Authors here investigate specific emotions, such as sadness, courage, and fear. Others turn to emotions spread throughout society by contemporary events, such as a ruler's death, the outbreak of war, or religious schism, and discuss how such emotions have widespread consequences in both social practice and theory.

Reading the Early Modern Passions
Essays in the Cultural History of Emotion

Edited by Gail Kern Paster, Katherine Rowe, and Mary Floyd-Wilson

2004 | 392 pages | Cloth $75.00 | Paper $28.95
Cultural Studies | History
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Table of Contents

Introduction: Reading the Early Modern Passions

PART I. EARLY MODERN EMOTION SCRIPTS
1. Against the Rule of Reason: Praise of Passion from Petrarch to Luther to Shakespeare to Herbert — Richard Strier
2. "Commotion Strange": Passion in Paradise Lost — Michael Schoenfeldt
3. Poses and Passions: Mona Lisa's "Closely Folded" Hands — Zirka Z. Filipczak
4. Compassion in the Public Sphere of Milton and King Charles — John Staines

PART II. HISTORICAL PHENOMENOLOGY
5. Melancholy Cats, Lugged Bears, and Early Modern Cosmology: Reading Shakespeare's Psychological Materialism Across the Species Barrier — Gail Kern Paster
6. English Mettle — Mary Floyd-Wilson
7. Hearing Green — Bruce Smith
8. Humoral Knowledge and Liberal Cognition in Davenant's Macbeth — Katherine Rowe
9. Five Pictures of Pathos — Gary Tomlinson

PART III. DISCIPLINARY BOUNDARIES
10. The Passions and the Interests in Early Modern Europe: The Case of Guarini's Il Pastor fido — Victoria Kahn
11. Sadness in The Faerie Queene — Douglas Trevor
12. "Par Accident": The Public Work of Early Modern Theater — Jane Tylus
13. Strange Alteration: Physiology and Psychology from Galen to Rabelais — Timothy Hampton

Notes
List of Contributors
Index
Acknowledgments