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Never before have I been asked to review the same book by more than one journal. Yet I received such an invitation for Desire in the Renaissance from not two but three different periodicals: in addition to the International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, the scholarly journals Renaissance Quarterly and Modern Philology contacted me about the book. If my experience is any indication, Desire in the Renaissance has clearly struck a nerve. This prompts one first to wonder what might make the book stand out from the welter of anthologies in the field of Renaissance literature that continue to pour forth from university presses and then to ask whether this attention is warranted.
The answer to the first question is not difficult to find; indeed, one has to look no further than the title. The conjunction between psychoanalysis (the preeminent intellectual movement of the twentieth century) and the Renaissance (the epoch that gave birth to modernity) detonates a powerful charge that is bound to be felt in many quarters. As Regina Schwartz & Valeria Finucci observe in their introduction, Freud in his elaboration of psychoanalytic theory turned regularly to artists and writers of the Renaissance: Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Ariosto (on the creative process), Tasso (on repetition), and of course Shakespeare—Hamlet, King Lear, The Merchant of Venice, and Macbeth being the plays that receive the most sustained attention—all figure in his work. But if ‘psychoanalysis is preoccupied with the literature of the Renaissance’, the editors argue, so ‘conversely, the writers of Renaissance literature were preoccupied with their version of the inner life, concerns that would come to constitute the purview of psychoanalysis’ (p. 3). Thus, extending an influential formulation by Shoshana Felman (1982), who has urged that the relationship of psychoanalysis to literature be conceived as one not of master-fully applied but rather of reciprocally implied knowledge, Schwartz & Finucci contend