Teaching & Learning Guide for: The View from the Interior: The New Body Scholarship in Renaissance/Early Modern Studies

Paster, Gail Kern, Katherine Rowe, and Mary Floyd-Wilson, eds. 2002. Heading Modern Passions: Essays in Cultural History of Emotion. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. $47.96 hc. $19.96 sc. 392 pp.Reading Modern Passions, a collection of essays edited by Gail Kern Paster, Katherine Rowe, and Mary Floyd-Wilson, signals its place on cutting edge of a paradigm shift in modern studies with simple fact that, in a volume devoted to study of in period, psychoanalysis is not mentioned until page 13, where it is subordinated to historical and dismissed without much ado on grounds of its essentialist logic. Instead of familiar Freudian and Lacanian narratives, volume presents essays that call on cognitive linguistics, cognitive psychology, anthropology, philosophy, sociology and phenomenology to emphasize ways in which early modern taxonomies of ... differ from our current categories, but also how they continue to script our debates about emotions as objects of study in humanities, sciences, and social sciences (1). Although essays range broadly across disciplinary and geographical fields, most contribute in some way to establishing historicity of inwardness. Thus, most important insight offered by this collection is that early modern psychology only partially shares priority we place on inwardness, alongside very different conceptions of emotions as physical, environmental, and external phenomena (15).The introduction provides a very useful summary to contemporary debates about emotional states and their classification. Acknowledging significant differences across disciplines about nature of human emotion, editors note that there is little agreement on what constitutes cardinal or core emotions, on how to rank emotions on a scale of complexity, on which creatures experience them, or on whether emotions are more pancultural than they are local and specific (3). They cite work of cultural linguist Anne Wierzbicka as offering a particularly useful approach for cultural historians like themselves, since her focus on language and emotion scripts acknowledges both universal and trans-cultural aspects of as well as their differing manifestations in different cultures.Essays in volume are divided into three sections: one on Early Modern Emotion Scripts, which charts ways in which modern and modern representations of differ; another, Historical Phenomenology, which seeks to recreate modern world in which mind, body, and environment were inextricably intertwined; and finally, Disciplinary Boundaries, which suggest some ways of understanding methodological differences among different fields that study human emotion. As such, they seek first to establish differences between modern and modern experience of emotion, and then to suggest how similarities between two can shed light on contemporary difficulties in cross-disciplinary understanding.The first section begins with an essay by Richard Strier, Against Rule of Reason: Praise of Passion from Petrarch to Luther, Shakespeare to Herbert, which argues that dominant value placed upon control of by reason in Western tradition is significantly disrupted by a longstanding tradition of of passion (23). Michael Schoenfeldt follows with an essay,'Commotion Strange': Passion in Paradise Lost, which similarly argues that Milton's depiction of pre-lapsarian human life is influenced by both condemnation and praise of passions. Schoenfeldt sees Milton's equivocal and situational attitude toward as typical of modern inconsistency, and notes that he seems to endorse both the rigorous self-control promised by classical ethics and sacrificial compassion at core of Christian affect (67). Zirka Z. Filipczak, in Poses and Passions: Mona Lisa's 'Closely Folded' Hands, moves volume from texts to art history to argue that in modern period, hands were a more common register of states of feeling than Mona Lisa's more scrutinized smile. …

INTRODUCTORY NOTE.-J. C. Beaglehole, of the Victoria University of Wellington, was until his death in 1970 the doyen of New Zealand historians and-together with J. W. Davidson of the Australian National University, who died in 1973-a leader in developing historical consciousness and historiography in the South Pacific world area. His editions of the journals of Captain Cook and his Life of Captain James Cook (published in 1974 by Stanford University Press) are not only masterpieces of scholarship and insight into the eighteenth century but unrivaled in their penetration of oceanic, as well as merely maritime, history. The New Zealand Historical Association maintains an annual lecture in his memory, and the essay which follows was originally delivered as the first Beaglehole Memorial lecture when that association met at the University of Canterbury in May 1973. It was subsequently printed in the New Zealand Journal of History (vol. 8, no. 1, April 1974) and is republished here with minor alterations by the generous permission of that journal's editors. What follows is a modified version of an essay in historical restatement, which owes much to John Beaglehole's own vision and his understanding of what vision is.

Reviewed by: Treacherous Faith: The Specter of Heresy in Early Modern Literature and Culture by David Loewenstein Mark Rankin (bio) Loewenstein, David. Treacherous Faith: The Specter of Heresy in Early Modern Literature and Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. $105 hardback, $50 paperback. In this important book, David Loewenstein investigates the representation of heresy and heretics in literary and polemical works, from the English Reformation during Henry VIII's reign through to the Civil War and the writings of John Milton. Its thesis is two- fold. On the one hand, the language used to describe heresy during this period is highly malleable and protean. Because they dissented from prevailing understandings of religious orthodoxy, heretics were perceived as seditious rebels, or as propagators of dangerous diseases. Heretics' ideas were said to threaten people's souls, and so heretics were viewed as harmful members of the body politic, capable of subverting and eroding the government's authority in both church and state. This language of contagion and sedition associated with the representation of heresy, Loewenstein argues, is constant across this entire period. One of the book's virtues is to demonstrate that Catholics and all kinds of Protestants were represented at one time or another through a uniform discursive register, one based upon irrational fear and anxiety as well as dark fantasies. At the same time, this book shows how the fears and linguistic strategies used to represent heretics themselves fueled creative textual production in numerous works, situated both within and without the canon of early modern English literature. Ultimately this conclusion constitutes the book's most enduring component—namely, that authorial choices made in representing heresy pushed writers into creative and imaginative terrains of composition that they might not otherwise have reached. This book offers readers a remarkable reach, in a chronological and a conceptual sense. It stretches from Thomas More's debate over religious orthodoxy with William Tyndale, during the early 1530s, through to Paradise Lost. Loewenstein includes chapters on the Lincolnshire gentlewoman Anne Askew, whose Examinations (1546–47) record her successive interrogation and torture during Henry VIII"s final years; on John Foxe's influential martyrology, the Actes and Monuments; on representations of Puritan, or forward Protestant, dissent in Elizabethan works such as Thomas Nashe's proto- novel The Unfortunate Traveller (1594) and Edmund Spenser's Faerie [End Page 178] Queene (1596); on mid- seventeenth- century heresiographies like Thomas Edwards's Gangraena (first published 1646); on imaginative responses to such works by selected radical Protestant dissenters; and on John Milton's imaginative engagement with the culture of heresy- making, both in his controversial prose and in Paradise Lost. Loewenstein demonstrates that a writer such as Edwards approaches the perceived heresy of unorthodox Independent Protestant "sects" that proliferated in his day, by employing nearly identical language, words and images, as those used by Thomas More to describe the Bible translator and reformer William Tyndale during the 1530s. By bringing together sixteenth- and seventeenth- century texts in this fashion, Treacherous Faith unites the study of English Reformation and Civil War- era literature in very productive ways. Few studies are able to do this. At the same time, Loewenstein convincingly traces a genealogical debate over "toleration" and "blasphemy," two terms related conceptually to the notion of the seditious and dangerous heretic. Both were understood differently in the early modern period than today. Orthodox seventeenth- century Presbyterian writers feared toleration because they viewed it as affording heretics a license to operate. The Quaker James Nayler allegedly blasphemed in 1656 when he rode a donkey into Bristol in reenactment of Christ's entry into Jerusalem, as told in the New Testament. Hysteria and paranoia in the Parliamentary debate over Nayler, Loewenstein argues, provide "the most striking illustration of the demonizing religious imagination at the very highest political levels" of seventeenth- century England (229). Treacherous Faith parts company with many studies by taking early modern polemical writing seriously and on its own terms. In his account of More's Dialogue Concerning Heresies (1529), for instance, Loewenstein documents how More's interest in exploring religious tension through his use of the dialogic form conflicts with his uncompromising religious outlook. Most productive in this section, however, is...

<i>Shakespearean Sensations: Experiencing Literature in Early Modern England</i>. Edited by Katharine A. Craik and Tanya Pollard. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Pp. v+244.

Teaching and Learning Guide for: ‘Representing the Duke of Buckingham: Libel, Counter-Libel and the Example of The Emperor’s Favourite’

The argument of Parris’s Vital Strife could have been simple: the surrender of Seneca’s irate Hercules to the assuaging therapies of sleep is an intertextual thread drawn in different directions but nonetheless uniting a variety of early modern texts from Jasper Heywood’s translation of Seneca’s Hercules furens (1561) to Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Macbeth and King Lear, Milton’s Paradise Lost and Margaret Cavendish’s Observations upon Experimental Philosophy. But it is complicated by Parris’s insufflation of intertextuality with pneuma, the breath or spirit in Stoic metaphysics which interfuses man with fellow humans, nature and the cosmos and is therefore claimed to have ethical and biopolitical significance. Part of that significance, according to Parris, is early modernity’s subversive championing of sleep against the stringent calls of Renaissance humanism for the permanent wakefulness, watch or vigil which characterized the scripturally authorized model of the pastoral king. To extol sleep was to undermine prevailing socio-political structures as well as, more abstrusely, to hoist the standard of biological normativity, here in its particular instantiation in stoic oikeôsis or care of oneself and consequently, on the panpsychic view of things, of one’s fellow humans, nature, etc.: ‘Insomnia becomes, in early modern literature, an ethical problem that makes the care for physical life a biopolitical concern’ (79).

In my dissertation, Contagious Animality: Species, Disease, and Metaphor in Early Modern Literature and Culture, I close read examples of Renaissance drama alongside their contemporary cultural texts to examine anxieties around social differences as constructed and mediated through what I call “contagious animality” in early modern English culture. Animal metaphors circulated anxieties around social differences on the early modern cultural stage in English drama where animality elicits uncertainties about identitarian constructions of difference. In this vein, I close read formal elements and their interactions with early modern culture to argue that animal metaphors transmit modes of speciating difference in examples of Renaissance drama and cultural artifacts. Whiteness exploits this fluidity between animal-human classifications as a power differential. Metaphors of animal-human speciation elicit anxieties around difference through a poetics of contagion. Spread through animal metaphors, animal-human distinctions circulate dehumanizing constructions of race, gender, and sexuality via affective influences in early modern English playhouses and by extension, affects cultural constructions of identitarian difference. England’s emergent settler-colonialist logics in the Renaissance positioned animal-human differences on hierarchies such as the Great Chain of Being where crossing the porous boundary between human and animal constituted a form of contagion. Actors’ imitations of animality through material performance and metaphor on stage spread through spectators’ senses—in other words, theatergoers felt animality as an affective, embodied, and material experience. In this vein, I approach animal studies in dialogue with pre-modern critical race studies, queer theory, and affect studies to address the circulations of difference through contagion and animality in early modern English literature and culture. By close reading dramatic and cultural materials, I argue that animal metaphors in early modern literature and culture represent forms of racial, sexual, and gendered difference in early modern England as something transmittable, showing their incredibly flexible and exploitable capabilities. In other words, the uncertain distinctions between what constructed an “animal” and a “human” were dangerously transmissive in early modern contexts.

Index to Volume 111: Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America

Reviewed by: Compassion in Early Modern Literature and Culture: Feeling and Practice ed. by Kristine Steenbergh and Katherine Ibbett James Waddell Compassion in Early Modern Literature and Culture: Feeling and Practice. Ed. by Kristine Steenbergh and Katherine Ibbett. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2021. xii+301 pp. £75. ISBN 978–1–108–49539–4. 'There is nothing simple about compassion', the late Lauren Berlant wrote, 'apart from the desire to be taken as simple' (Berlant, Compassion: The Culture and Politics of an Emotion (New York: Routledge, 2004), p. 7). That is an 'axiom' which still 'reverberates strongly' (p. 295), according to Kristine Steenbergh's concluding chapter to this volume. As this diverse and engaging collection shows, Berlant's sceptical interrogations of compassion are applicable to—and, indeed, were operative in—the early modern period, when 'the feeling and practice of compassion were recalibrated in a pressure cooker of social, religious and political changes' (p. 6). These shifts brought new tensions to classical disputes about compassion, including over its constitutive balance of emotion or action, intuition or intention, and proximity or distance between subject and object. Essays are paired thematically, setting up congruences and contradictions which emulate the 'confusion and diversity' of compassion itself (p. 10). The opening essays by Bruce Smith and Katherine Ibbett are illustrative. Smith expounds an undogmatic 'middle way between Stoic control of the passions and Christian encouragement of compassion', notably in the 'embrace of compassion's "outgoing-ness"' (p. 30) in Thomas Wright's 1604 psychological treatise The Passions of the Mind in General. Calling this embrace 'an exception' in a work otherwise 'hostile to the passions' may, however, overstate the case (p. 29); if anything, Wright's approach to the passions is markedly tolerant. In contrast to Smith, Ibbett delineates the bounds of compassion as construed by four genteel writers of [End Page 473] the European Counter-Reformation, by whom compassion was couched in the language of decorous sociability among an 'enclosed world of peers' (p. 49), an altogether more conservative form of fellow-feeling. Even inclusive forms of compassion inevitably bespoke and policed boundaries and hierarchies, whether racial (as in Matthew Goldmark's chapter on Bartolemé de las Casas (pp. 257–72) and John D. Staines's on Aphra Behn's Oroonoko (pp. 273–90)) or religious (as in Richard Meek's and Steenbergh's chapters on sermons (pp. 103–38)). Two essays examine 'Consoling' in the contexts of bereavement (Paula Barros, pp. 63–81) and sickness (Stephen Pender, pp. 82–100). Drawing on rich source materials—Spenser, Donne, Burton, Browne, Bacon, Vives—both consider shifts between intimately affective expressions of solace and more rigorous consolatory practices rooted in humanist discourses of proper friendship. Other pairings are more surprising: Alison Searle's bustling analysis of compassion, religious conversion, and state authority in James Shirley's The Sisters (pp. 159–79) is united with Clarinda E. Calma and Jolanta Rzegocka's more expository (but still illuminating) account of the Jesuit drama of Poland–Lithuania (pp. 141–58). There is much here for historians as well as literary critics, notably Rebecca Tomlin's research into alms-giving, delving into the churchwardens' Memoranda of St Botolph's, Aldgate (pp. 237–54). The most compelling chapters revolve around Shakespeare. Elisabetta Tarantino uses the vexed question of compassion for Malvolio as a starting point for a meticulous tracing of onomastic and chronological mirrorings, within and between Twelfth Night and its sources (pp. 173–96). Eric Langley contributes a bracing, sensitive exploration of the Lucretian trope of shipwrecks viewed from shore by (un)compassionate spectators, focusing on The Tempest (pp. 197–216) but leading deftly into Toria Johnson's chapter on King Lear, which, it is argued, expresses a sense of unmooredness arising from the 'Reformation shift away from medieval structures surrounding charity—grounded as they were in clear church doctrine— and the subsequent rise of concepts more commonly associated with interpersonal connection, like pity, fellowship and compassion' (p. 221). Overall, this heterogeneous, pan-European collection of essays presents a convincing alternative to rigorous compassion scepticism: Steenbergh's Conclusion suggestively takes cues from post-humanist critics to insist that 'we stay with the trouble and explore the...

<i>Political Turmoil: Early Modern British Literature in Transition, 1623–1660</i>. Edited by Stephen B. Dobranski. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. Pp. xvi+365.

The Autumn 2012 meeting of Northern Renaissance Seminar was held at Leeds Trinity University College on 8 September 2012, with theme of Disability and Renaissance. The theme was intended to address a perceived lack of engagement thus far with critical theory by scholars of Renaissance literature and culture.The conference organizer, Dr Susan Anderson of Leeds Trinity, welcomed delegates and introduced keynote speaker, Dr Allison Hobgood from Willamette University, Oregon. Hobgood's talk, Modern Disability Studies: Beholding Milton, started with a discussion of ethical beholding as a way of avoiding excluding people from critical discourse, and as a way of combating normative encouragement to ignore difference. Hobgood argued that disabled was an operational identity category in English Renaissance and that representations of in period are not always merely metaphorical, but can also tell us something of lived experience of people. Indeed, she asserted that material conditions of illness, injury, and childbirth would have made impairment more rather than less visible than it is now.The second part of keynote speech was a round-up of state of field in USA, detailing current research on aspects of as diverse as dwarf aesthetics in The Faerie Queene, and autism and theory of mind in connection with Book of Common Prayer. Hobgood's vision for future of studies in early modern period necessitates resisting charges of anachronism in order to enable socially responsible dialogue anti-ableist politics and advocacy in scholarship and teaching.The final part of keynote speech was a Miltonic case study, critiquing traditional scholarly discourses surrounding Milton's blindness and instead positioning Paradise Lost as part of a disability aesthetic. In this paradigm Milton's God is the ultimate normate and his angels are ableist superhumans, while Satan stands against their definitions of what it means to be fit.Following keynote speech, first panel, chaired by Dr Liz Oakley-Brown (Lancaster University) was on Sexuality. Dr Amritesh Singh, from University of York, spoke on Masculinities in Mary Sidney's The Tragedie of Antonie, looking at links between compulsory able-bodiedness and compulsory (marital) heterosexuality. The paper examined crisis that occurs when a body becomes by age or injury and how this impacts on gender. The other paper in this panel was my bisexual approach to examining liminality of gender and psyche in Spenser and Shakespeare, an argument that these texts offer ways to present positive, festive outcomes for madness. This reading was welcomed as being particularly important to a presentist approach to early modern texts, taking into account impact of exclusionary readings for present-day queer and spectators and readers.The next panel was devoted to and was chaired by keynote speaker Allison Hobgood. Dr Liam Haydon, from Manchester University, spoke on Milton and Universal Blindness, arguing that Paradise Lost is not an account of an individual's blindness but rather taps into an early modern metaphorical understanding of blindness as denoting a loss of virtue. Haydon compared quotations from Paradise Lost with King James and Geneva Bible verses from Psalms, describing being compassed about by enemies and calling for help. Haydon argued that doubly reconfigures his own and challenges his audience to see right. Then Adleen Crapo from Toronto presented her paper Staging Disabled Authorship in Early Modern Literature: The Cases of Paul Scarron and John Milton, focusing on two writers with acquired disabilities. Crapo outlined how their enemies and detractors used Milton's blindness and Scarron's physical deformities (probably caused by rheumatic fever) to call their morality into question, and how both men used rhetoric and self-publicity to counter these accusations. …

Previous article FreeNotes on ContributorsPDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreJeffrey B. Griswold is a PhD candidate at the University of Maryland at College Park, specializing in early modern English literature. His dissertation, “The Political Animal: Early Modern Literature and Human Exceptionalism,” argues that the unique vulnerability of the human species was essential to a previously unexamined strand of Renaissance political thought. This project revisits human exceptionalism through the lessons of posthumanism, considering articulations of shared life that ground the polis in our deficiencies rather than in language or in sovereignty. His work has previously been published in Spenser Studies and the Spenser Review.Judith Haber is professor of English at Tufts University. She is the author of Desire and Dramatic Form in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009) and Pastoral and the Poetics of Self-Contradiction: Theocritus to Marvell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), as well as articles and essays on Marlowe, Middleton, Shakespeare, and Webster. She is currently working on a book project tentatively titled, Adoptive Strategies: Imagining Paternity in Early Modern England, which will explore texts by Cavendish and Jonson, in addition to plays by Marlowe and Shakespeare.Cole Jeffrey recently received his PhD from the University of North Texas, where he teaches literature and composition. He is currently working on a book, The Aesthetics of Sin: Beauty and Depravity in Early Modern Literature, which explores the relationship between Reformed theology and Renaissance aesthetics. This book will demonstrate how theological debates about sin and depravity encouraged writers from Shakespeare to Milton to reject traditional aesthetic paradigms and develop new conceptions of beauty and taste that would prove instrumental in the shift from the classical philosophy of beauty to Enlightenment aesthetics.Michael Slater is assistant professor of English at the State University of New York’s College at Brockport, where he works on Renaissance drama, the intersections between literature and the history of science, and allegory. He is currently completing his first book, Forms of Proof: Tropes and the Literary-Scientific Revolution, which argues that the rise of mechanical science in early modernity had a profound impact on both language and literary forms. He has also published articles on Spenser, Donne, and Shakespeare.Thomas Ward is associate professor of English at the US Naval Academy, where he teaches Renaissance literature. His research examines how representations of singing and reciting poetry reflect broader questions and anxieties about textual circulation in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England. He has published articles on topics ranging from Irish war cries in Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, to loss of voice in Philip Sidney’s Arcadia, to liturgical sound in George Herbert’s The Temple. His current book project discusses media and the lyric genre in the publications of the London stationer Humphrey Moseley, focusing on the works of John Milton, Abraham Cowley, and Edmund Waller. Previous article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Renaissance Drama Volume 47, Number 1Spring 2019 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/703106 © 2019 by Northwestern University. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Compassion, Love, and Happiness:Positive Emotions and Early Modern Communities Linda Pollock (bio) Barclay, Katie, Caritas: Neighbourly Love and the Early Modern Self, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2021; hardback; pp. 240; R.R.P. £72.00; ISBN 9780198868132. Fox, Cora, Bradley J. Irish, and Cassie M. Miura, eds, Positive Emotions in Early Modern Literature and Culture, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2021; hardcover; pp. 240; R.R.P. £85.00; ISBN 9781526137135. Steenbergh, Kristine, and Katherine Ibbett, eds, Compassion in Early Modern Literature and Culture: Feeling and Practice, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2021; hardback; pp. 290; R.R.P. £80.00; ISBN 9781108495394. Wood, Andy, Faith, Hope, and Charity: English Neighbourhoods, 1500–1640, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2020; paperback; pp. xvi, 306; R.R.P. £64.99; ISBN 9781108814454. Up until recently, much of the work in the history of emotions in early modern Europe has focused on those strong passions that rend individuals, families, and communities asunder: anger, jealousy, envy, and grief, for instance.1 But the tide is turning away from negativity, suppression, and destruction and towards those passions crucial to the creation and preservation of communities. The four books under review all grant passions and affections a constructive role in individual lives and social relations, delineating how emotion was woven into the fabric of early modern society. In Faith, Hope, and Charity: English Neighbourhoods, 1500–1640, Andy Wood examines the building and experience of neighbourhood for all ranks of English society for the period 1500 to 1640 through the trifecta [End Page 131] lens of faith, hope, and charity. Katie Barclay explores in Caritas: Neighbourly Love and the Early Modern Self the meaning of community for ordinary people in eighteenth-century Scotland through the belief and enactment of caritas. The essays in Positive Emotions in Early Modern Literature and Culture, edited by Cora Fox, Bradley Irish, and Cassie Miura, augment the 'happiness turn' and seek to redress the imbalance in current scholarship by bringing to light the existence of positive feelings in daily life, the active pursuit of pleasure, and how literary structures elicit and encourage affective attachments. The contributors to Compassion in Early Modern Literature and Culture: Feeling and Practice, edited by Kristine Steenbergh and Katherine Ibbett, concentrate on compassion but take a broad-brush approach to the concept, as well as moving beyond England. The essays delve into interrelated concepts along with compassion's multiple forms and complexities, in the hope that such entanglements will be productive and lead to new understandings. Andy Wood's meticulously researched and deeply felt book investigates how early modern English people, rich, middling, and poor, did their best to make their communities operate. The three biblical tenets of faith (in God, neighbours, and friends to provide pleasure and support), hope (for a future with economic security and political empowerment), and charity (which both rendered help to those in need and granted a right to assert claims to aid) structured and guided the workings of early modern neighbourhoods, rural and urban. By examining the idea and definition of neighbourhood, the obligation to live in harmony and help others, the nature of disputes and reconciliation, as well as who was included and excluded, he shows that notwithstanding problems, challenges, inconsistencies, and changes, neighbourliness endured as an ideal and practice. Barclay's Caritas, based on around two thousand court cases, supplemented with personal correspondence, and replete with moving stories of those of lowly social status, places love at the centre of eighteenth-century Scottish society. She considers the centrality of marriage to the foundation of a loving community, how young people were socialized into upholding caritas, and how caritas promoted harmony and underpinned hospitality, as well as investigating the costs involved in this model for those who would not or could not conform. Deploying practice theory—the concept that emotions are engrained in body and mind through repeated practice—she lays out how caritas restrained violence, promoted peacekeeping, shaped social interaction, and offered a model for ethical relations. The interdisciplinary Positive Emotions in Early Modern Literature and Culture brings together the insights of affect theory and historical studies of emotion in order to reconsider which emotions mattered to early modern culture, and their...

Teaching &amp; Learning Guide for: Modern Problems of Editing: The Two Texts of Marlowe's Doctor Faustus

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