In this volume, Colleen Ruth Rosenfeld complicates the conventional understanding of sprezzatura, the appearance of effortless grace recommended and cultivated by early modern theorists of poetry, precisely by addressing its cultivation. Taking a lead from Ben Jonson's Timber (1641), she distinguishes the poet, the craft of the poet, and the product of the poet's craft. She suggests that the “fiction” of a poem (that is, the originary form supplied by the poet in the creation of the poem) establishes a world that thereafter functions according to the rules of its own logic. Early modern humanist pedagogy encouraged style (elocutio), understood as an ability to identify and deploy figures of speech, with the curious result that students were taught to notice the artifice of effects otherwise valued for their artlessness. Resisting the traditional bias against artifice that regarded obvious rhetorical effects as insincere (a bias that favored the clarity and plainness of logic) early modern poets made conspicuous use of figures of speech as a means of pursuing poetic knowledge. Within the shifting dialectic informed by these contrasting attitudes toward conspicuous figure, poetic theory made space for figures of speech as drivers of thought rather than barriers to thought. In response to the reduction of rhetoric, in which figure was understood as merely decorative, poesy came to understand “figures of speech as generative forms of thinking” (5). As features of the fictive worlds brought into being by poetic makers, figures of speech determine the “laws” that govern those worlds. Since these invented worlds appear over and against received understandings, they encourage indecorous thinking. In so doing, they promote thinking by means of style, rather than according to logic, and thereby expand what counts as thinking.

After previewing her central themes, Rosenfeld organizes her material into two main parts. In the first part, comprising chapters 1 through 3, she accounts for several approaches to figure that were available for early modern writers. In the second part, chapters 4 through 6, she develops “case studies” of these various approaches. In chapter 1, Rosenfeld examines how style, understood especially as the incorporation in a work of figures of speech, establishes the possibilities for a fictive world. She establishes the Ramist reforms as a motivating context for the developments she observes, since these reforms exaggerate the traditional demotion of rhetoric to decoration and correspondingly elevate dialectic as a competing and complementary means of achieving knowledge. Rosenfeld closes the chapter with a complex account of two uses of epanodos in Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene.

Chapter 2 considers the ways that humanist instruction converted the study of figures of speech aimed at recognition into a study aimed at composition—the process, in other words, by which figures became formulas. Rosenfeld introduces an example of gradatio, Dorus's (that is, Musidorus's) elaborate praise of various distinctions of “fairness” as suggested by one of Pamela's gloves, to consider the complex deployment of the figure. Cleophila (Pyrocles) rebukes Dorus's extravagance as insincere artifice. Rosenfeld suggests that this use of gradatio “establishes the ‘co-ordinates’ for something like Fairness” (69) and thus maps the conceptual space of the fiction. Chapter 3 further explains the distinction between decorum and indecorum. Starting with Horace's definition of decorum as requiring something like “allegiance to the natural world” (73) characterized by “harmony, proportion, measure, and rule” (74), Rosenfeld suggests that indecorous thinking reverses these norms, favoring (for example) “the part over the whole” (and so disvaluing harmony). For this chapter, Rosenfeld considers the “discursive extravagancies” of Antissia, a character in Mary Wroth's Urania. Rosenfeld suggests that indecorous thinking, in this and similar cases, opens within the fictive world a space for consideration of social and ethical problems not capable of representation in “decorous” texts.

In the chapters comprising the second part of the study, Rosenfeld revisits The Faerie Queene, Arcadia, and Urania, giving more detailed—and complicating—attention to selected episodes in each work. In chapter 4, she considers the function of simile in the characterization of Braggadochio in Faerie Queene 2.3.36–37. Structurally, simile ought to bring the reader closer to the natural, but when readers notice it as simile, the noticing distances them from the natural (it focuses their attention on the artificial). Rosenfeld notices that Ben Jonson's marginal identification of simile in this passage implies both Jonson's appreciation of simile's power to innovate (its generativity) and his contrary tendency to attach the simile to a particular meaning (that is, to control generativity). For the bulk of the chapter, she considers variations on the counter-impulses that determine explanations and uses of simile during the period. In chapter 5, Rosenfeld considers the figure of antithesis in Philip Sidney's Arcadia. She focuses attention on the famous ending of the revised Arcadia in mid-sentence. Rather than explaining this interruption with reference to Sidney's personal history, she explains it as a problem of style. The break comes after a series of antitheses that indicate (most overtly) how evenly matched Anaxius and Zelmane (Pyrocles) are in a fight. Antithesis establishes this evenness so emphatically that it stabilizes the scene. In other words, it tends to shut down the maker's invention so that the maker is thwarted by his own device. The final chapter of the study considers periphrasis in Mary Wroth's Urania. Because periphrasis replaces direct naming with indirect, it favors obscurity over clarity and resists history in favor of what will never be. As in the previous chapters of part two, Rosenfeld lets this central example expand into accounts of classical and humanist explanations of the figure in other texts and contexts.

Rosenfeld's book makes an important contribution to the interpretation of early modern texts, recognizing that poets’ use of conspicuous figure is conceptually in tension with sprezzatura. Unfortunately, the complexity of the topic, which calls for relatively specialized knowledge of the traditions of rhetoric and pedagogy as well as detailed knowledge of the literature she considers, and Rosenfeld's difficult, layered, and recursive style make the book a difficult read.