Review of \u3ci\u3eThe Usurer\u27s Daughter: Male Friendship and Fictions of Women in Sixteenth-Century England\u3c/i\u3e by Lorna Hutson

Hutson\u27s study of the impact of humanism on male friendship and the anxieties in the changing nature of friendship expressed in literature and Shakespearean drama is brilliant and thought provoking, a work that stands at the intersection of economic, cultural, and literary history. Hutson\u27s writing style is dense and rather difficult, and her thesis will certainly provoke debate, especially as she takes on feminist and new historicist critics. Hutson\u27s title is provocative, and a reader would probably pick up her study thinking it was about Jessica, the most famous usurer\u27s daughter, and The Merchant of Venice. Though one would have indeed felt that Merchant would have been the ideal play for Hutson to analyze in her discussion of economics or on male friendship and the anxiety it provokes, she saves that play for her conclusion. The conclusion, in fact, is the strongest chapter of the book, and one comes away wishing she had focused more of her attention there. But Hutson is using the metaphor of the usurer\u27s daughter not to discuss Jews in Renaissance England, but rather the part all women played as objects of exchange for men making a bid for success in the Renaissance