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

Promotional Information

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.

About the Author

Gail Kern Paster is Director of the Folger Shakespeare Library and the author of The Body Embarrassed: Drama and the Disciplines of Shame in Early Modern England. Katherine Rowe is Associate Professor of English at Bryn Mawr College. She is the author of Dead Hands: Fictions of Agency, Renaissance to Modern. Mary Floyd-Wilson teaches English literature at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and is the author of English Ethnicity and Race in Early Modern Drama.

Reviews

"Thanks to the collection as a whole, the complex history of the passions in the early modern mind and body will now take a more prominent place in our study of the literature, art, and music of the period."--MLR "Provides an engaging and extremely useful introduction to historicized explorations of the early modern passions through the lens of the creative arts."--Sixteenth Century Journal