“Orpheus's lute,” muses Proteus in The Two Gentlemen of Verona, “was strung with poets’ sinews” (3.2.77). In her new monograph, Jenny Mann links Shakespeare's observation to a broader theory of the sublime force of rhetoric and poetry. Her book recounts how Orpheus emerged from the shadowy realms of Greek antiquity as a legendary embodiment of poetic ecstasy before the writings of Virgil and Ovid gave his story shape and cohesion. During the English Renaissance these classical traces reemerged, signifying the activities of rhetorical energeia. The authors in Mann's study draw on the myth of Orpheus to imagine poetry not as created by the poet, but as seducing him, overpowering him, sounding notes from his plucked sinews and binding poet and audience together in lyrical thrall. The legend of Orpheus, and specifically Ovid's Orphic series in books 10 and 11 of the Metamorphoses, she argues, gives Renaissance authors a topos, a terminology, and imagery for conceiving the force of verbal eloquence.

By her own admission, the book is not organized around a central argument. Instead, Mann scaffolds an Orphic hermeneutics whereby various elements of the Orpheus myth are indexed to a cluster of interlocking ideas: the erotic charge of rhetorical persuasion, the sublime model of authorship and literary influence, and the “preternatural power” of rhetoric as object of epistemological study (69). The effects of Orphic force are enumerated in her chapters—Meandering, Binding, Drawing, Softening, and Scattering—underscoring her claim that for writers in the English Renaissance, energeia transforms language, poet, and audience in observable ways. This structure produces some pleasing constellations of classical and Renaissance texts, albeit by sacrificing more sustained readings. But this facilitates rather than diminishes the richness of Mann's argument by enabling her to adumbrate a sublime theory of early modern rhetoric and poetry that is simultaneously violent, nationalistic, and queerly seductive. Mann's link between Orpheus and the sublime is one of the work's central achievements. She builds on valuable recent work by scholars like Patrick Cheney and David L. Sedley by offering scholars a new lexicon of the sublime keyed to the Orpheus myth.

Mann's chapters can be read in isolation (and the reiteration of key concepts throughout suggests that she anticipates such readings), although the chapters build on each other in a way that rewards a full reading. But despite emphasis on the broader arguments, this is a ruminative work, studded with luminous moments in which Mann close reads archaeological sites as perceptively as she does epyllia. She excels at philology, unfolding the intellectual history of images and phrases that might strike others as merely tropic. A reading of Ovid's account of Orpheus's death in chapter 5 is a standout moment. Mann's command of Latin reveals the resonances of Ovid's line “Orphea percussis sociantem carmina nervis” (11.5), which in the original Latin conveys the violence inherent in the harmonious music Orpheus produces. Ovid's account of Orpheus's death, Mann notes, puts the lie to the Ciceronian account of Orpheus as the great civilizer of the savages, suggesting instead that “art is savagery, and it aims to subdue us” (164). This reading gestures toward the book's larger point that Orphic poetics often explores human nature on the knife edge between civilized and feral states of being.

While Mann often focuses on minor texts and forgotten moments, the sum of these parts is a bolder work than one might expect. Early on she declares “the story of Orpheus is the story of humanism” (17). This, it seems to me, is the larger claim Mann professes not to be making—the idea that all the captivating and terrifying tensions of human language and culture inhere in the figure of Orpheus, whose song could tame rocks and trees but could not save him from the savage fury of the Bacchantes. Indeed, she observes that “the moment words fail to persuade is precisely the moment that they become Orphic poetry” (186). This provocative and poignant claim is a reminder that Orpheus has much to say about poetry's power, but also about its failures and limitations. It is one of the many reasons this book is sure to draw a wide and enthusiastic readership among scholars of Renaissance English literature.