In this wonderfully intelligent and beautifully written book, Jeff Dolven considers the Sidneyan injunction that poetry's task is to delight and instruct in light of the humanist pedagogical principles according to which Elizabethan writers were themselves instructed. What he finds in the romances of John Lyly, Philip Sidney, and Edmund Spenser is profound skepticism with respect to the possibilities of education that emerges in the conflict between favored discursive modes and devices of humanism such as the maxim and the example, and the meandering, interlacing, inconclusive nature of romance narrative.

Dolven begins by focusing on the pedagogical problems and strategies that characterized the sixteenth-century English humanist classroom, articulated in the pages of schoolmasters’ books. “At the heart of education” he claims, “is an epistemological question, the teacher's question, how do I know you understand”? (63; italics in the original). The effort to answer this question required students to participate in strategic reductions such as repetition, exercises designed to thwart mere repetition, and the collecting and redeploying of extracts. These practices show “a common tendency … to render narrative or historical texts in anarrative forms: they share an idea of understanding as taking the time out” (64). Thus Dolven posits a contradiction between the forms that signify instruction and the temporality of romance narrative. In Lyly's The Anatomy of Wit, the performance of wit that “occup[ies] the non-time of argument, a version of the non-time of the school,” stands in place of the education by experience that a travel narrative might seem designed to tell (83). The book thus confirms Ascham's famous argument about the dangers of experience in the world compared to the safety and productivity of the schoolroom. In the Old Arcadia, we witness a collision between the “unbending ethics” embodied in the maxim or the sentence and the “sympathies cultivated over the hectic course of the narrative” that produces not resolution but ethical impasse (125). In the New Arcadia, a more mature Sidney exploits Ramist method as a structuring principle for his narrative so that the engine that generates incident is itself a mode of instruction, impoverishing the romance. With the 1590 Faerie Queene Dolven focuses on the problem of the example, the humanist instruction combining precept and action. In a brilliant account of the spectatorial traps besetting Spenser's characters, he argues that if the example is to instruct, the onlooker must not empathize with exemplifying others but coolly contemplate the lessons of their predicaments. The poem presents a choice between “exposure, involvement, entanglement” and a detachment that in Guyon's case looks like “his failure to change, his failure to grow up” and in Britomart's like cluelessness before the figures in the House of Busirane (164). The conclusion of book 6 in Calidore's courteous and well-rewarded shamelessness when he barges in on Colin and the Graces signals the poem's capitulation to romance's detractors, rendering it “the idle profitless toy that the schoolmasters deplored” (233). Dolven concludes with a consideration of John Milton's Maske Presented at Ludlow and a gesture toward the emergence of the Bildungsroman, the form that simply could not be in the sixteenth century. The medium of education is narrative: characters learn from sometimes painful experience and readers learn from vicariously accompanying them.

This summary doesn’t do justice to the critical intelligence evident both in the readings of individual texts and in the overall argument of this book. The fresh illuminations of the highly familiar literary texts are myriad. Dolven excavates the implicit poetics of humanist pedagogy to analyze its practices and tropes in terms of categories like temporality, experience, and empathy rather than the moral or curricular ones of its own mandate. He asks how learning is represented in the schoolroom, recognizing that curricula and academic exercises are productive of particular kinds of narrative and categories of experience that will thrive beyond the school. This imaginative analysis, however, points to a problem: Dolven tends to narrativize, and this restricts the factors he considers in his analysis. The field is delimited by two kinds of text, the humanist pedagogical manual and the romance narrative, that overlap in their pedagogical mission and diverge in the meaning they impart to time, experience, and error. He connects these genres by biographical surmise; the poets, grammar schoolboys all, unavoidably carry the humanist instructional mission into their poetry at the same time that they “do not believe in the project”—though Dolven can’t decide whether the pedagogical failures they orchestrate bespeak a polemical purpose or “bitter, private irony” (171). It is entirely possible that these writers felt and explored exactly this predicament. But what Dolven's fine readings demonstrate is simply an incompatibility between the static forms of humanist instruction such as the maxim, the example, or the extract, and the fluid, entangling form of romance, which the poets persist in bringing together. The evidence points to but cannot answer why, given their humanist training, these writers were attracted to the genre of romance. Dolven posits that romance challenges the pedagogical assumptions of humanism. But another possibility is that the genre, aristocratic in content and sensibility, reflects the poet's class aspirations. In his discussions of humanist hostility to the Grand Tour and of chivalric apprenticeship, Dolven brushes against status issues that might have inflected the relationship of these writers to the grammar school, but doesn’t pursue them. A third possibility might have to do with the complex relationship these writers developed to the vernacular and its forms. Dolven accords the school perhaps a larger space than it deserves in the field of determinants that these texts inhabit.

This misjudgment, if it is one, is productive, insofar as it contributes to the superb argumentative control that Dolven demonstrates throughout the book. This book should be given to every doctoral candidate in English as a model of style. Dolven is himself a poet of some distinction and this shows itself in the subtlety and intelligence of his readings and how he offers them to the reader. Writing of book 5's Munera, whose golden hands and silver feet are chopped off and nailed on a post, Dolven comments on Spenser's assignment to her of a “sclendar wast”: “one had not had to think of what connected those golden hands and silver feet up to that moment, but she is given an unallegorical middle, a surprising and touching detail that might almost be felt in the crook of an arm before she is gone from the poem for good” (214). Similarly, an analytical point is made with such clarity and commitment that there's almost a “thunk” in the reader's head as the idea lands. Dolven's analysis is complex and detailed. And so he pauses frequently to summarize and distill, reminding us of where we have been, making sure we are ready for the next step. His book is about the conflict in Renaissance texts between the condensations of teaching and the complex entanglements of romance. But in his impressive book, prolonged excursus, sensuous lingering, and strategic, pedagogically attuned reduction all happily cohabit.