Reading the Early Modern Passions: Essays in the Cultural History of Emotion (review)

As E. P. Thompson noted long ago, human experience is rarely exhausted by "thought and its procedures," and seldom fully available to l'histoire événementielle, the history of events. We experience our experience, Thompson claimed, as "feeling." While "feeling" remains a inchoate, mercurial concept — shorthand for an ensemble of actions and reactions, wilful engagement and doleful distress, alterations glorious and sufferable — its place in intellectual and cultural history is secure: emotion has begun its steady migration onto book jackets and into the titles of symposia; the roiling world of "feeling" has spurred a cottage industry of inquiry. In the study of early modern Europe, scholars have embarked on an exploration of that "subtile knot which makes us man," in Donne's words. We might take feeling's close cousins, the humors, which have been pressed into service with increasing frequency, as an example: building on early twentieth-century scholarship on melancholy, historians and literary scholars have acquainted us with bile and choler, blood and phlegm, krasis, krisis, and temperament. The "affective turn" thus follows closely on the heels of broad investigations into the ways in which human embodiment and the methods and metaphors of medicine illuminate, or impinge upon, early modern culture and politics.

Reading the Early Modern Passions is a rich, inspired, and suggestive contribution to the history of emotion. Exploring "the early modern emotional universe" (1) in an arresting melange of old and new history, psychoanalysis, historical phenomenology, art history, musicology, and assiduous philological scholarship, Reading the Early Modern Passions is the most ambitious, wide-ranging, and successful collection of essays on early modern emotion yet published. Each essay is eloquent, apperceptive, and resplendent with insight. Despite a rather programmatic introduction, Paster, Rowe, and Floyd-Wilson should be congratulated for assembling a remarkably cogent, incisive collection of work.

The collection is divided into three sections. In the first, Richard Strier argues strenuously for the "validity" and "desirability" of emotions and passions in both humanist and Reformation traditions (32), while Zirka Filipczak, noting that gesture both influences and reveals emotion, offers an invigorating interpretation of Mona Lisa's hands in Leonardo's famous portrait. In a tempered, eloquent essay that should occasion debate among Miltonists and non-Miltonists alike, Michael Schoenfeldt treats passion and compassion in Paradise Lost. Schoenfeldt argues provocatively that Milton "courts rather than dampens the volatility" of the passions by "mapping" them against the story of the Fall (45). Finally, John Staines essays the role of emotion in the emergent English public sphere in the 1640s and 1650s, arguing that early modern writers "brought the passions into their own developing sense of public life" (97).

Exploring "how to behave our selves when . . . affections extraordinarily possesse us," as Thomas Wright wrote in his 1604 preface to The Passions of the Minde in Generall, the essays in section 2 retail both the strengths and, though few, the weaknesses of the collection. Arguing for a macrocosm full of sympathies and antipathies, Gail Kern Paster's own essay, now republished in her Humoring the Body: Emotions and the Shakespearean Stage (2004), proposes an extension of affect "across the species barrier." Using Falstaff and his bestial metaphors as her spur, Paster claims that "animals played a key role heuristically in the early modern production of practical knowledge about the passions" (121–24). Investigating "English mettle" and engaging Shakespeare as well, Mary Floyd-Wilson argues that ethnicity in the early modern period is "defined more by emotional difference than appearance"; ethnic distinctions rest on national temper, on "how easily one is stirred or calmed," on "one's emotional vulnerability or resistance," rather than climate or geography alone (133). Vulnerability and resistance to the passions, disciplining their "natural turbulence," are Katherine Rowe's concerns in her essay on Sir William Davenant's...