Colors Demonic and Divine: Shades of Meaning in the Middle Ages & After by Herman Pleij (review)

REVIEWS 276 gain agency along with the increase in temperature. In following this argument, Paster includes a considerable amount of information from early modern treatises on virgins’ disease and female melancholy. Finally, Katherine provides a counterexample, as she has excessive choler, which Petruchio must regulate. “Petruchio requires Kate to symbolize her wifely submission through humoral subordination to his internal climate” (133). Chapter 3, “Melancholy Cats, Lugged Bears, and other Passionate Animals: Reading Shakespeare’s Psychological Materialism Across the Species Barrier,” examines animal emotions because of the early modern understanding that animals’ bodies were also humoral and thus that human and animal emotional experience had important parallels. Paster discovers that early moderns considered animals to have particular humoral balances that gave them particular behavioral characteristics, and that these characteristics were common to a species. When Shakespearean characters describe their emotions by comparing themselves to animals, they are making a connection based on this shared humorality between humans and animals. She uses moments in plays like 1 Henry IV and Antony and Cleopatra in her analysis, which ultimately reveals that “identification across the species barrier was compelling for the early moderns because it seemed both to reinforce affective self-experience and to offer an escape from it into the self-sameness of animal passion” (150). Identifying an emotion with an animal, then, reveals a core early modern epistemology, one which viewed the self as surrounded by and existing within cosmological desires and forces that included the animal kingdom. The final chapter is entitled “Belching Quarrels: Male Passions and the Problem of Individuation” and examines how humoral thinking relates to shifting early modern ideas about social hierarchy. Paster contends that the early moderns were shifting the conception of the elite from a paradigm of lordship, in which one person presided over life in the household with everyone else placed in a rigid hierarchical system based on service, to a paradigm of urbanity, where members at court were basically equal in status and created a shared culture. The emotional shift necessitated by this shift in elite behavior is the subject of this chapter, and Paster uses plays by Shakespeare and Jonson to trace the “kind of moderated, emotionally continuous, and socially distinct subject those reforms were meant to produce” (196). Thus the characters in Shakespeare and Jonson use the language of humorality to perform, and try to adapt, their social roles. Paster is careful to remind readers that the characters were not always successful at this pursuit. Overall, this is a meticulously researched study that pushes readers to rethink early modern discourses of the passions from a phenomenological perspective . It provides a solid grounding in critical conversations about early modern epistemologies of embodiment, gender and subjectivity, but it also aggressively reimagines premodern embodied emotion. For that reason, it would benefit those with expertise in the subject as well as those who are interested in discovering the early modern ecology of the passions. LOREN M. BLINDE, English, UCLA Herman Pleij, Colors Demonic and Divine: Shades of Meaning in the Middle Ages & After, trans. Diane Webb (New York: Columbia University REVIEWS 277 Press 2004) 124 pp., 20 figs. In this concise book, Herman Pleij explores colors and their variable meanings during the Middle Ages, Renaissance, and present day. Based on a booklet published by the author in 1994, entitled Kleuren van de Middeleeuwen (Colors of the Middle Ages), Colors Demonic and Divine discusses colors as an important subject for debate. In this work, Pleij continues the chronology of his study by considering the application of these colors and their changes in meaning during the Renaissance until present day. As the title indicates, the author focuses a large part of his argument on colors and their heavenly or satanic connotations. Pleij’s central focus throughout the book, however, is to demonstrate that the use of colors, which were extremely rich and bold in the Middle Ages, began to change around the time of the plague and the Reformation to the blacks, whites, deep blues, and soft pastels that, he argues, remain popular even today. This book is quite successful in presenting the reader with an introduction to ideas about color over the past millennia. The book sets out...