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Translating Investments: Metaphor and the Dynamic of Cultural Change in Tudor-Stuart England.

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Translating Investments: Metaphor and the Dynamic of Cultural Change in Tudor-Stuart England By Judith Anderson New York: Fordham University Press, 2005

In her latest book on the functioning of metaphor in early modern England, Judith Anderson sets herself two related tasks. She tests the accounts of metaphor in contemporary linguistics (citing Jacques Derrida, Paul Ricoeur, and neocognativists like George Laikoff and Mark Johnson) against the theory and practice of writers in the early modern period. (She comments that "history and text have as much to tell theory as the reverse" [2].) On the other hand, she uses the period's treatment of metaphor to expose the halting, uncertain movement of early modern cultural change. In so doing she reads with characteristically searching attention an extraordinary range of cultural texts--literary works by Shakespeare, Donne, and Spenser, but also dictionaries and treatises on rhetoric, politics, theology, and economics.

Its punning title, Translating Investments, suggests in several ways the book's focus. Translatio is the Latin term for metaphor and Anderson argues that metaphor involves translation, a "carrying across" from one context to another. It is further a kind of Hegelian sublation, a "translation to a higher level incident on partial cancellation of the physical" (Ricoeur, quoted on p. 1). Metaphor is creative, giving a surplus beyond the original, physical meaning of the word, but the departure from the physical also involves...

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