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Professor Greenblatt of Berkeley is the leading proponent of New Historicism, which is a mixture of history, literary criticism, anthropology, and cultural poetics in the style of Michel Foucault. Learning to Curse collects nine essays written over the last 15 years that set out to define New Historicism as an approach and illustrate its workings. The essays are uniformly well written, original, engaging, and dazzling in the leaps they make across historical periods. For example, there is a bold juxtaposition of Marlowe's The Jew of Malta with Marx's “On the Jewish Question” and one is read in the light of the other. The essay, “Resonance and Wonder,” is another exciting exploration of anti-Semitism.
I would like to concentrate, however, on Greenblatt's use of psychology and psychoanalysis in this book. Despite the author's brilliance in all areas of cultural poetics, he is oddly reticent in the psychological domain. For example, the essay, “Filthy Rites,” cries out for psychological explanation of rituals of dirt and soiling. Luther's scatological preoccupations are not only linked to the militant theology of early Protestantism, but also the unattractive traits of the anal-sadistic personality. Much more could be said that would negotiate—a favorite word of Greenblatt's—between theology and scatology.