Aspects of Subjectivity: Society and Individuality from the Middle Ages to Shakespeare and Milton. By Anthony Low. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 2003. Pp. xxi + 242. $60.

In 1992 David Aers famously whispered in the ear of early modernists that their claims about the Renaissance invention of subjectivity were at best presumptuous, and at worst simply wrong. Questions surrounding identity and subjectivity were quickly becoming the controlling questions in medieval studies, addressed with greater or lesser specificity in studies of gender, heresy, and the "other," and through the use of analytical tools made available through queer theory, deconstruction, and post-colonial paradigms. Such studies tended to be synchronic rather than diachronic; they avoided contrasting the Middle Ages with the Early Modern period in order not to allow the Early Moderns to define the terms of the analyses.

Michael Matto
Adelphi University