215 Book Reviews Berns, Ute, ed. Solo Performances: Staging the Early Modern Self in England. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2010. Pp. 272. $76. Jared Johnson, Thiel College Published in 2010, Solo Performances: Staging the Early Modern Self in England gath- ers a diverse collection of essays assembled from papers presented at the Performing Cultures conference held at the Free University of Berlin in 2007. he work features thirteen new essays from a wide range of international scholars that position perfor- mance studies in a pivotal role in shaping the future of early modern English studies. In the introduction, Ute Berns, the co-organizer of the Performing Cultures con- ference and editor of this volume, invokes Stephen Greenblatt’s famous concept of Renaissance self-fashioning as the volume’s theoretical point of departure, charac- terizing it as “a process that is performative in nature,” and claims that the works included in Solo Performances will revisit early modern self-fashioning with a “new theoretical edge and analytical precision” (11). he sharpening instrument that the collection’s contributors apply to Renaissance self-fashioning is performance studies. hough Berns articulates a rigidly deined critical context to situate the essays that appear in Solo Performances, the articles themselves present a multitude of schol- arly perspectives. he contributors to t he volume vary greatly in terms academic training and experience, some based irmly in the German university system and others extending across the European continent and beyond. he collection is orga- nized in three major sections: 1) “Authoring and Authority,” 2) “Self-Inventions and Pathologies,” and 3) “Fashioning Sovereignty.” he individual essays contained within each section examine a wide range of textual performances. Canadian Review of Comparative Literature / Revue Canadienne de Littérature Comparée CRCL JUNE 2013 JUIN RCLC 0319–051x/13/40.2/211 © Canadian Comparative Literature Association