Passions and Subjectivity in Early Modern Culture ed. by Brian Cummings and Freya Sierhuis (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Passions and Subjectivity in Early Modern Culture ed. by Brian Cummings and Freya Sierhuis Jennifer Clement Cummings, Brian and Freya Sierhuis, eds, Passions and Subjectivity in Early Modern Culture, Farnham, Ashgate, 2013; hardback; pp. 328; 3 b/w illustrations; R.R.P. £70.00; ISBN 9781472413642. This collection brings together essays on the study of the history of the passions in early modern culture (especially England). In doing so, it intervenes in a well-established field that is attracting increased attention from literary scholars, historians, and philosophers alike. As the editors, Brian Cummings and Freya Sierhuis, observe, ‘In the last two decades, intellectual history has worked voraciously to end the neglect of the passions in the understanding of early modern thought and assumptions’ (p. 3). Indeed, it now seems odd even to refer to any such ‘neglect’, so thoroughly have scholars scoured the period for attitudes and concerns about the passions. The avowed aim for this volume is, as the editors put it, to ‘make new connections between embodiment, selfhood and the passions in order to suggest both new models of the self and new models for interactive and interdisciplinary history’ (p. 6). These new models are positioned against the more body-focused approaches of two major figures in the study of the passions, Gail Kern Paster and Michael Schoenfeldt. Cummings and Sierhuis argue that this ‘turn to the body’ has resulted in work that assumes an early modern body almost entirely in thrall to its passions. As they observe, ‘Within this picture, human agency has almost been removed in the search for a pathologized self’ (p. 5). The essays in this collection, they state, are more interested in finding connections between ‘the abstract subject of political thought and the inward selves of literary history’ (p. 9), and thus are less focused on Galenic physiology or faculty psychology than many previous studies. Many of the essays included here are excellent. Space constraints preclude me from discussing all the essays in detail, but those that stood out to me included Christopher Tilmouth’s essay, which takes up recent work on inter-subjectivity to show how this understanding of early modern selfhood helps us read accounts of the passions more accurately; Russ Leo’s, on Spinoza; Cummings’s ‘Donne’s Passions: Emotion, Agency and Language’; Felicity Green’s essay on Montaigne and emotion; Katherine Fletcher on how Milton’s monism pushes him to counter Cartesian dualism in his writing; and Katrin Ettenhuber’s essay on Augustine, Donne, and grief. These clearly argued essays share a clear focus on the passions and what their study can bring to our understanding of the passions in early modern literature and philosophy. [End Page 159] Although the collection is well conceptualised and, in general, well focused, one or two of the essays here seem less relevant to the overall topic than most. Here I think of Joe Moshenska’s essay on metaphor and touching, which is interesting and well written, but not clearly related to the study of the passions. Unfortunately, the quality of the essays subsides towards the end of the collection. Some of the final essays were not very clearly argued, or else rest on rather dubious assumptions of influence or causality. Stephan Laqué’s essay, for example, is plagued by the desire to read Shakespeare as ahead of his time – in this case, as an influence on Descartes’s theories of the passions. Laqué asserts that ‘in Descartes there is an unacknowledged debt to the Danish prince’ (p. 268) – a claim of which I am unconvinced despite a very interesting discussion of what he terms the ‘theatre of the passions’ as played out in Hamlet. However, overall this collection is well worth consulting for anyone interested in the passions in early modern thought, literature, and history. Jennifer Clement The University of Queensland Copyright © 2014 Jennifer Clement