sphere, centring on an original reading of tworelatively little known texts – Charles Lamotte’s Essay upon Poetry and Painting (1730)and the Sermon on Painting written by Horace Walpole, first published as an appendixto the Aedes Walpolianae (1747). In these chapters, Haynes persuasively suggests thatcanonical works of art could be released from the taint of Popery, either imaginatively,through the refining ‘Protestant gaze’ of the educated English tourist, or physically, byremoving the works from the Popish environment for which they were made, leavingother, lesser works to absorb the brunt of the viewer’s religious anxieties.

The most engaging part of the book, however, is the fifth and final chapter. Here theauthor departs from her main theme to explore the different ways in which imageswere reintroduced into Protestant places of worship after 1660, and effectivelyconveys the complex visual environment of English church interiors of the period,where figurative painting (and less often sculpture) played a low-key but significantrole. The historical record is most plentiful, and most revealing, on those occasionswhen the display of images was disputed – at the parish church of Moulton in 1685,at St Mary’s Whitechapel in 1714, and at St Clement Dane’s in 1725. As a case study,Haynes focuses on the bitter pamphlet scuffle that accompanied the display and ritualdestruction of a gilded carving of St Michael at All Hallows Barking, in the City ofLondon in 1681, revealing how localised disputes over the doctrinal legitimacy ofimages were typically fired by broader political conflicts – the rhetoric of idolatry andsuperstition often masking more secular divisions within the Church.

Most original is Haynes’ brief discussion of the less controversial representation ofMoses and Aaron in many English parish churches during and after the Restoration,invariably as an accompaniment to prescribed passages of scripture. The universalacceptance of these two Old Testament figures has often been acknowledged butnever satisfactorily explained. Haynes, by contrast, usefully points to their status asambassadors of the re-established Anglican Church. It is a pity that some of the issuesraised in this chapter are not developed more fully in the present study, though theauthor reveals they are to be the subject of a further article and projected secondbook. Both promise to be important and illuminating additions.

Throughout the book, the ideologically fraught encounter between the Protestantviewer and the graven image is conveyed more convincingly through the author’sdiscussion of eighteenth-century writers on art and religion than throughexamination of the works of art themselves. The black-and-white illustrations are ofvariable quality and are relegated to the centre pages of the book – a decision on thepart of the publisher that unfortunately plays down the richness and complexity ofthe visual material discussed. Elsewhere, the aristocratic taste for opulent country-

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Page 3: Pictures and Popery: Art and Religion in England, 1660-1760 – By Clare Haynes

house chapels and the role of print culture in the making and reception of religiousimagery in England are mentioned only in passing and suggest further areas ofpotentially fruitful enquiry. Despite these shortcomings, Pictures and Popery makes abold and most welcome foray into a neglected area of English cultural history, openingavenues of enquiry that have been largely ignored for a generation or more.

Richard JohnsHomerton College, University of Cambridge

The Cambridge Companion to Berkeley. Edited by Kenneth P. Winkler. New York:Cambridge University Press. 2005. xiv + 454. £45.00. hb. 0-521-45033-0. £16.99. pb.0-521-45657-6.

This edited collection of papers on the work of George Berkeley is a welcome andlong-anticipated addition to the Cambridge Companion series, containing as it doescontributions from many of the finest Berkeley scholars writing today. There aretwelve papers (in addition to the editor’s introduction), each of which is dedicated toa different aspect of Berkeley’s intellectual output.

In a review of this length it is not possible to comment on all of the papersindividually, so I shall restrict my attention to the first seven, which focus on issuesrelating to Berkeley’s central philosophy of immaterialism and idealism for which heis most renowned. It should be noted, though, that the other five papers are instructivepieces concerning topics that may well also be of interest to readers of this journal. Toname them, these are ‘Berkeley’s natural philosophy and philosophy of science’ (LisaDowning), ‘Berkeley’s philosophy of mathematics’ (Douglas M. Jesseph), ‘Berkeley’smoral and political philosophy’ (Stephen Darwall), ‘Berkeley’s economic writings’(Patrick Kelly), and ‘Berkeley on religion’ (Stephen R. L. Clark).

The first chapter in the volume is David Berman’s ‘Berkeley’s life and works’.Berman is arguably peerless as a biographer and historian of Berkeley, and here weare given a succinct yet informative overview both of Berkeley’s major professionalpreoccupations, and of the principal figures and themes in Berkeleian biographicalscholarship. Berman then proceeds to make a powerful case for the claim thatBerkeley was not straightforwardly honest, either in his writings or in his life, and tosuggest that this trait has its roots in his extreme religiosity.

Michael Ayers’ ‘Was Berkeley an empiricist or a rationalist?’ follows. Ayers respondsto and rejects a controversial tendency in recent years to cast Berkeley as a rationalist,and specifically as a Cartesian philosopher. He provides us with a wide-rangingoverview of the existence and nature of the empiricist–rationalist dichotomy both inancient philosophy and in Berkeley’s immediate early modern predecessors, beforepresenting ample and clear textual evidence for his central claim above. In so doing,Ayers helpfully identifies Berkeley’s distinctive epistemology and sets it in historicalcontext.

Third comes Robert McKim’s ‘Berkeley’s notebooks’. This paper traces the earlydevelopment in the Philosophical Commentaries (the notebooks that Berkeley keptwhen preparing his first major works) of some of what would become his publishedarguments against the existence of material substance, and other key themes. Thenotebooks are a vital resource for those engaged in the study of Berkeley, but are easilymishandled, and while McKim’s piece is certainly insightful and useful, someadditional advice concerning the notebooks’ proper use would have been beneficial tomany readers.

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