“I am the Alpha and Omega” (Rev. 22:13). Governed by the Christian religion, the Latin West was indoctrinated with the notion that the alphabet, divinity, and life itself corresponded. Boeckeler's Playful Letters delves into the multivalent uses of alphabetic letters and letterforms in print, paint, and performance in the early modern period. The argument turns on alphabetics as an interpretive model “to demonstrate … letterature's communicative function, affecting how readers read, writers wrote, printers printed, and image-makers made” (2–3). William Shakespeare, Albrecht Dürer, the Cyrillic alphabet, printed alphabets, and graphic design are all examined under Boeckeler's theoretical eye, showcasing the ways that letters were read, repurposed, and recombined outside of the alphabetic group, but ever with a keen sense of their prevailing organizational principle.

The first chapter considers one of the first printed works on graphic design, Geofroy Tory's Champ Fleury, from 1529, which examines the proportion of letterforms based upon the proportions of the human body. Tory's explanation of type and letter design is in a similar vein to Dürer's work on human proportions, yet Tory's was only published in this singular edition. Boeckeler correctly points out that such a consideration of letterform design was the direct result of the invention of printing with movable type; many of the author's arguments throughout the book, in fact, focus on various aspects of print culture. Chapter 2 tackles figured alphabets, with particular focus on Peter Flötner's Menschenalphabet woodcut print, of 1534, and I. Paulini's alphabet, of the 1570s, depicting episodes from Ovid's Metamorphoses, further exploring the links between the individual, the body, and the letterform. For Flötner, human bodies with their appendages bent and contorted took the shape of the letters; Paulini's bodies, however, become letters in a Daphne/laurel-tree transformation. While I do not always agree with Boeckeler's elision of autonomous alphabetic prints with those incipit initials meant to be printed integral with text, her conclusion, which incorporates Conrad Grale's alphabetic engravings, ultimately ties the bow on her discussion of the corporeality of printed alphabets. Boeckeler turns her focus on Albrecht Dürer's Self-Portrait of 1500 in the third chapter, examining how the painting is a self-portrait in both image and text. She considers the monogram as both an organizing principle and second self-portrait, but I was left wondering whether the monogram organized the portrait or whether both simply derive from Dürer's same system of proportion. Chapter 4 looks at the role played by alphabets in three of William Shakespeare's plays: Richard III, King Lear, and Titus Andronicus. Letters, letterforms, and alphabets creep into the plot of each play as both minor points and as fulcra on which the entire play can turn. Boeckeler spends considerable time discussing the pivotal G in Richard III and English orthography; Lear and Titus are less well covered. The fifth chapter takes us east, to an examination of the first printed Cyrillic primer by Ivan Fedorov, in 1574, and the historical narrative of the Cyrillic script/text. This was interesting new material for me, and I wish there had been a more substantive consideration of common pan-European trends in the early modern era.

Although the type of theoretical interpretation found in Playful Letters is not always my inclination, I can appreciate the perspective Boeckeler brings to bear on letterature. With its heavy reliance on an existing understanding of theory and academic method, this is not a text for undergraduates, but it should provide ample ground for graduates as well as for academics working in the areas on which Boeckeler touches. I would have preferred more-substantial endnotes grounding Boeckeler's readings and interpretations of the material, which would help to make the book more useful to those not just interested in the theoretical arguments. Playful Letters will, however, make me take a second look at the ways in which the alphabet/letterforms activate and are activated by aspects of early modern print and literary culture, how something so concrete yet malleable, ubiquitous yet invisible, pervades aspects of early modern culture beyond the expected literary.