Affective Inheritances

Paster, Gail Kern 3–4, 12, 26, 36, 65–6, 184, 221–2 Paster, Gail Kern, and Skiles Howard 112 Paster, Gail Kern, Katherine Rowe and Mary-Floyd Wilson 4, 17–18, 25, 26, 111–12, 133, 163, 221–2

(Meek and Sullivan, 275)

The publication of these four books attests to a continued interest in early modern studies in discussing the circulations of affect, the exchange of emotions, and the embedded nature of an emotionally embodied subject within a landscape networked by passionate influence. Unavoidably and rightly, Gail Kern Paster's landmark works— Humoring the Body, The Body Embarrassed, and the edited collection Reading the Early Modern Passions—cast a long shadow over these discussions, and her influence continues to permeate all contemporary critical thinking about the affectively involved subject of Renaissance writing. ¹And yet, in all four of these books, there seems to be an attempt to move discussion along, in some cases by acknowledging Paster's pervasive presence only parenthetically, almost taking it as read, and in other cases by emphasizing the perceived shortcomings of her work. For example, in Arab, Dowd, and Zucker's collection, Paster predominantly appears only in the footnotes, as befits a collection where the signification of 'affect' encompasses much more than simply 'humoral emotion'; whereas in Meek and Sullivan's collection, Paster remains — as is clear from the index entry above — by some margin the most cited critic, and yet in the majority of cases is cited in order to correct, contradict, or consign her work to a previous critical 'turn'. Now, it seems, serving our sharp-toothed critical turn on scholarship that fed us, we turn and turn again, at times a little too hungrily. In Meek and Sullivan's excellent collection—where every well-crafted essay has something genuinely original to offer and which is indeed taking discussion forward (along trajectories which, to these reviewers' minds, are already latent in Paster and in most respects in line with, or parallel to, her intentions)—some essays have got the memo, but many others continue to harbour Paster-ized tendencies. Arab et al. are explicitly presenting work in honour of Jean Howard, advancing her work and extending her thought; and, comparably, the essays in Meek and Sullivan's collection advance and extend the thought of Paster and need not, we suggest, be read as correctives but as continuations. The strength of these four books is, in significant ways, due to the strength of their scholarly affective inheritance.

In their introduction, Meek and Sullivan position their collection as offering a revision of previous medical-historical approaches, which, they suggest, are too keen to interpret early modern emotion exclusively or excessively in relation to humoral theory and the body:

Academic interest in emotion has largely been informed by the cultural history of medical thought, resulting in a picture of early modern emotion that stresses the centrality of the material, humoral body. Scholars in the field have tended to focus on the physiological determinism of emotion in early modern texts, arguing that feeling was something that happened to the body of the passive, receptive subject, who either gave way to these material impulses or attempted to resist them through stoical self-control.

(3)

Meek and Sullivan see these approaches as having 'obscured the way in which other intellectual and creative frameworks, such as...