Reading Sensations in Early Modern England (review)

Katharine A. Craik's Reading Sensations in Early Modern England contributes to a subfield of literary studies that aims to recover early modern emotional experiences by drawing on contemporary understandings of the psychophysical humoral subject, thus sharing the interests of Michael Schoenfeldt¹ and Gail Kern Paster.² Craik, however, shifts the discussion in a new direction by drawing attention to the relationship "between the word and the flesh—and, more specifically, the relationship between literary texts and the bodies of English gentlemen" (p. 3), tracing how George Puttenham, Sir Philip Sidney, John Donne, Thomas Coryat, Richard Braithwait, and Thomas Cranley emphasized and valued the somatic effects of reading. Thoughtful and concise, Reading Sensations makes the compelling argument that reading was an active and often dangerous experience that "shaped, and sometimes imperiled, masculine subjectivity" (p. 3).

In the first chapter, Craik puts Thomas Wright's The Passions of the Minde in Generall (1601, 1604), a guide to emotional self-mastery founded on medical knowledge and moral philosophy, next to Henry Crosse's Vertues Common-wealth: Or The High-way to Honour (1603), a moral treatise on the vices that plagued English gentlemen of the age. This textual pairing, Craik argues, brings to light a paradox "at the centre of many polemics . . . : how can poetry be both trifling and insignificant and, at the same time, devastating to those who consumed it?" (p. 26). The risks lie in the dynamic and reciprocal exchange between "contagious books and the pliable minds, bodies and souls of those who consume them" (p. 26). Craik's observation that "poetry and the sacred word" appear to work on the passions and the body "in remarkably similar ways" (p. 33) is provocative but underdeveloped. It opens the door for others to consider further how the Reformation's emphasis on personal reading of the scripture may have influenced moral perspectives on the reader's somatic experience.

In chapters 2 and 3, Craik focuses on George Puttenham and Sir Philip Sidney to consider how the "physical sensations triggered by imaginative writing which so worried Wright and Crosse became a creative resource" (p. 34) for those invested in the "transformative power of literature" (p. 35). In one of the book's strongest arguments, Craik maintains that Puttenham's The Arte of English Poesie (1589) develops a "new aesthetic vocabulary" to establish a productive link between poetry's stirring effects and a masculine English identity. Most surprising, as Craik notes, is Puttenham's insistence that the parts of poetry "not only move or arouse the sensitive bodies of readers, but are also themselves characterized by changeable bodily attributes such as heat, colour, size and texture" (p. 39).

In her discussion of An Apology for Poetry (1595), Craik stresses Sidney's interest in the power of poetry to incite choler in soldiers serving their country. While noting that prominent male readers of The Arcadia such as Gabriel Harvey described the text's potential to inspire "noble courage," Craik suggests that Sidney actually "forbids readers" from taking pleasure in its representations of anger, acknowledging instead poetry's tendency to beguile (p. 71).

In "'These Spots are but the Letters': John Donne and the Medicaments of Elegy," Craik reads a progression in Donne's faith in expressing, and thereby easing, sorrow. Whereas The Anniversaries fail as texts "designed to work therapeutically on despair," the confessional language in Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions not only "registers in its very structure and syntax the stages of Donne's sickness" (p. 91) but also "betokens God's grace" (p. 92). Overly neat and compressed, this chapter sees an evolution in Donne's beliefs that could be explained by emphasizing the generic differences between an elegy for a stranger and one's personal prayers in a time of crisis.

Following an entertaining chapter on Thomas Coryat's literalizing the "rich vocabulary of bibliophagia" (p. 95), Craik tackles the...