Book Reviews 795 committed to messianic Christian ideas that condemned wealth and predicted the approaching end of the world. At the same time, he was obsessed with the desire for gold and worldly accomplishment. These conflicting commitments (which seem comparable to the dichotomy of mysticism and practicality that Flint explicitly rejects) could not be easily reconciled within Columbus’s culture, but the voyages of exploration offered him a way to act on both of his fervent desires: he would spread Christianity andfind gold. Yet the ‘creative tension’ could never be resolved because the discoveries led to new human cruelties, and Columbus never acquired much wealth. Put simply, the ‘creative tension’ produced the disappointments as well as the achievements of his life. Still, as Flint describes him, ‘Columbus remains one of the most talented and. . . imaginative human beings ever to have lived’ (p. 214). Flint thus uses her scholarly research to develop a new (and sometimes old) portrait of a historical figure whom she respects. She reminds readers that even the most adventurous persons can never escape the language and cultural assumptions of their era. Perhaps more importantly, however, Flint analyses the shaping influence of a culture without ignoring or denying the complex ideas and desires of a creative, ambitious individual. Her description of the interactions between a culture and a specific person incorporates many of the best qualities of a well-researched, contextual approach to intellectual history (for example, she carefully analyses the books and popular beliefs that shaped the experiences and literature of educated Europeans during the fifteenth century). Flint is more concerned with traditional scholarship than with recent books about cross-cultural encounters, which means that she writes about Samuel Eliot Morison instead of contemporary theorists such as Tzvetan Todorov. Her aspiration to enter the ‘imaginative landscape’ of her subject’s culture may be overly optimistic, but this historical goal offers valuable guidance for her sympathetic explorations of Columbus’s life and ideas. Readers will learn something new from her explorations, even if they remain detached from the alien world of fifteenth-century Europe and unsympathetic to the visions or achievements of Christopher Columbus. Lloyd Kramer University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill Drama and the Market in tke Age of Shakespeare, Douglas Bruster, Cambridge Studies in Renaissance Literature and Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 19923, xiii + 159 pp., $27.95. Douglas Bruster’s volume, the first title in a new series, Cambridge Studies in Renaissance Literature and Culture, promises to explore the links between Renaissance drama and Elizabethan and Jacobean economy and society, ‘looking at the professional status of playwrights such as Shakespeare, and the establishment of the commercial theatres’ (p. i). In so doing he proposes to chart the development of a new ‘materialist vision’ in the drama of the playhouses, born out of and reacting to the massive expansion of ‘the market’ (both the reality and the idea) in metropolitan culture. And to this end he