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  • Reading the Early Modern Passions: Essays in the Cultural History of Emotion
  • Mary Thomas Crane
Paster, Gail Kern, Katherine Rowe, and Mary Floyd-Wilson , eds. 2002. Reading the Early Modern Passions: Essays in the Cultural History of Emotion. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. $47.96 hc. $19.96 sc. 392 pp.

Reading the Early Modern Passions, a collection of essays edited by Gail Kern Paster, Katherine Rowe, and Mary Floyd-Wilson, signals its place on the cutting edge of a paradigm shift in early modern studies with the simple fact that, in a volume devoted to the study of emotion in the period, psychoanalysis is not mentioned until page 13, where it is subordinated to "historical phenomenology" and dismissed without much ado on the grounds of its "essentialist logic." Instead of the familiar Freudian and Lacanian narratives, the volume presents essays that call on cognitive linguistics, cognitive psychology, anthropology, philosophy, sociology and phenomenology to emphasize the ways in which "early modern taxonomies of emotion . . . differ from our current categories, but also how they continue to script our debates about emotions as objects of study in the humanities, sciences, and social sciences" (1). Although the essays range broadly across disciplinary and geographical fields, most contribute in some way to establishing the historicity of "inwardness." Thus, the most important insight offered by this collection is that "early modern psychology only partially shares the priority we place on inwardness, alongside very different conceptions of emotions as physical, environmental, and external phenomena" (15).

The introduction provides a very useful summary to contemporary debates about emotional states and their classification. Acknowledging significant differences across disciplines about the nature of human emotion, the editors note that "there is little agreement on what constitutes the cardinal or core emotions, on how to rank emotions on a scale of complexity, on which creatures experience them, or on whether emotions are more pan-cultural than they are local and specific" (3). They cite the work of cultural linguist Anne Wierzbicka as offering a particularly useful approach for cultural historians like themselves, since her focus on language and "emotion scripts" acknowledges both the universal and trans-cultural aspects of emotion as well as their differing manifestations in different cultures. [End Page 239]

Essays in the volume are divided into three sections: one on "Early Modern Emotion Scripts," which charts the ways in which modern and early modern representations of emotion differ; another, "Historical Phenomenology," which seeks to recreate the early modern world in which mind, body, and environment were inextricably intertwined; and finally, "Disciplinary Boundaries," which suggest some ways of understanding the methodological differences among different fields that study human emotion. As such, they seek first to establish the differences between early modern and modern experience of emotion, and then to suggest how similarities between the two can shed light on contemporary difficulties in cross-disciplinary understanding.

The first section begins with an essay by Richard Strier, "Against the Rule of Reason: Praise of Passion from Petrarch to Luther, Shakespeare to Herbert," which argues that the dominant value placed upon control of emotion by reason in the Western tradition is significantly disrupted by a longstanding tradition of "praise of passion" (23). Michael Schoenfeldt follows with an essay, "'Commotion Strange': Passion in Paradise Lost," which similarly argues that Milton's depiction of pre-lapsarian human life is influenced by both condemnation and praise of the passions. Schoenfeldt sees Milton's "equivocal and situational" attitude toward emotion as typical of early modern inconsistency, and notes that he seems to endorse both "the rigorous self-control promised by classical ethics and the sacrificial compassion at the core of Christian affect" (67). Zirka Z. Filipczak, in "Poses and Passions: Mona Lisa's 'Closely Folded' Hands," moves the volume from texts to art history to argue that in the early modern period, hands were a more common register of states of feeling than Mona Lisa's more scrutinized smile. The essay offers a complex reading of the ways in which the position of Mona Lisa's hands accords with early modern precepts about decorum and modesty, but also complicates them. Finally, John Staines discusses "Compassion in the Public Sphere of Milton and King...

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