Splenditello
Stephen Greenblatt, 19 June 1986
Immodest Acts: The Life of a Lesbian Nun in Renaissance Italy
by Judith Brown.
Oxford, 214 pp., £12.50, January 1986,0 19 503675 1 Show More
by Judith Brown.
Oxford, 214 pp., £12.50, January 1986,
“... A few months ago, in California, I had a message that a New York Times reporter had telephoned. I conjured up a half-dozen possible reasons for the call, all of them unabashedly narcissistic, only to find, when I finally reached her, that the reporter wanted to know what I thought of a scholarly book that had just been published. Such a question from the press is highly unusual in the United States: American newspapers rarely interest themselves in scholarship, and our reporters, like our politicians, have failed to develop a public discourse that can accommodate ideas of a complexity greater than that conveyed in advertising jingles ... ”