Experimental Selves: Person and Experience in Early Modern Europe by Christopher Braider (review)

In this book, Christopher Braider grapples with the complex way selfhood was conceptualized and articulated in the early modern period across Europe. He underscores the manifold nature of the self, 'or to use the word early moderns more freely chose, the person', which was 'modelled for them in the avalanche of portraits that signalled its newfound primacy and ubiquity' (p. 5). Braider ambitiously suggests that we need to rethink a number of key problems concerning not just the nature of self, or the language used to describe this, but also of knowledge and of experience. He undertakes this task by positing that the early modern concept of person was an 'experimental' phenomenon. By exploiting the dense semantic range the term 'person' enjoyed in early modern usage, he demonstrates its four-dimensional quality (as a composite of mind, body, and social relation over time). Furthermore, he suggests that, like the experiments in the field of science occurring across the period, 'person too is an experiment, a precipitate of the process of trial and error through which it comes to know itself' (p. 23). Through the case studies that span the following seven chapters, he then determines to put this hypothesis of experimental selves to the test. In so doing, he also deftly demonstrates that art itself is inherently experimental at its heart: texts and pictures not only represent the world, 'they intervene in it, changing it, and changing us even as we in turn change them by asking the questions we ask and by performing the trials and committing the errors that are integral to all acts of reading, viewing and thought' (p. 334). The chapters on the theatre offer particularly original readings and view the theatrical space as a unique laboratory. In Chapter 5, which looks at what he calls 'the poetics of agency', the distinction drawn between the considerable freedom Corneille affords his characters, as opposed to the more constrictive position imposed by Racine, is arguably rather overstated. However, Braider demonstrates a crucial difference between tragedy versus comedy when he argues that Molière's plays and actors underscore the experimental and thus openended aspect of all types of action. Overall, this study examines an impressive range of authors from the late-fifteenth-century Neoplatonist Pico della Mirandola to the eighteenth-century philosopher Kant. The case studies are drawn from a wide range of cultural and disciplinary contexts. In addition to theatre, the chapters discuss the early novel (focusing on La Princesse de Clèves), the art of portraiture, pictorial experiments in vision and perception, theory of knowledge, and the experimental scientific work of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This engaging book certainly covers much ground, but Braider is also keenly aware of what is not included. He regrets the lack of a chapter on autobiography, the limited space afforded to fiction (particularly picaresque and epistolary novels), and to the eighteenth-century cult of sensibility. There is ample material for a second volume. In the absence of Braider penning one, he has, nonetheless, drawn attention to a range of topics that are sure to inspire many other scholars within the field.