Evans, Kasey. Colonial Virtue: The Mobility of Temperance in Renaissance England.  Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012. xii + 275 pp. ISBN: 978-1442643598. $60.00 cloth. 

It is fitting that we enter a work on temperance via the Bower of Bliss and the Knight of Temperance’s ordeal therein.  With this introductory Spenserian moment, Evans deftly guides us through the etymological resonances of ‘temperance’ and its growing temporal connotations in the Renaissance “when representations of the virtue begin to emphasize first the postponement of the passions over time, and subsequently . . . the industrious control of time itself” (3).  Rather than retreading the well-worn territory that nearly three decades of Spenserians have charted in the wake of New Historicist writing on colonial resonances of the Bower, Evans at the very outset finds new grounds for speaking about Book II’s notorious conclusion.  Guyon’s “tempest of . . . wrathfulnesse” (II.xii.83.4) represents neither the knight’s failure to uphold his eponymous virtue, nor a momentary lapse in “readerly rigour,” but an expansion of the concept itself into uncharted territory (4).  Specifically, Evans is concerned with the mobility of temperance into the new geographic and discursive spaces created by England’s expansion into the New World, as well as with movements and migrations into colonial territories carried out in the name of temperance.

Evans’s project is ambitious from the start.  She sets out to trace the changing rhetorical, geographical, and political connotations of temperance as it shifts from the scholarly discourses of classical Europe to the political and economic vocabularies of early British colonialism.  Such a project necessarily entails an engagement with a range of primary materials and Evans consistently impresses readers with her large selection of sources.  She places canonical literary works by Spenser, Shakespeare, and Donne in conversation with lesser-known textual productions that include political treatises, dietaries, and advice manuals among others.  She argues that it is this expansive breadth that distinguishes her work from extant scholarship on temperance, and readers are quite likely to agree. 

One might be a little less inclined to agree with the methodological interventions that Evans claims for her work, specifically her aim “to bridge the persistent divide between traditional philological and political postcolonial criticism” (7).  This dichotomy appears somewhat schematic, and it might be remiss to imply that the postcolonial critics listed in this context, including Andrew Hadfield, Willy Maley, and Shankar Raman, were engaged in a political postcolonial criticism that wasn’t also formal and philological.  In fact, foundational figures in postcolonial theory, Said being an obvious example, were influenced by a philological tradition associated with Erich Auerbach, and postcolonial work in early modern studies has, more often than not, continued in this tradition. 

That said Evans’s own work is exemplary within this tradition, turning to a remarkable range of texts on early colonial encounters as sites for close reading and linguistic analysis.  Readers familiar with the work of Jonathan Gil Harris will find here a similarly compelling reading of literary and cultural texts, with chapters devoted to both The Tempest and tobacco treatises.  Evans acknowledges her debt to Gil Harris and others in this tradition who have worked towards “an expansive critical perspective that speaks across scholarly subfields, textual canons, and disciplinary bounds” (7).  Indisputably, this is the biggest strength of Colonial Virtue as well.

Evans also draws extensively on scholarship exploring early modern corporeality.  While Michael Schoenfeldt, Mary Floyd-Wilson, and other scholars have identified for us the physiological dimensions by which early modern bodies and selves are constituted, Evans locates these arguments in a very particular context of New World colonial expansion, in which temperance takes on interesting new temporal, ethical, and political dimensions.  Her interventions in this regard are richly detailed and the result is a refreshing new study on early colonial expansion, New World encounter, and their resonances in a range of discursive formations of the period.  Along with Jean Feerick’s recent Strangers in Blood, also from University of Toronto Press, what we have here is a work that offers new possibilities for corporeal and physiological understandings of colonial encounter and transatlantic migrations. Spenserians will also notice that Book II becomes the locus of important arguments regarding temperance in both works.  While Feerick is concerned with the Bower’s Irish resonances, Evans continues in the tradition of Greenblatt and others who look to its New World contexts.  “Blood Guiltie” temperance is important to both arguments, although temperance is inflected somewhat differently in each reading.  If in Feerick’s reading, temperance is the act of regulating one’s blood, in Evans’s it is the act of regulating the affective life.  She suggests that Guyon must temper his “early tendency toward affect and empathy with a rigorously mercantile version of temperance” (9).  Particularly valuable is Evans’s insistence on the proto-capitalistic implications of temperance in Book II.  She argues that the poem critiques temperance “as an ethically and epistemologically impoverished virtue”; it is “a fiction erected both to justify and to disavow the violent truth of primitive accumulation” (66).  Interestingly, in their respective racial and mercantile readings of temperance, Feerick and Evans offer up analyses of different, yet crucially related, aspects of the colonial encounter.  Both, it would seem, are imperative to fully grasping Guyon’s fraught journey into the Bower and its colonial allusions.

In other chapters of Colonial Virtue we see a fine mix of focused close readings of individual texts on temperance and theoretical analyses of conceptual shifts in the notion of temperance.  The architecture of this work is clearly well thought out.  Evans begins with a chapter that surveys the changes in classical formulations on temperance that are registered in the work of late medieval and early modern artists, writers, and philosophers.  We then move to a section on “Temperance Explores America” that includes the aforementioned chapter on The Faerie Queene, followed by a chapter on The Tempest. Part II, “Temperance Colonizes America” moves into less canonical territory, beginning with a chapter on John Donne and Christopher Brooke’s sermons—two rhetorical responses to the Powhatan attack on the English settlement in Virginia.  This section ends with a brilliantly entertaining chapter on a range of ‘non-literary’ texts, including economic tracts by Gerard Malynes and James I, as well as medical manuals by Thomas Trapham and William Hughes.  With its focus on tobacco, tea, coffee, and chocolate, this final chapter is likely to be particularly valuable to those interested in early modern commodity culture as well as those with a broader interest in diet and identity—a frequently ignored dimension of the colonial encounter. 

In sum, Evans’s work is thorough, expansive, and rewarding reading for Spenserians, as well as for scholars more generally interested in early colonial encounters.  We enter it through the Bower Bliss and leave in the ventriloquized voice of Thomas Tryon’s “East-Indian Brackmanny” (206).  Thus bookended by two radically different, canonical and non-canonical, literary and non-literary texts of English colonialism, Colonial Virtue is an engaging read from start to finish.

Gitanjali Shahani is an Assistant Professor at San Francisco State University.  Her edited volume, Emissaries in Early Modern Literature and Culture: Mediation, Transmission, Traffic, 1550-1700 (with Brinda Charry) was published by Ashgate in 2009.  She has published articles on the early modern East India trade, women’s writing from the early modern archive, Shakespeare in Hindi cinema, and food studies.  She is currently working on a book about the early modern spice trade.