A Cultural History of the Emotions in the Baroque and Enlightenment Age Volume 4 9781472535764, 9781474207041, 9781350090934

Table of contents :
Cover
Halftitle page
Series page
Title page
Copyright page
CONTENTS
ILLUSTRATIONS
GENERAL EDITORS’ PREFACE
Introduction What Were Emotions? Definitions, Understandings, and Contributions
DEFINITIONS AND MEANINGS
EMOTIONAL CULTURES
EMOTIONAL CULTURES IN THIS BOOK
CONCLUSION
CHAPTER ONE Medical and Scientific Understandings
THE PASSIONS
PASSIONS IN DISCOURSES OF HYGIENE
MEDICINE OF THE MIND
MADNESSES
CONCLUSION
CHAPTER TWO Religion and Spirituality
FEELINGS (AND SENSES) TOWARDS
THE GREATER THE FEAR, THE MORE INTENSE THE PIETY
DENOMINATIONAL FEELINGS
ON PREACHING (AND ON WIGS, MARIONETTES, AND BAKING)
THE “ECUMENICITY OF EVERYDAY LIFE”
CHURCHES (FEELING) UNDER SIEGE
REASON, SENTIMENT AND RELIGIO(S) IN THE AGE OF ENLIGHTENMENT
CHAPTER THREE Music and Dance
THREE LISTENING EXPERIENCES
BEYOND THE PLEASURE PRINCIPLE
SIGN AND SYMBOL
MODES AND KEYS
TOWARD A (MUSICAL) VOCABULARY OF THE EMOTIONS
DANCE MEASURES
WORDLESS RHETORIC
TOWARD A (MUSICAL) HISTORY OF THE EMOTIONS
CHAPTER FOUR Drama
HISTORICAL PRELUDE: CHARACTER, COSMOS, SELF
RATIONALISM AND THE HISTORY OF THE DRAMA
HOBBESIAN SELVES
CHAPTER FIVE The Visual Arts
INTRODUCTION
THE PASSIONS AND ARTISTIC EXPRESSION: THEORY AND PRACTICE
HORROR PICTURES: THE EXPRESSION OF PAIN AND FEAR
GIOVANNI PIETRO BELLORI’S IDEA , NICOLAS POUSSIN, AND CHARLES LE BRUN
THE CATHOLIC REFORMATION AND THE EXPRESSIVE POWER OF DEVOTIONAL IMAGES
SENSUAL AND EROTIC IMAGES
DUTCH GENRE PAINTING AND THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY
CHAPTER SIX Literature
THE PASSIONS OF RHETORIC, POETICS, AND AESTHETICS
SUBLIME, PITIFUL, AND CONTAGIOUS PASSIONS IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY
MELANCHOLY SYMPATHIES: THE GENIAL AND MORBID PASSIONS OF POETS AND NOVELISTS
CHARACTER, SYMPATHY, AND THE RISE OF THE NOVEL
CONCLUSION: RHETORIC AND SENSIBILITY
CHPTER SEVEN In Private The Individual and the Domestic Community
APPROACHES
MEANINGS
DEPLOYED DISCOURSE
POWER AND AGENCY
PUBLIC AND PRIVATE, LOCAL AND STATE
CONCLUSION
CHAPTER EIGHT In Public Coolectivities and Polities
CIVILIZED EMOTIONS
CIVILITY AND THE PASSIONS
SENTIMENTAL SOCIETIES
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
NOTES
REFERENCES
INDEX

Citation preview

A CULTURAL HISTORY OF THE EMOTIONS VOLUME 4

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A Cultural History of the Emotions General Editors: Susan Broomhall, Jane W. Davidson, and Andrew Lynch Volume 1 A Cultural History of the Emotions in Antiquity Edited by Douglas Cairns Volume 2 A Cultural History of the Emotions in the Medieval Age Edited by Juanita Ruys and Clare Monagle Volume 3 A Cultural History of the Emotions in the Late Medieval, Reformation, and Renaissance Age Edited by Andrew Lynch and Susan Broomhall Volume 4 A Cultural History of the Emotions in the Baroque and Enlightenment Age Edited by Claire Walker, Katie Barclay, and David Lemmings Volume 5 A Cultural History of the Emotions in the Age of Romanticism, Revolution, and Empire Edited by Susan Matt Volume 6 A Cultural History of the Emotions in the Modern and Post-Modern Age Edited by Jane Davidson and Joy Damousi

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A CULTURAL HISTORY OF THE EMOTIONS

IN THE BAROQUE AND ENLIGHTENMENT AGE Edited by Claire Walker, Katie Barclay, and David Lemmings

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BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC 1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2019 Reprinted 2019, 2020 Copyright © Bloomsbury Publishing, 2019 Claire Walker, Katie Barclay and David Lemmings have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Editors of this work. Cover image: The Expressions, Charles le Brun. (© Wikimedia Commons) All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN : HB : Set: ePDF: eBook:

978-1-4725-3576-4 978-1-4725-1506-3 978-1-3500-9093-4 978-1-3500-9094-1

Series: The Cultural Histories Series Typeset by RefineCatch Limited Bungay, Suffolk To find out more about our authors and books, visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

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CONTENTS

L IST OF I LLUSTRATIONS

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G ENERAL E DITORS ’ P REFACE

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Introduction Katie Barclay, David Lemmings, and Claire Walker

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Medical and Scientific Understandings Stephen Pender

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Religion and Spirituality Giovanni Tarantino

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Music and Dance Tim Carter

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Drama Peter Holbrook

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The Visual Arts Lisa Beaven

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Literature John D. Staines

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In Private: The Individual and the Domestic Community Laura Alston and Karen Harvey

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In Public: Collectivities and Polities Brian Cowan

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N OTES ON C ONTRIBUTORS

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N OTES

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R EFERENCES

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I NDEX

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ILLUSTRATIONS

INTRODUCTION 0.1 Caspar de Crayer, Christ Appearing to Saint Lutgarde.

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0.2 Jean-Baptiste Greuze, Head of a Young Woman.

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0.3 William Hogarth, Mr Garrick in the Character of Richard III.

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0.4 Guido Reni, Charity.

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1.1 T. Willis, Cerebri anatome: cui accessit nervorum descriptio et usus.

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1.2 Pieter Xaveri, Two Madmen.

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2.1 Religion in Tears.

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2.2 William Hogarth, The Sleeping Congregation.

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2.3 William Hogarth, Enthusiasm Delineated.

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2.4 Francis Swaine, Figures by Chelsea Waterworks, London, Observing the Fires of the Gordon Riots, 7 June 1780.

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2.5 Bernard Picart, Tableau des principales religions du monde.

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CHAPTER 3 3.1 Abraham Bosse, Auditus/L’Ouye (“Hearing”).

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3.2 Antonio Vivaldi, Il cimento dell’armonia e dell’inventione: concerti a 4 e 5, op. 8.

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CHAPTER 4 4.1 After Henry Fuseli, King Lear Casting Out his Daughter Cordelia (Shakespeare, King Lear, Act 1, Scene 1).

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4.2 ‘The Way of the World’ by William Congreve—Mr Baddeley in the character of Petulant.

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ILLUSTRATIONS

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CHAPTER 5 5.1 Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, Boy Bitten by a Lizard.

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5.2 Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, The Card Sharps.

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5.3 Peter Paul Rubens, Prometheus Bound.

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5.4 Nicolas Poussin, Israelites Gathering the Manna.

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5.5 Étienne Baudet, Landscape with a Man Killed by a Snake (after Nicolas Poussin).

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5.6 Robert Sayer, A frightened and an angry face, left and right respectively, after Charles Le Brun.

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5.7 Alessandro Turchi (called Orbetto), The Lamentation.

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5.8 Annibale Carracci, Pietà.

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5.9 Gregorio Fernández, Dead Christ.

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5.10 Guido Reni, Saint Sebastian.

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5.11 Ludovico Cardi (called Il Cigoli), The Penitent Magdalene.

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5.12 After Titian, Penitent Mary Magdalene.

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5.13 Frans Hals, Young Man and Woman in an Inn.

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5.14 Jan Steen, Doctor’s Visit.

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5.15 Jean-Baptist Greuze, Filial Piety.

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CHAPTER 6 6.1 Title page to Longinus, Dionysii Longini Rhetoris Praestantissimi Liber de grandi loquentia sive Sublimi dicendi genere Latine redditus.

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6.2 Frontispiece and title page to John Donne, Deaths Dvell, or, A Consolation to the Soule, against the dying Life, and liuing Death of the Body.

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6.3 Frontispiece to Eikon Basilike.

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6.4 Title page to Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy.

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6.5 The death of Yorick from Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman.

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CHAPTER 7 7.1 Arthur Devis, The John Bacon Family.

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7.2 Thomas Rowlandson, The Love Letter.

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7.3 Philibert Louis Debucourt, Le Compliment ou La Matinée du jour de l’an (The Compliment or New Year’s Morning).

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ILLUSTRATIONS

7.4 Johan Joseph Zoffany, David Garrick and Mary Bradshaw in David Garrick’s The Farmer’s Return.

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CHAPTER 8 8.1 Frontispiece, Jean-François Senault, The Use of Passions.

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8.2 “Affectus Comprime/Repress the Passions!”

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8.3 Bernard Picart, engravings of the facial expressions of “desire” and “hope” for: Conférence de monsieur le Brun, premier peintre du roi . . . sur l’expression générale et particulière.

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8.4 Bernard Picart, engravings of the facial expressions of “anger mixed with fear” and “anger mixed with rage” for: Conférence de monsieur le Brun, premier peintre du roi . . . sur l’expression générale et particulière.

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8.5 “The coffeehous mob.”

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GENERAL EDITORS’ PREFACE

The General Editors, volume editors, and individual authors of this series have many organizations to thank for helping to bring it into existence. They gratefully acknowledge assistance from the Arts and Humanities Research Council (UK ); the European Research Council Project, The Social and Cultural Construction of Emotions, University of Oxford, and its Director, Professor Angelos Chaniotis; the Leverhulme Trust; and the Wellcome Trust. Above all, the series has depended on support from the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions (CE 110001011). The project was conceived as a key part of the Centre’s collaborative research work and has benefited greatly from the generous help of its academic and administrative staff. The General Editors also express their deep gratitude to the volume editors and authors for their time, expertise and gracious willingness to revise essays in the light of readers’ comments. Many other people helped in reading, tracing images and advising in various ways. Our thanks go to Merridee Bailey; Jacquie Bennett; Sophie Boyd-Hurrell; Frederic Kiernan; Mark Neuendorf; Fiona Sim; and Stephanie Thomson; and to the patient staff at Bloomsbury: Dan Hutchins; Claire Lipscomb; Beatriz Lopez; and Rhodri Mogford. We especially acknowledge Ciara Rawnsley, who as Editorial Assistant for the entire series has tirelessly helped authors and done indispensable and meticulous work on all aspects of the volumes’ preparation. This series is dedicated to the memory of Philippa Maddern (1952–2014) who was an original General Editor, and an inspiring friend, mentor, and colleague to many of the contributors.

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Introduction What Were Emotions? Definitions, Understandings, and Contributions KATIE BARCLAY, DAVID LEMMINGS, AND CLAIRE WALKER

The history of emotions is flourishing, not least for the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It is perhaps no surprise that a period long associated with critical shifts in the development of modernity, periods of contest, conflict, and evolution, provided ripe evidence for the role of emotion in producing societies, cultures and nations. Emotion is increasingly integrated into a wide range of historical domains, from political thought and state formation to family life and the development of individual psychologies. This volume brings together a range of current thinking on how emotion inflects and informs our understanding of the Baroque and the Enlightenment, periods marked not only by changing definitions of “emotion” but also by important emotional cultures that act as structures for the early modern world. As essays in this volume attest, emotion provides key insights not only into the origin, nature, and consequences of historical change, but also important continuities.

DEFINITIONS AND MEANINGS It is during the period of the Baroque and Enlightenment that the word “emotion,” denoting passions and feelings came into usage, albeit in an irregular fashion. In the seventeenth century, “emotion” more commonly referred to movement or a disturbance, often in the form of political or civil unrest or agitation. The Oxford English Dictionary suggests it first appeared in John Shute’s (fl. 1557–98) translation of Andrea Cambini’s (1445/1460–1527) Two Very Notable Commentaries in 1562, which referred to “great tumultes and emotiones” between the king and nobility in France (OED: “emotion, n.”; Cambini 1562: 30). John Florio (1533–1625) employed the word in a usage denoting sentiment in his 1603 translation of Michel de Montaigne’s (1533–92) Essays, writing “Nero taking leave of his mother, whom he sent to bee drowned, felt notwithstanding the emotion of that motherly farewell.” Thomas Lodge referred to it in 1602 as “this emotion or rage of iealousie” in his translation of Josephus’ Works (OED: “emotion, n.”). These early usages in English were derived from other languages, principally French. René Descartes (1596–1650) famously used émotion to signify “passion” in his treatise Les Passions de l’Âme (1649). And by the early eighteenth century, some English writers had adopted this sense of the word. It appeared in commentary on the levity and frivolity of modish women’s behavior in December 1711 in no. 254 of the Spectator, where a sober “correspondent” extolled the retired life of a married wife, asserting “I love to talk 1

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of him [i.e. her husband], and never hear him named but with Pleasure and Emotion” (Bond ed. 1965: 2: 488–9; OED: “emotion, n.”). However, despite its insertion in the English lexicon, “emotion” remained far less common than the more regular medieval and early modern words for feeling, like “passions,” “appetites,” “desires,” and “affections.” The Scottish philosopher, David Hume (1711–76), in his Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40), used “emotion” in a manner which most closely resembles current usage (Dixon 2003: 104). Adam Smith (1723–90) did likewise in his Theory of Moral Sentiments (first published in 1759). Yet, according to Thomas Dixon, “emotions” in its modern sense as a “theoretical category” in the science of the mind was not “invented” until the early nineteenth century. Another Scottish philosopher, Thomas Brown (1778–1820), defined emotions as “vivid feelings, arising immediately from the consideration of objects, perceived, or remembered, or imagined, or from other prior emotions” (Dixon 2012: 340). While “emotion” was gradually emerging in the eighteenth-century English lexicon, its definition was far from confirmed. Thomas Brown admitted to his students in Edinburgh that the word’s exact meaning “is difficult to state in any form of words” (Dixon 2012: 340). Brown employed “emotion” as a theoretical category in mental science, replacing the terminology current since at least Augustine of Hippo in Christian thinking, but which had originated in Greek and Roman Stoic philosophy. This understanding pitted the passions against calm reason or the affections (Dixon 2012: 339). Medieval theologians like Augustine, and later Aquinas, distinguished between the passions, appetites, lusts and desires—“raw, unregulated feelings” which might lead to sin and indicated a fallen soul—and the affections or enlightened motions of the rational soul—“calm, useful feelings” which inculcated love and compassion (Dixon 2003: 233; Dixon 2012: 339; Hultquist 2017: 71). It is tempting to explain this shift in language and meaning firmly within the transition from a medieval and baroque worldview to one of scientific and enlightenment rationalism and secularism. There were obvious shifts from a purely theocentric understanding during the eighteenth century. Anglican divine Joseph Butler (1692–1752) argued for anthropocentrism when he suggested that the affection which led to good was “our own happiness, enjoyment, satisfaction,” rather than love of God (Butler 1970: 100; Dixon 2003: 84–5, 93). However, while a Whiggish and positivist progression from theology to science occurring exactly in the period covered by this volume might be seductive, it is flawed. There is ample evidence that Christian and theistic understandings existed alongside the secular and scientific. There was no neat binary. Instead thinkers espoused a range of ideas which might be mapped along a spectrum between the two poles (Dixon 2003: 233–5). As Dixon affirms so succinctly regarding the eighteenth century, “This was not merely an ‘Age of Reason’, but nor was it merely an ‘Age of Passions’. It was an age of reason, conscience, self-love, interests, passions, sentiments, affections, feeling and sensibility” (Dixon 2003: 66). R. S. White has observed that “we can only use words to describe emotions. But words have histories and they change in meaning over time, either subtly or markedly, and sometimes they become obsolete” (White 2017: 33). This seems apposite when considering shifting understandings of “emotion” and its early modern precursors. While it is more straightforward to trace a broad transition in the meaning of “emotion” between 1600 and 1780 from simply the movement of a body or political agitation to embodied sensations which accompanied, signified or reflected mental feelings—“the temperature of the mind,” as Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832) so aptly put it (Dixon 2012: 340)—to a mental state which might be studied scientifically, “passion” also has a history during this period.

INTRODUCTION

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Aleksondra Hultquist has described the passions as “the vocabulary to define feeling in the early modern period” (Hultquist 2017: 71). As such, thinkers sought to categorize and classify them. Descartes listed six primary passions (wonder, love, hatred, desire, joy, and sadness), but these were broken down into multiple individual feelings, like anger and pity. In Leviathan (1651), Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) identified over thirty (Hultquist 2017: 72). Theorists recognized that the passions were important for individual and corporate wellbeing, and they needed to be balanced in much the same way as the humours to ensure equilibrium. Moreover, passions were understood quite literally to “make history.” They underpinned political actions and social behaviours, so thinkers from Hobbes and John Locke (1632–1704) to Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–78) and Hume considered how passions might be harnessed for the improvement of society (Hultquist 2017: 72–3). Hultquist has described the passions as “a system of emotional knowledge” which encompassed much more than the “emotions,” which replaced them. They were “indicative of entire systems of feeling in the early modern world that structured both individual and collective identities and actions” (Hultquist 2017: 73). The term “passion” also had a rich religious and cultural context, which informed early modern understandings of the way feelings might be experienced, shaped and employed by individuals and communities. “Passion” was embedded in medieval Christian thought and ritual through its association with the suffering of Jesus Christ in the final days of his life from the Last Supper to the Crucifixion. It connoted physical suffering and pain and described bodily affliction and illness as well as the martyrdoms meted out to Christ’s followers for their faith. During the Baroque, lay and religious Catholic audiences encountered the Passion in text, image, and music, and the graphic representations of it continued to shape individual and corporate religious identities. The English Carmelite nun, Teresa of Jesus Maria Worsley (1601–42), was so devoted to it that she not only interpreted any physical infirmity as her own version of it, but she inflicted physical punishments upon her body to relive Christ’s suffering (Daemen-deGelder 2013: 70–91). In this she mirrored the devotional practices of medieval holy women who embraced corporeal chastisement as Imitatio Christi. However, her identification with the Passion was so intense that the other nuns reported “sometimes upon account of her tender complection [sic] we were forced to hinder her from looking upon any moving picture and forbear speaking of any thing when she was present, of these Mystrys.” If she did, she was so overcome with intense feelings that any effort to quell them resulted in nosebleeds, flushes, and fainting fits (Daemen-de-Gelder 2013: 77–8). The Passion therefore elicited excessive “passion” in the form of an overpowering bodily and mental response. Sister Teresa of Jesus Maria Worsley neatly encapsulates the complex meanings of the term during the Baroque. It was grounded in religious meaning but had physical and psychological dimensions, like “emotion.” Yet it was not simply a synonym for “emotion.” Its medieval etymology endowed it with far richer and complex meanings which were evolving in early modern understandings of the relationship between sentiments, the body, the imagination, and religious identity. In Protestantism, the Reformation had not dislodged the Passion, with Protestant preachers emphasizing its centrality in salvation. In 1623, on the first Friday of Lent, John Donne (1572–1631) preached at Whitehall on John 11.35 (“Jesus Wept”). The sermon is not only a positive comment on weeping and the human compassion it represents, but it also reminded its audience of Christ’s suffering and death for their sins. Donne places this incidence of Jesus weeping in the gospels not in Gethsemane prior to the Passion but on the cross in the midst of the crucifixion (from Hebrews 5.7: “S. Paule saies, That in the

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FIGURE 0.1: Caspar de Crayer, Christ Appearing to Saint Lutgarde, c. 1653, oil on canvas, 250 × 170 cm, Klooster van der Zwartzusters-Augustinessen, Antwerp. Photo: © KIK-IRPA , Brussels.

INTRODUCTION

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daies of his flesh, he offered up prayers with strong cries and tears”). Donne explained: “because those words of S. Paul belong to the declaration of the Priesthood, and of the Sacrifice of Christ . . . the Crosse was the Altar; and therefore to the Crosse we fixe those third teares” (Lange 1996: 173–6). Donne reminded his audience that Jesus was fully human, demonstrating the capacity to emote, but his exegesis of Christ’s weeping was also a lesson about doctrines of salvation which aimed to touch listeners’ hearts and souls. The Passion’s imperative for active engagement of affect, body, mind, and soul, was even more pronounced in the eighteenth-century evangelical Christianity of the Methodists. Devotional attention to the way of the cross might inspire conversion through sympathy for Christ’s suffering and a sense of guilt for being a sinner who required redemption through Jesus’ painful sacrifice (Cruikshank 2009: 58–60). One of John Wesley’s hymns presented powerful images of Christ’s tortured body to “move” the viewer quite literally to feel his pain and commit to conversion or spiritual renewal: Who see must surely feel That piteous spectacle! Stone to flesh the sight doth turn! Yes, I share the dying smart, Now I look on Thee and mourn Now I give Thee all my heart. —Cruikshank 2009: 60 Articulating the Passion to envisage Christ’s torment elicited a visceral response which was a prompt to action. Adam Smith in The Theory of Moral Sentiments argued that hearing or seeing suffering did not incite the emotional response, rather the imagination responded by inculcating sympathy. By imagining oneself as the person in pain, their agonies “begin at last to affect us, and then we tremble and shudder at the thought of what he feels” (Smith [1790] 1976: 9). In the eighteenth century, therefore, the Passion was not simply a subject for religious contemplation and self-fashioning, it provided a paradigm for spiritual and moral reformation. “Emotion” during the period covered by this volume emerged as a term in its own right, and evolved in English from meaning physical agitation to describe mental feeling. However, the older terminology of “passions” and “affections” continued as the dominant discourse structuring thinking about feeling and its wider religious, political, social, economic, and moral imperatives during the Baroque and the Enlightenment.

EMOTIONAL CULTURES If the experience of emotion is shaped by how it is defined and articulated, it is also informed by broader emotional cultures. The way that particular societies have produced rules to regulate emotional behaviour, expression, and experience has been a topic of considerable interest amongst scholars (e.g. Stearns and Stearns 1985). The now classic model of the emotional community is suggestive of the ways that particular norms for expression and valuation of emotion are shared by groups in ways that produce their identity (Rosenwein 2006). Similarly the concept of the emotional regime identifies how such communities become implicated in structures of social, economic, and political power, and thus are able to promote the liberty or suffering of its members (Reddy 2001). The idea of an emotional culture overlaps in important ways with both the idea of

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emotional communities and regimes, but extends them through its interplay between the social practice at their heart and the broader ideas, arts, philosophies, literatures, beliefs, and values that inform those practices (Barsade and O’Neill 2016). The Enlightenment period is perhaps distinctive in the history of Western Europe in having an emotional culture that has not only been named but which was remarkably coherent across Europe, if with particular national quirks. The “culture of sensibility,” as it has been termed for northern Europe, was a broad-based cultural movement that promoted a particular emotional style in a broad domain of fields from the visual arts to music to philosophy to science and which was practiced by individuals, largely of the social elite and middling sorts, in their display, articulation, evaluation, and experience of emotion (Barker-Benfield 1992; Reddy 2000; Haidt 1998). The culture of sensibility drew on scientific observation of the sensate body, where people received and interpreted information through sight, touch, hearing, smell, and taste, to enable a rethinking of the experience of the human’s engagement with the world. These sense engagements were typically understood to be experienced as emotion, at its most utilitarian pain and pleasure, which led to emotion playing a key role in judgement and decision-making. This was not an unsophisticated theory. Whilst some utilitarian theorists advocated for value judgements based on pleasure and pain alone, where pleasurable activities were a social good and painful activities the reverse, a much longer anxiety about the excesses of pleasure and luxury tempered this reading. Rather, emotions were overlaid with both Christian morality and classical notions of virtue to enable sophisticated judgements of right and wrong, beauty, taste, and judgement (Linton 2000). Rationality—another key Enlightenment concept—also continued to play an important role in decision-making as it was reason that enabled people both to interpret their emotional sensations appropriately and make good decisions based upon them. Indeed, the culture of sensibility placed particular emphasis on emotional self-control, with a continuing concern that an excess of emotion could mislead. Drawing on wider ideas about class, race, and gender, women, the lower orders, and non-Europeans were often thought to lack the capacity to appropriately exercise reason over their emotion. At times, both Protestants and Catholics extended this lack of ability to exercise emotional selfcontrol to their opposition. A lack of self-control could make people more humane and compassionate, something particularly admired in women, but it was thought to reduce their ability to make good decisions and thus justified their exclusion from political life and power (Barclay and Carr 2018; Dwyer 1998). Perhaps a response to the excesses, vitalities, and conflict of the seventeenth century, the importance of the control of emotion to the culture of sensibility shaped wider cultural practices. Eighteenth-century elite audiences increasingly prized expressions of emotion that were controlled, delicate, often light, shaping art, music, and even theatre. If aesthetes identified beauty as distinct from the sublime, the former was viewed as better able to express emotional sophistication and control; the excess of the sublime acted as a threat to the well-managed self (Gilman 2009; Packham 2013). This was not to say that people avoided emotional experience. Not only was that impossible for the sensate body, but as a broader range of emotional experience was correlated with sophistication and cosmopolitanism, people pursued different emotional experiences as a source of knowledge and improvement. There was a demand for experiences—whether practical science experiments or novels—that gave people insights into the range and experience of human emotion (Fairclough 2017). Whilst such an appetite led to the pursuit of a wide range of emotions, before the development of Romanticism and the Gothic, greater

INTRODUCTION

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FIGURE 0.2: Jean-Baptiste Greuze, Head of a Young Woman, possibly 1780s, oil on canvas, 41 × 32.4 cm, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Bequest of Miss Adelaide Milton de Groot (1876–1967), 1967 (67.187.72).

emphasis was placed on what could be described as “gentle” emotions as the most effective at cultivating the “civilized” self. Discussion of what might be described as emotional management or cultivation might be suggestive of a culture that viewed emotion as a species of performance. Yet, whilst there were some strident critics of these values, most people emphasized that emotion

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should be “authentic,” with hypocrisy or fraudulent emotional displays the cause of particular anxiety (Lemmings, Kerr, and Phiddian 2015). Such a concern was especially the case for groups such as the French Radicals of the 1780s and 90s, who regarded emotional authenticity as evidence of the virtue that should underpin society and social good (Reddy 2001). The tension—for modern scholars at least—between this search for education in emotion and worries about authenticity can perhaps be captured in the actor David Garrick’s remarkable theatre performances in the second half of the century. Garrick was praised for transforming theatre to a more “natural” mode that better enabled audiences to engage with the sentiments of the character. Yet, his style continued to use— if now adapted—formal oratory gesture and expression to convey his feelings to audiences (Benzie 1994). That emotion could be adequately expressed through a formal system of gesture reflected not a demand for artifice but the important role of emotion, usually called “sympathy,” as a mode of communication. If the senses enabled an emotional reading of the world, then sympathy was the communication of that emotional knowledge between actors, an activity that enabled them to determine the character and truth of an individual’s behaviour. Proper training in emotional display enabled people to better demonstrate their authentic selves. It was not that emotion should be faked, but that it could be honed through education and experience to produce better judgements and moral action that was central to the culture of sensibility.

FIGURE 0.3: William Hogarth, Mr Garrick in the Character of Richard III, 1746, etching and engraving, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (32.35(238)).

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How widespread the impact of a culture that was disseminated and maintained through art, literature, science, and similar “elite” knowledges was, is a topic of debate. Yet not only was the eighteenth century a time of increasing literacy and dissemination of “cheap print” across Europe (Raven 2014), but the culture of sensibility also shaped religious practice and devotion, incorporating much of the population (Mack 2008). By the end of the century, there is increasing evidence of the dissemination of these emotional values across the social spectrum, especially for urban audiences and those who had access to reading materials (Barclay 2015b). With a few exceptions, how this culture played out amongst non-elite social groups however remains a topic for further investigation. If the culture of sensibility has been robustly identified and explored for the eighteenth century, such an encompassing emotional culture has been harder to identify for other times and places. If we can make connections between ideas, beliefs, and behaviours across the domains of art, science, family life, and religion in other periods, articulating those connections as a coherent emotional culture has been more challenging. This is perhaps in part because the culture of sensibility was, maybe unusually, a culture that was driven by an emotional logic; it was emotion that people used to make sense of the world. Whilst attempts have been made to identify the Baroque, the first seventy-five or so years of the seventeenth century, as a consistent cultural moment (Maravall 1986), tying the Baroque to an emotional logic has been more challenging. If the Baroque has a “style,” then it was perhaps an emphasis on “strong” emotional responses to stimuli. The visual arts explored intense, vivid, and theatrical emotional expression; musicians looked for a greater range of ways to express harmony and emotional meaning (Davidson and Maddox 2017; Dickey 2017). Religion emphasized passionate devotional practices (Schmidt 2007). And scientists pursued emotions—from natural affection to melancholy—as phenomena that were central to interpreting human behaviour, motivation, and power relationships (Barclay 2015a; Sullivan 2016). There was a general interest, indeed curiosity, in exploring how emotion was expressed, how that could be conveyed in various forms, and its implications that provided important underpinnings for the later culture of sensibility. During the period, such explorations provided people with an array of examples of how to emote, as well as complicating how the experience of emotion should be interpreted in social and moral terms. The ideas that particular emotions were sinful or not, or that particular emotional expressions could be associated with virtue or vice, was finally dismissed (after centuries of discussion). Instead, emotions became a form of communication, whose meaning was contextual and multivalent. Emotions could still be sinful or anti-social but this was not necessarily a function of their nature. They continued to be tied closely to the performance of duty, so that emotional authenticity did not stand alone from the fulfilment of responsibilities or service. Thus, eighteenth-century lovers could claim devotion, despite their failure to commit; seventeenthcentury lovers demonstrated their emotion through the act of fidelity (Barclay 2011). It is also evident that particular communities and groups had specific emotional styles or norms that shaped their behaviour and evaluation of emotion. There was a wide array of emotional cultures that operated in distinctive ways for particular groups. English Benedictine nuns prized displays of heartfelt sorrow and weeping, whilst trying to discipline “the explosiveness of [divine] love” (Lux-Sterritt 2017: 167), producing a distinct emotional style. Conversely, the salon culture of seventeenth-century France, followed by Occitan elites, rejected “strong emotions” for more delicate expressions—an early precursor to the fashion of the next century (Hanlon 1993). If there were value systems that seemed to have general impact for seventeenth-century Europeans, they

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FIGURE 0.4: Guido Reni, Charity, oil on canvas, 137.2 × 106 cm, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Gift of Mr and Mrs Charles Wrightsman, 1974 (1974.348).

were perhaps concepts like charity, sociability, and fellow-feeling (Ibbett 2017). Whilst, or perhaps because it was, a period of significant religious schism and fragmentation, as well as broader political and social conflict, the concept of community was central to European definitions of self and group. Underpinning such belief was the core concept of Christian charity, an idea that resonated across the Christian spectrum, and which promoted

INTRODUCTION

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“loving” relationships between neighbours (Barclay forthcoming). Love was a key ethic for community relationships and behaviour, and was expected to inform how people responded to conflict, to requests for help and hospitability, to criminality, and more. Love also underpinned key concepts like friendship and sociability that were used as models for religious communities, polities, and societies. Despite ongoing debate around where the boundary of the community lay, and thus who love or friendship should extend to and in what form, sociable ideals nonetheless enabled a particular imagining of social relations during this period that extended across European cultures. The emotions of Europeans during the Baroque and Enlightenment were produced through engagements with broader emotional cultures that expressed themselves in art, literature, politics, religion, science, and in family and community life. If the culture of sensibility provided a coherent emotional vision for the experience of feeling, many people, in both the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, also learned their emotional rules from more local emotional cultures that arose from families, workplaces, associations and communities. The beliefs, values, and practices of smaller groups could intersect, inform, and even challenge dominant emotional cultures, leading to evolution in ideas and experiences over time. If the historian has the advantage of tracing the emotional cultures that would become prominent and significant in moving to the mainstream, we perhaps also lose the emotional worlds of those whose records failed or whose cultures were stricken from the record.

EMOTIONAL CULTURES IN THIS BOOK The contributors’ essays in this book address the principal fields of endeavour that have been identified as vehicles for emotional practices, while taking careful notice of the conceptual slippage represented by the range of terms identified with emotions during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. They also contextualize emotional regimes. Thus Giovanni Tarantino, considering religion and emotions, takes account of the aftermath of the European Reformation, and notes the relative de-sensationalism of protestant forms of worship, as compared with the baroque emotionalism of the counter-Reformation. Indeed, Tarantino draws attention to the popular demonization of the English Methodists in the mid-eighteenth century, whereby critics utilized their emotional “enthusiasm” to associate them with the hated Jesuits. At the same time he shows how in Europe fundamentalist Catholic theologians like the Dominican Daniello Concina railed against what he saw as the threat of material prosperity, novel-reading, and freethinking literature and drama to “softly enchant the passions,” and obscure the intense spiritual emotionality of the primitive church. But as Tarantino shows, Concina and his ilk were swimming against the tide of Enlightenment thinking and the philosophes, as well as multiplying colonial encounters with people of different beliefs; all of which tended towards sentimental toleration and the deadened emotionalism of deistic worship. Religion was capable of inspiring musical performances too, although Tim Carter’s chapter on music and dance demonstates that in our period they might also appeal to erotic and sociable emotions as well as pity, and they could legitimately induce pleasure for its own sake, as long as it was disciplined to avoid excess. He shows that music was useful to the forces of counter-Reformation in Europe because of its direct appeal to the senses, and also describes the rise of opera in Rennaissance Italy, a form of musical theatre, which as it developed sought to elicit specific Descartian passions through separate arias, and in its eighteenth-century mature form modelled appropriate female behaviour via

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cathartic laments. Some baroque operas shared their origins with courtly dance in the form of sarabandes, masques, and ballets de court; they evolved into formal dances performed by the nobility at court designed to represent the majesty of absolute monarchy. But despite the continuing popularity of the opera, as Carter shows, the advent of a more sentimental style in literature from around 1740 was echoed by the development of purely instrumental music which sought ultimately to appeal to the listeners’ emotions directly, in a proto-Romantic fashion. He concludes with some reflections on the history of emotions as applied to music, which acknowledge the difficulty of fully understanding how contemporaries were moved by the performances they consumed. We may say “consumed” because for many scholars the middle and later years of the seventeenth century marked a watershed shift to a more rationalist and materialist society in which many forms of life were transformed by commercial individualism, and emotional cultures shifted accordingly. Thus Peter Holbrook, writing about English drama in Chapter 4, identifies the emergence of consciousness around the individual self in Shakespearian theatre, which he contrasts with the spiritually connected and emotionally simplistic human souls represented in didactic medieval literature. But for Holbrook, Shakespeare’s characters remain connected to and carried away by the created natural order of feeling and meaning, and they often cannot fully understand or express the powerful emotions motivating their actions. Certainly, for Shakespeare, love is more than a worldly contract. But it is not until the advent of the Hobbesian world of competitive individualism that we encounter consciously rational and self-conscious characters, like those of Dryden and Congreve, and Johnson and Sheridan; who merely describe their passions as components in a negotiation for pleasure and advantage, rather than being transported by them. The production and consumption of visual art is the subject of Lisa Beaven’s chapter. Like Carter and Holbrook, Beaven is concerned with the transmission of emotions in art as a key to the changing cultures of feeling during our period, and their relation to broader historical change. She identifies three major shifts in artistic emotionality: more emphasis on the expression of strong emotions concomitant with increased intellectual interest in “the passions of the soul”; a greater emotional realism associated with the Catholic counter-Reformation and a matching suspicion of religious imagery tending to iconoclasm in some Protestant countries; and finally the rise of a bourgeois market for art, especially in the Low Countries. By the eighteenth century, indeed, the depiction of everyday life and the domestic art of the salons represented a movement away from the use of strong emotions for moral purposes towards an appreciation of visual art as unmediated sensual communication, like music to be consumed and enjoyed for its own sake. Literature, like the performance arts, was also transformed over the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries by the rise of a bourgeois market and the parallel appreciation of the purely aesthetic value of its products. As John Staines puts it in his chapter, rather than being a matter of public or domestic performance as in church or the theatre, reading was becoming an increasingly private and subjective experience that appealed to the individual imagination through the cultivation of sympathy. Staines pays particular attention to sublime poetry arising out of the seventeenth-century wars of religion. For example Milton’s Paradise Lost achieves sublime experience by connecting with truths, which can only be known by contemplation of the divine; but Milton also warned against the danger of literary appeals to pity and compassion creating a false object of sublime, as in the case of works which conjured an image of the martyred Charles I of England. For him the story of humanity was the management of passion in the cause of good rather than evil: and in his analysis of Milton, Staines connects the compassionate love story of Adam and Eve with the sympathetic

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narratives of the modern novel. But the eighteenth-century novel has characters and circumstances whose passions the reader is encouraged to experience imaginatively, rather than stock figures who represent moral dilemmas. Indeed, the novel taught readers—women above all—the bourgeois sensibility of politeness, as well as constituting a primary site for pleasurable sympathy with the protagonists’ trials and tribulations. It is arguable that scholarly attention to emotions has been most enduring and central in the history of the domestic family. Certainly, in their chapter on the domestic sphere Laura Alston and Karen Harvey show that recent studies of the European family have identified emotionality as the principal driver of historical change in this institution. They demonstrate the sophisticated theoretical approaches adopted by current family historians, which depend on conceptualizing emotional “communities” and “emotives,” and, like several chapters in this book, emphasize the importance of ideals around sensibility, as conveyed by the expansion of print culture in the eighteenth century. In this case, styles of affect associated with sensibility helped to constitute the domestic space as an ideal home and serve as an instrument for women to differentiate their roles from men and the instability and aggression of more public spaces. This chapter is careful to stress that there was continuity in domestic relations over our period as well as change, however, noting (for example) the importance of love and affection among seventeenth-century families, as well as their eighteenth-century counterparts. It also reveals the range and complexity of power relations in households and families as they were influenced by the performance of emotions, and suggests that the domestic environment frequently interacted with the public sphere, for example in the deployment of discourses about motherhood and caricatures of sexualized domesticity. In his broad and learned study of medicine and its scientific underpinnings, Stephen Pender emphasizes the enduring importance of the passions as one of the “non-naturals,” the environmental influences on health identified by Galenic theory, belief in which persisted into the eighteenth century. Indeed attention to the passions and their humoural context crossed the public/profession divide, in so far as they featured in learned texts and self-help manuals. Around 1700 it was uncontested that passions were essential to the relationship between body and soul, and overly powerful passions might engender illness, requiring moderation. For Descartes, writing around the middle of the seventeenth century, the “animal spirits” must be managed by reason. Certainly, over the next half century, as Pender points out, the basic categories of medicine were substantially revised, and attention to “spirits and humours” gave way to discussion of nervous sensibility, but the passions retained their central role in diagnosis and cure, as seen in the efflorescence of self-help manuals, which tended to stress the importance of diet as an influence on the brain. There was a fresh emphasis among physicians on moral philosophy as “medicine of the mind,” however, and the need for a sympathetic and polite bedside manner. He concludes with a discussion of madness and its supposed remedies, for which an overlypassionate imagination was generally thought to be the cause. Finally, Brian Cowan’s chapter discusses the role of emotions in the development of state and society over the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Cowan deploys the hypotheses of Norbert Elias and Jurgen Habermas about the “civilizing process” and the growth of the “public sphere” as critical aids for understanding relations between transformations in state and society and emotional experience. But he is careful to distance himself from one-dimensional claims about the repression of emotions by civility and rational public conversation. For example, he emphasizes the importance of libellous, erotic, and pornographic literature, as well as that which was sentimental and

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broadly “civilizing,” as evidence for a complex range of emotional influences. He also sets up an interesting comparison between discourses about the passions and those relating to civility, and considers the influence of sensibility in the advance of social reform projects such as the campaigns to abolish slavery and prevent cruelty to animals. Indeed, in Cowan’s formulation, at the beginning of the eighteenth century, civility had morphed into “politeness,” an emotional regime which was sociable and urbane rather than courtly, and improving rather than oppressive.

CONCLUSION The two centuries of emotional cultures evidenced in these essays provide the opportunity for some comparative discussion about the history of emotions, and particularly the causes and consequences of emotional change in the larger cultural contexts of the Baroque and Enlightenment. Cowan, for example, recognizes that for Elias and Habermas, emotional changes usually identified with this period—repression of violence and promotion of rational exchange—were merely consequences of the rise of the early modern state and increased social exchange. But against this, he emphasizes more recent research that values sensibility as a dynamic emotional culture, which helped to shape the contours and substance of life after 1700. The rise of sensibility appears to have impacted significantly on medicine too, and there was a corresponding attention to the management of the passions. Similarly, Beaven, Staines, and Holbrook treat literature, art, and drama as the management of emotions in forms which were productive of “public consequence,” in so far as they constituted emotional communities by appealing to the feelings of their consumers; typically by inducing “wonder” in the Baroque period and cultivating sympathy for imaginary characters in the age of Enlightenment. Alston and Harvey show how over the whole of the period epistolary expressions of love or anger were “tactics” by which women and men sought agency and power in family life. It can be argued, therefore, that emotional change was not merely epiphenomenal; rather, as William Reddy and Barbara Rosenwein have suggested (in their different ways), challenges to existing regimes of feeling helped to produce larger historical shifts. The potential for a study of emotion to enable a rethinking of the Baroque and Enlightenment continues with new research in the field. If current research has enabled a rethinking of dominant narratives of the period—of histories of revolution, state-building, the rise of the public sphere, religious and scientific transformation, and more—histories of the emotions of the lower orders and popular culture, of particular sects or social groups, of Europe’s engagements with Empire and the other, of the everyday, all provide opportunities to nuance and complicate our current understanding of emotion’s roles in history, society and culture. As a new and dynamic field, the essays here are just the beginning of a much bigger history of emotions.

CHAPTER ONE

Medical and Scientific Understandings STEPHEN PENDER

William Falconer’s (1744–1824) A Dissertation on the Influence of the Passions upon Disorders of the Body (1788) answers the Medical Society of London’s (est. 1773) annual question for 1787, “What diseases may be mitigated or cured, by exciting particular affections or passions of the mind?” (viii). Citing ancient and contemporary sources, Falconer explores an ensemble of illnesses—from epilepsy to fainting—caused or assuaged, intensified or remedied, by passion: jealousy promotes biliary circulation, for example, while “a little raillery” mitigates hypochondriasis; anger exhausts mental and physical strength, but gout and palsy are sometimes cured by “paroxysms of rage” (20, 60, 12–13). Fear makes us more “liable to the infection of contagious distempers,” but remedies mania (47, 15–16; but see, for example, Strother 1725: 419, and Corp 1791: 55–64, for more sceptical views). Falconer (1788) argues that passions depend on the imagination, and nowhere is their influence more sharply felt than in intermittent fevers, in which “the certainty of the cure has almost always depended on the degree of the patient’s confidence in the success of his remedy” (23). Contagious fevers, like typhus, “afford strong instances of the influence of mental affections both as prophylactics and remedies” (27). Physicians must treat a wayward, overheated imagination. Falconer cites the famous Edinburgh physician William Cullen (1710–90): the mind be fortified, inured from objects of fear (funerals, passing bells), and occupied with confidence in remedies, with prudent friends or urgent business, even with charms that “ingross” attention (28–9, 43, 52–3, 65; see de Valangin 1768: 66–9, for worries about amuleta). In most cases, practitioners should enlist “the strong powers of the imagination, or the concurring influences of the soul,” for they are often more powerful than drugs (Falconer 1788: 87–8). Physicians’ conduct is crucial. Amicability, compassion, and tenderness are a “general obligation,” as physicians must “sympathize with the sufferings of their fellow creatures” (93–4); they should do so moderately, lest indulgence impair or “enervate the mind” (95). Along with “prudence and command of temper” (97), esteem, respect, and affection, “steadiness of character and presence of mind” are “indispensable requisites to a physician” (95, 98). Falconer is certain that confidence is salutary, that trust animates patients’ spirits (30, 67). This late eighteenth-century dissertation embodies the main concerns of this chapter: the eclecticism of baroque medical thought, physicians’ conduct and comportment at the bedside, and the roles of passion in sickness and health. One of the res non-naturales, “non-natural things”—the others are diet, air, or environment, sleeping and waking, 15

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exercise and rest, excretion and retention (and, occasionally, coitus, medicinal baths, frictions, or rubbing; see Jonstonus 1657: 20ff.)—the passions have secured a vertiginous amount of attention in recent scholarship, from Anthony Levi’s ground-breaking 1964 work on French moralists through Albert Hirschman’s argument that interests trump passions in the eighteenth century by combining “the better nature,” the restraint and force, of reason and passion (1977: 43), to recent work on generations and communities of feeling and the shift from passion to emotion over the longue durée (Dixon 2003; Rosenwein 1998; Rosenwein 2006; Rosenwein 2016). “Affect studies” continues to flourish (Leys 2011; Ahern 2017). My purpose here is to ask: in the midst of significant ferment in European philosophy and medical thought in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, can we identify an ensemble of sustained, more or less consistent conceptions, as well as durable forms of therapy and intervention, for the passions? My answer is a guarded “yes.” In the face of sometimes sharply divergent conceptions of vitality (mechanism and vitalism: doctrines that propose understanding human life mechanically, reduced to physical or chemical forces, and those that view life as irreducible to variant conceptions of matter active or passive), focussing on the non-naturals discloses their afterlife. If Galenism as a “science” waned in the period, categories of suffering and medical intervention were still largely underwritten by this scholarship late into the eighteenth century (Temkin 1973: 165, 135; Temkin 2002). As a medicine of spirits and humours was gradually and unevenly unseated by nerves and fibres, sensibility and irritability (Wild 2006: 184–7, 194–209; Beatty 2012), both patients and physicians occupied a “shared medical world,” spoke a “common language,” and moved within “the same humoral explanatory framework” (Stohlberg 2011: 79; Siraisi 2004: 204; Fissell 1991; Churchill 2012). This common language underwrote the strength of the non-naturals as enduring categories for “relating the individual to health and disease.” Even in the late eighteenth century, P. J. G. Cabanis (1757–1808) joined Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) in thinking that “temperament” conditioned individual capacity, even selfhood (Temkin 1973: 179; 2002: 97). In fact, while medical theory changes, and while physicians and philosophers engage in rebarbative debate, medical practice remains organized by more or less constant Galenic categories and practices, forms of intervention and counsel, including the ways in which the passions were probed, used, and understood, well into the Baroque period. Baroque medical thought is a broad church that includes not only physicians and surgeons, but philosophers, theologians, and popularizers concerned with regimen and therapy, physiology and anatomy, bodies and souls. Its eclecticism and pan-European scope, as well as its influences on natural philosophy and the “new science,” are now well known. Baroque physicians essayed the fragile commensurability of theory and intervention, their uneven professional status as investigators of contingency, and the ways in which particular medical cases might yield general knowledge (Cook 1989; Siraisi 1990: 103; Steinke and Stuber 2004). This medical eclecticism often manifests a confected mix of ancient thought and Christian learning, late scholasticism and the “new philosophy.” Daniel Sennert’s (1572–1637) reformist efforts, for example, enlist Epicureanism, Augustine, contemporary chymistry, and academic scepticism in his important summa of current medical knowledge (Sennert: 1611; Sennert 1618; Sennert 1661: 371; Hirai 2011: 77–98). This is also true of the eighteenth century; both orthodox and heterodox physicians often drew on the same sources and ideas (Thompson 2008). This dominance of Galenic medical thought was secured in sustained attention to the non-naturals. While diet was by far the most popular area of medical intervention (Albala

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2003), and “air” garnered attention, passions were central concerns for physicians and philosophers across the period. They appear prominently in learned texts, feature in popular “self-help” manuals, and in regimens of all kinds (Mikkeli 1999; Joutsivuo 2000: 194–6). Both traditions seek to balance medical-moral stricture. As sufferers were urged to rectify their passions, to seek counsel from friends and moral advisors, including physicians, increasingly psychic distempers were understood as disorders of the body (Park 1988: 477; Caron 2015: 553). This change is also present in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century anthropologies. Indeed, as Mary Floyd-Wilson has argued, ethnicity in this period is distinguished “more by emotional difference than by appearance,” by a willingness to be moved, stirred or calmed, and a capacity to move others; the passions themselves must be viewed “ecologically” (2004: 133–4). Eighteenth-century anthropology produced a “philosophy of the human body,” as “philosophical physicians,” médicins philosophes, explored rich, expansive territories between animism—the notion that the soul controls even “involuntary” organic function—and the arch materialism of thinkers like La Mettrie (Zammito 2002: 242–5; Martinelli 2010). It was a period in which European thought was conditioned by the “debate about the proper relationship of reason with the passions, sentiments, and affects” (Dixon 2003: 72). By the time of Kant’s 1772–3 lectures, devoted to investigating the psyche and the passions, humours, and temperaments, national character, the sexes, and cognition, anthropology had become part of a baroque enthusiasm for “empirical psychology.” For most contemporary scholars, this was a period in which “the mind changed”: its “domain was redefined; its activities were redescribed; and its various powers were redistributed” (Rorty 1982: 159; see Vidal 2011). This chapter explores these changes with a focus on what we now call “emotion,” a term new in the period, and often in medical writing, interchangeable with passion, affect, adfectus, perturbation, the pathomata animi. Recent explorations of affects, pathemata, perturbations, emphasize the concatenation of passion’s terminology (Dixon 2012; Hultquist 2017). While there is a case for “emotion,” herein I shall mostly use the term “passion.”

THE PASSIONS Passion’s terrain is variegated, its bequests distrait: with rare exception in the period (Hume comes to mind), reason benighted is passion triumphant, hence the widespread frustration with the rise of appeals to pathos in theological, natural philosophical, and other discourses in the period. Passions speak of embodiment, for they point to, if they do not always disclose, the “mysterious” union of bodies and souls, even if, as the physician Frederick Hofmann attests, “we have no idea” how “material causes affect the mind” (1783: 2:300; Morgan 1725: 372). This is an abiding concern, derived largely from Galen. In the mistitled Quod animi mores, he asserts that souls are conditioned by bodies (Galen 1997: 375–6; Galen 1951: 13–15), a notion to which baroque thinkers frequently return. By the 1740s, the idea that “character accords with the temperament of the body” was proverbial; it was already an “old saying” by the early 1600s (Wright [1604] 1971: 37–8; Reynolds [1640] 1996: 11). Consensus emerged about the yield of this assertion. As Humphrey Brooke (bap. 1618–93) writes in 1650, discussing the need for eupatheia, moderate passions, “Tis observable that there is a mutual influence from the Body upon the Mind, and from the Mind upon the Body: not necessitating, but inclining” (224, 226). Similarly, in 1703 John

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Broughton notes that an “Effect of the Union is this; that the Action and Passion is reciprocal; it is the Soul that moves the Body in Life . . . [and] the Body conveys Motion to, and as variously moving, causes various Sensations in the Soul” (88, 85). Herman Boerhaave (1668–1738) argued a similar line, noting that body–soul interaction is likely a reciprocal, consenting “harmony” established by God, as a change in one produces change in the other: when the body “is set to rights,” the mind “will quickly return to its Office.” He claims passions as potential causes of disease, but never fully explains their influence. Albrecht von Haller (1708–77) agreed, arguing that nerve stimulus must produce “certain new corresponding thoughts in the mind” (quoted in Wright 2000: 248). Thinking through this union, and the ways in which passions emphasize its confected nature, encourages a diverse array of thinkers to assert strongly passion’s passivity or to propose ways of thinking of passions as spurs to or forms of action. The range of inquiry, investigation, and speculation is daunting. From antiquity on, “passion” was conceived predominantly in two ways: either, in specific medical contexts, as a form of suffering, as wound or distemper or, more broadly, as a kind of internal motion (motus) in the soul (Dixon 2003: 43–5; Rosenwein 2016: 150ff). Indeed, passions are “operations of the soule,” especially of the appetitive faculty, as Thomas Wright (c. 1561–1623) avers in 1604. For the Jesuit Wright, they are seated in the heart, and affect the body by directing both humours and spirits (Wright [1604] 1971: 11, 8, 33, 37). His psychology and phenomenology of passion is typical, as he claims that the imagination is central to feeling, and that the sensitive appetite cannot actively love, hate, fear, or hope without it (31, 308). Yet the passions arise in other ways, via humoral imbalance, via the presence or longing for “sensual objects,” at the behest of reason (149). All three means become areas of inquiry for essayers of emotion, as do the animal spirits, which “follow” the passions. Both passions and spirits are instrumental in sickness, in misprision and false judgement (4, 31, 35, 45, 61, 308). As Francis Bacon (1561–1626) avers, numberless and sometimes imperceptible are the ways in which “the affections colour and infect the understanding” (1857–74: 4: 57–8). The passions produce errors of time, distance, and scale, and the imagination contributes significantly by distorting, combining, and recombining images of the objects of sense (James 1997: 159–82). If one is not a moderate, prudent sage, and thus exempt from “outrageous passions,” over-hot, tumultuous, or vehement passions are “cured” by an ensemble of techniques, borrowed largely from stoicism. Counsel might be sought from a trusted friend or advisor; reason, prudence, or meditation might inure one against emotional turbulence; diversion might assuage or occlude immoderate feeling; or, popular with Reformed writers who denigrated certain forms of rationality, one passion might be used to “master” another. The latter is “of special use in moral and civil matters,” in which one “faction” is set against another in the “government within” (Bacon 1857–74: 3: 438; Bright 1586: 245). Such techniques were widely employed by physicians and rhetoricians, theologians and philosophers, all appropriate counsellors and all with a legitimate stake in investigating the passions. Wright’s assertions are orthodox. His early seventeenth-century treatise explores the relationship between passions and humours, souls and bodies, for the benefit of physicians and courtiers, divines and orators, in order to offer insight into not only the workings of emotion but the ways in which it might be mobilized in discourse, remedied, read in the face of another, and occasion debility (Wright [1604] 1971: 29ff., 105). Although there are earlier interventions, Wright published near the beginning of a period in which passion was redescribed, reconfigured, and relocated. Similar treatises were popular in the period

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and shared territory with self-help manuals (Johns 1998: 398ff.; Mikkeli 1999: 92–6; see, for example, Strother 1750). His work is part of a broad consensus, even amongst later thinkers who held irreconcilable theories of vitality: the passions were vexing, they exacerbated or occasioned sickness, they must be moderated. Above all, physicians and philosophers recognised their raw power. In 1649, Descartes (1596–1650) published his last book, which arose from what he claimed to be a life-long attention to medicine that, to his mind, contained little of “significant use” (1985: 1:143, 3: 275). His correspondence evidences his attention to maladies of body and soul and he writes frequently about regimen, for “often a bodily indisposition” prevents clarity of thought, freedom of will, licit feeling. For Descartes, physical health is a “precondition” of “living a good life” (Shapiro 2003: 440–1). He was enamoured with “the idea of utilising the results of physiological science in a blueprint for ethics” (Cottingham 2006: 197). Descartes “licensed the merger” of ethics and medical thought (Wood 1994: 129, 133). Descartes argued that the passions are naturally good (Article 211), that they dispose the body-soul composite in ways beneficial to health and longevity, to actions that sustain it (e.g. Article 52). Passions excite our volition, inclining us to choose wisely, to will and to persist in willing “things for which they prepare” the body (Articles 40, 52). Passions also function to support moral aims, like loving things which are clearly and distinctly good (Articles 139, 141, 212). As Christopher Tilmouth notes, the passions “signal proper, usually bodily concerns in which man, as soul-body composite, should be interested” (2007: 148). Yet they court error, and must be shepherded by reason, in the form of clear ideas of what is actually “good” (Article 138). Such management takes the form of intellectual “emotions” or movements, a new category of passions unlike those which are caused by the spirits and depend on the body. These new passions fire “matching” corporeal passions, which dispose us to prosecute the good. Intellectual passions are inspired by images joined with images that press on the imagination, which generates in the body the passions that subvent volition (45; Tilmouth 2007: 148–9). The other means of prophylaxis is delay, waiting out the tumult of blood and spirits that accompany, say, fear (Articles 46, 47). Both techniques depend on “internal persuasion.” To gird oneself against vehement passion, the movements of spiritus must be unmoored from certain images and towards others, in a process that Bacon calls “negotiation within ourselves” (4:455–6), Descartes “convincing,” “persuading.” This is frank counsel, internalized. Until the middle of the eighteenth century and the appearance of “nervous substance” or “juice” (Flemyng 1751: 38, de Valangin 1768: 313; Sutton 1998), Descartes was a key thinker on the motion in motus animi: the animal spirits. Natural, vital, and animal spirits were subtle forms of matter, most often consubstantial with blood, responsible for some somatic and psychic functions; they were the mooring between matter and immortal spirit, body, and soul. In a typical account, the famous German physician, Daniel Sennert, presents spiritus as rarefied matter, spirits are “the bond by which the body and soul are united . . . and being wrought in the principal parts of the body are conveyed through channels [nerves] into the whole body, and are joined with Innate heat, that they may help the powers and faculties perform their actions.” Although animal spirits “perform internal and external senses,” Sennert is careful to insist that the soul is faculties and powers, and that it merely “useth” the spirits as instruments and vehicles (1661: 12–13). Borrowing from Castelli’s often reprinted Lexicon medicum, Steven Blankaart’s (1650–1704) A Physical Dictionary (1684) notes:

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Spiritus, Spirits, are reckon’d of three sorts, the Animal Spirits in the Brain, the Vital in the Heart, the Natural in the Liver . . . The Animal Spirits are a very thin Liquor, which distilling from the Blood in the outward or Cortical Substance of the Brain, are by the proper Ferment of the Brain exalted into Spirits, and then through the Medullar Substance of the Brain, the Corpus Callosum, and Medulla Oblongata, are derived into the Nerves and Spinal Marrow, and in them perform all the Actions of Sense and Motion. —266 Animal spirits are produced in the “barky Substance” of the brain, “Pneumatosis” (233). Thomas Willis (1621–75) also identified the “Barky substances of the Brain and Cerebel” in the production of spirits, which in turn are “most subtile Bodies, and highly active, inkindled from the Blood of the Brain, and its Appendix,” made lucid and aeriel, the “Hypostasis” of the sensitive soul itself. The spirits have a “a two-fold Aspect, to wit, inward for Sense, and outward for Motion.” The ambitious French physician Marin Cureau de La Chambre (1594–1669) advanced a broad programme of medical anthropology in the mid- to late seventeenth century, with a focus on comparative anatomy and physiognomy, passions and spirits, anchored by a conception of the soul that blends Aristotelian and Cartesian elements (Struever 2000; Wild 2008). He repeatedly makes the case that, since passions “are actions common to the Minde and to the Body,” as they are concatenated and swift, both “Physick and Moral Philosophy must help one the other to discourse exactly of them” (Cureau 1661: 1: sig. A6v, 2: 280–1). He begins his magisterial Discourse on the Passions (1661) with Thomist claims: passions are “motions” of either the sensitive or intellective appetite, the former passions proper, the latter “actions, or Operations,” differentiated by whether these motions are other-directed, or “only for him who acts them” (1: sigs. a4r–v). The sensitive appetite itself is not “shut up in one part onely [the heart],” but “dispersed through all the organs of the Senses,” its “boughs and branches are extended thorow all the body” (1: 55–6, 167, 2: 50–1, 70–3). Somatic compliance is precisely why each passion, “as Physick teacheth us,” also has its own pulse (1: 100, 2: 57–60, 373). The intellectual appetite, the will, is a form of action, which is a self-regarding intervention in the world. The essence of all passion is motion, consisting “in the inward emotion which the object forms in the appetite” (1: 256, 4). But Cureau cautions that the motion of the sensitive appetite is not like motion in the body: “all this agitation is made in it self ” (1: 258). The passions are “nothing but the emotions of the appetite, by which the soul moves towards good, and estrangeth itself from evil.” This motion is effected by the animal spirits and either sent out through the body, in concupiscible passions, or constrained in the heart, in irascible passions (1: 14–15, 164–9). This “flux and reflux” of the spirits draws the humours along with them, and registers on the surface of the body, as paleness, for example (1: 15, 62, 67; see 266–7). Every passion has an aim, and ideally the motions of the spirits should conform to that aim (1: 15–16). “Moral character” for Cureau is when the soul employs “clear and distinct knowledge” to obtain an end, and the spirits move in ways that support virtuous action (1: 19, 55). Even in the most “Spiritual Passions,” the spirits are activated and “sensibly alter the Body” (1. 268). Resisting imperfect motions, girding against excessive feeling, requires superior motion, since the sensitive appetite alone is not able to resist passions (2: 183, 216–7). The doyenne of superior motions is constancy. Cureau occasionally moots traditional therapies—diversion, driving one passion out with another (70, “a great grief makes us

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forget a less”)—but proclaims that constancy is “alone the only means by which the soul truly resists the Passions.” Other techniques are not “true resistance” but “flights or fights” (2: 184). In true constancy, the spirits are stiffened, comparable to water settled and congealed (2: 190–1). Still, there are “inferior passions” that are healthy. Of “all the motions of the Minde,” he writes, “there is none more a friend to Health then [pleasure], so as it be not extreme. It drives away sickness, it purifies the blood and the spirits, and renders . . . our yeers flourishing” (142). Cureau’s focus is the sensitive appetite, located most frequently in the faculties or powers of the sensitive soul. Against Descartes’ psychic reductionism, several thinkers echo this move: the soul is not tripartite, as it was in ancient conceptions, but bipartite. In his natural history of the passions, the physician Walter Charleton (1620–1707), for example, finds it necessary to posit a “sensitive soul” joined to the rational (1674: A6r), rendering intelligible conflicts in appetite and volition (bb3r). This “Corporeal Soul” is divisible, composed of tiny particles diffused throughout the body (10), nourished by “spiritous” parts, extinguished at death, and linked to vital and animal spirits (sig., bb7r, 5–30). Passions themselves are ascribed to this corporeal soul, have their seat in the imagination, and are, in Charleton’s view, disruptive to the whole animal economy via their “instant” succession of agitated motion (56, 64–5, 69–71). Somatic changes are felt via the nerves and the brain (77–9). In love, for example, the corporeal soul dilates, and animal spirits are “like lightning dispatched from the brain by the nerves instantly to the Heart,” rending the pulse strong, the blood more “nimble.” This blood carries vital spirits “newly enkindled” to the brain, which are then “sublimed or refined” into animal spirits that, in turn, oblige the soul to continue to fixate and indulge the idea or “image” of the beloved. In hatred, the soul contracts, the spirits retreat to the brain, and fill it with “sentiments” of bitterness; very few spirits, already “compressed,” descend to the heart via the “Pathetic nerves,” and the pulse is unequal (111). Passions must be kept in “the bounds of Moderation,” of course, but Charleton, like Descartes, also notes that those moved by feeling have richer lives (169). Thomas Willis offers anatomical ballast for these views. For Willis, too, the passions court power, and love, excited either by an object or an opinion, mobilises the animal spirits and inclines the “whole Nervous System,” toward the thing beloved or toward its “Idol in the Brain.” To Willis, the corporeal soul, ideally subservient to the rational, is either “quiet and undisturbed” or “shaken and moved” and, if disturbed, not only the animal spirits and the blood, but the humours, “very many Members and Parts of the Body, and . . . the Rational Soul it self ” are altered (1683: 45). As Robert Frank observes, theoretically the two souls are distinct, but the corporeal took on “a complexity of meaning and function” that infringes on the autonomy of the rational soul (1990: 131). This soul has two primary “gestures”: either dilation in pleasure or love, or contraction in grief, sorrow or hatred. From this “twofold Affection of the Sensitive Soul” arise all other passions (Willis 1683: 48). In what might be seen as a moral philosophical commentary, Willis advances the sensitive or corporeal soul as that which responds to desire and aversion and offers a miniature treatise on individual passions (45–55). Further, he was certain that anatomical study of the brain, its function and dysfunction, as well as the foundational chemistry of bodies, would reveal and chart the faculties of the soul (Frank 1990: 108, 132–3). Broadly, the cerebrum was the seat of volition, including imagination, motion, perception, as the animal spirits “hollow out passages” in the folds of the brain (Dewhurst 1980: 139; 1684: part 4, 93ff.); this is also the locus of the passions, “conceived in the cerebrum,”

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FIGURE 1.1: T. Willis, Cerebri anatome: cui accessit nervorum descriptio et usus,(Amsterdam: G. Schagen, 1664), opp. p. 32, fig. 1a. Wellcome Collection. CC BY.

communicated through the cerebellum to the praecordia, and vice versa, via the spirits (1980: 142; 1684: part 4, 94–7). Thus both “passion” and “action” find themselves in the same cerebral locus, with the implication that the passions were felt by the whole animal economy, even as far as “the Rational Soul it self.” Willis’s work appears at the transition from spirits and nitre to solids, fibers, and nervous fluid, but it spurred a tendency to seek anatomical and physiological foundations for feeling, even if his schema was not universally accepted (see, for example, Ridley 1695: 157–200).

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The animal spirits are still pressed into service in orthodox and popular treatments of passion in the eighteenth century. An authority at law, for example, suggests that overheating the spirits leads to foolishness, for the spirits are too hot to respond to “cold and sedate Reason” (Brydall 1700: 53). In concert with nervous substance, spirits are responsible for motion, sensation, and perception; they are “that subtle Fluid that passes in the Nerves,” refined from the blood. Citing Willis, Peter Paxton (d. c. 1711) notes that nervous diseases arise from the irregularities of the animal spirits; remedies should “divert or quiet” the same (1707: 176, 190, 193). By mid-century, as Ephraim Chambers’s (c. 1680–1740) Cyclopaedia (1728) asserts, animal spirits is a term applied to “different motions and agitations of the soul,” as various objects are present to the senses, but he explicitly excludes motions “whereby the soul is carried towards any thing,” which are actions. Passions, like grief, “interrupt” the soul but, in a Cartesian idiom, Chambers also claims that they are “of the utmost consequence with respect to health or disease,” for they are the “modifications or impressions” on the mind annexed to pleasure and pain which “incline us to our bodies, and all things that may be of use to their preservation.” Borrowing silently from Thomas Morgan’s 1725 account, Chambers notes that passion is “a kind of medium between a simple affection of the mind, and the appetites and sensations of the body,” caused by “the motion of the animal spirits” in order to “produce and preserve a disposition . . . suitable to the object perceived” (s.v). He offers a spurring phenomenology of feeling: first, judgement of the object, then disposing the will based on that judgement; then a “peculiar sensation of modification,” that occasions a “new determination of the course” of blood and spirits into the arms, legs, face, etc. The soul is then “shaken” by the movements of animal spirits, and feels “a sensible emotion,” one that fixes the soul momentarily and inspires a kind of “satisfaction” (s.v.). Similarly, the famous moralist Henry Grove (1684–1738) argues that in passion “the spirits are moved after a more vehement and tumultuous manner,” in ways “prejudicial to the mind in its judgment of things” (1749: 1. 277–86). Retailing a common view, and agreeing with Willis’ physiology of feeling, Grove concludes that the passions are “springs” to action, putting the blood and spirits in salutary motion as long as they are properly directed and moderated (279, 280, 285, 293–305). Orthodox eighteenth-century thought, then, preserves early commitments to passions as the “motus” in motus animi, no matter how novel the description. For John Burton (1710–1771) in 1738, passion “is always attended with such or such Consequences in the Constitution; and . . . such a particular Temperature of the Constitution always affects the mind with such or such Passions and Dispositions.” They do this by vibrating solids and refining the body’s “juices,” by irritating the nerves and contracting fibers (335–8). Later in the century, Thomas Arnold (c. 1742–1816) is clear: “every passion is accompanied with a correspondent state of body . . . produced by the intervention of the brain and nerves; and every such state of body, nerves, and brain, is accompanied with, or at least tends to promote, a correspondent passion” (1782–6: 2: 333). There is also a consistency in the moral valence of the passions. As Arnold insists, the passions “were undoubtedly implanted in our nature for wise, and beneficent, purposes; but the folly of man has perverted them to the most absurd, and pernicious” (1782–6: 2: 328–9). Passions influence health, since they create “disorders in the blood,” so subduing the passions with reason “is the first and principal rule in which mankind ought to be trained up, to secure a good state of health in all the periods of life” (Hippocrates 1776: 73).

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PASSIONS IN DISCOURSES OF HYGIENE As several scholars have argued, the traditional categories of medicine—physiology, semiology, pathology, hygiene, and therapeutics—underwent significant revision in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, with forms of preventative medicine, like dietetics and hygiene, devoted to “a good state of health in all periods of life,” suffering uncertain theoretical fates (Mikkeli 1999: 98–118). Yet older traditions continued to flourish, and attention to the passions as part of diagnosis and cure remained robust. The first sections of Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1690), for example, are organized by the non-naturals, and John Locke (1632–1704) concludes this part of his text by insisting that physical health is necessary for spry, enlivening thought. He focuses on disposition and inclination, and on the use and management of the passions, for much of the tract ([1690] 1996: §§1–33, 74, 100–2). As John Burton writes in 1738, “it is certain that Affections of the Mind, especially when sudden and intense, do inflame very much, and alter the Constitution, so far as necessarily to bring it under the Physician’s care” (334–5). Burton’s text partakes of the rich tradition of early modern hygiene manuals, which Heiki Mikkeli has explored, and in which there was a broad commitment to patient autonomy and to self-care, evidenced, for example, in manuals for the poor. In 1707, John Purcell (c. 1674–1730) insisted that medical knowledge affords patients means of expression as well as criteria with which to judge physicians (sigs. Ar–v ff.). Books concerning health and regimen “ordinarily included sections on the passions . . . and their role in the etiology of disease,” and baroque hygiene texts had a long afterlife, popular well into the nineteenth century (Rosenberg 2013: 20, n. 32). I offer a few examples here of the ways in which the passions appeared in such texts, either as markers of illness, as illness itself, or as conduits for distemper and for cure. The Spanish physician Juan Huarte (1529–1588) argued that passions disclose dispositions, and that, once known, dispositions should guide not only the use of the nonnaturals but choice of vocation ([1594] 2014: 86–7, 136–7, 147–8). In this context, Huarte argues that virtue requires “good temperature,” that mirth is salutary, and that sadness “consumeth the moisture of the brain,” and thereby diminishes the understanding (233, 125). His fame is frequently noted in the period (Bowman 1784: vii), as was the Jesuit Leonard Lessius (1554–1623), whose Hygiasticon (1613) was translated by Timothy Smith in 1743. He advances sobriety as multiply beneficial, but key is its “mitigation of the passions and affections,” especially anger and melancholy (1743: 69, 72, 94). Sobriety cures “these Evils” by “correcting” the humours that are the “efficient Cause of . . . Passions.” A predominant cold, phlegmatic humour, he writes, “stuffs up the narrow Passages of the Spirits, and damps the very Spirits themselves, rendering them sluggish: So that the Apprehensions of the Mind become thereby slow and languid, inconstant and irregular, and often make a Man lose himself, his reason, and his Argument in Disputation” (76). One response is a drying diet, as it keeps even the brain in its “due or Proper Mediocrity” (78, 83). A sober diet sustains memory and understanding (75ff.), including thinking, reasoning, inventing, counseling, judging, and fitness for “Divine Illuminations” (78–83). In the absence of sobriety, we are unable to quiet the mind, attain holiness, or “refrain” from passions and appetites (80). While he founds physiology on the nervous system, George Cheyne (1671/2–1743) inherits and retails this tradition in his enormously popular 1724 text, An Essay of Health and Long Life, which turns on moderation and self-regulation. In a work that combines

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medicine and Christian morals (Wild 2006: 135), one of his central claims is that the passions “have a greater influence on Health and Long Life, than most people are aware of ” (Cheyne 1724: 144). Like Cureau and others, Cheyne distinguishes spiritual from animal passions, the former restricted to the mind, or spirit, alone and active, the latter involving the body, and passive (145–8). He then defines passions as “The Effect produced by Spirits or Bodies [external, material objects], immediately on the Body,” noting that most taxonomies of the passions can be reduced to love and hatred (152). His phenomenology of acute and “chronical” feeling is instructive: sudden Gusts of Joy or Grief, Pleasure or Pain, stimulate and spur the Nervous Fibres, and the Coats of the Animal Tubes, and thereby give a Celerity and brisker Motion to their included Fluids, for the same Time. And the Functions of the Heart and Lungs being involuntary, they have their more immediate Effects upon them. Thus both sudden Joy and Grief, make us breath short and quick, and make our Pulse small and frequent. —153 Sustained passions “wear out, waste, and destroy the Nervous System gradually,” by “fixing . . . a Set of Ideas on the Imagination” (155–61). Those with “lively” imaginations are prone to violent passions, and those who experience such passions are more susceptible to disease (171, 160). His remedies? Love of God, combined with “a just and laudable Self-love” (161–8). Prophylaxis requires attention to regimen, time, care, patience, and self-love tempered by self-denial (173). Disease arising from passion “may be cured by Medicine,” but medical intervention must follow the quieting or calming of vehement feeling, which is “the Business, not of Physick, but of Virtue and Religion” (171). Virtue, religion, and self-care continued to organise hygienic texts for the rest of the eighteenth century (Porter and Porter 1998). In a period in which delicate health sometimes signified emotional depth and sensitivity (Beatty 2012: 3), the anonymous Hippocrates’s Treatise on the Preservation of Health (1776) combines assertions about the “stamina” and elasticity of the nerves, channels, and “pipes” with moral advice (69–70, 73). As the author insists, it is “absolutely incumbent on every man, who seriously desires to preserve his health, to labour indefatigably to subdue his passions.” Failure to moderate the passions is “experimentally known” to weaken the nerves, retard circulation, impair digestion, produce spasms, obstructions, hypochondriacal disorders, even death. Distempers arising from vehement passions “are more stubborn, and harder to be remedied” than corporal disorders (37–9). Continual serenity, springing from “a good conscience,” is the “greatest contributor to perfect health” (40). Similarly, Kingsmill Davan’s account, meant for general readers, offers an anthropology of the passions (1799: 68–9, 115–21), an excursus on the senses as “the medium through which the passions are excited” (70–82), disquisitions on sensibility and sympathy (92– 103), and something Davan calls “external emotions,” those which arise either from association or instinct, and can be “read” with “tolerable accuracy” in the body (103–14). But it is largely devoted to hygiene. Take, for example, Davan’s view of fear: some are born with an inclination to fear, while others “are rendered so by disease or accident, which unstring the nerves.” Debility augments timorousness (40, 50, 62, 64). Nerves become irritable from affliction; those that suffer are more prone to pity and compassion (14–15, 24–5). Davan cites Charles Le Brun (1619–90), Locke, Thomas Reid (1710–96), and offers a complex taxonomy of the passions, while noting the “benevolent affections are planted in our nature” (5, 18, 13–14). His scope is wide, but he alights on irritability,

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“independent of our mind,” which arises from pleasure or pain, themselves the basis of desire and aversion (11, 10, 149). Thus relatively new theory about vitality does not preclude “old” advice about regimen. He advises a “prudent care of the body, and a steady government of the mind” as guards against disease and prejudice; health strengthens and refines taste, adds vigour to sensibility, invigorates our sensations, and “temperates” fiery passion (20, 27, 47). There are dozens of other examples, including several early eighteenth-century texts by the physician John Floyer (1649–1734); James Adair’s (1728–1801) popular Medical Cautions (1786), which advises invalids to be “cheered by hope and sustained by diversity of amusement” (112–3); John Armstrong’s (1709–79) Art of Preserving Health (1796: 125ff); and Benjamin Grosvenor’s (1676–1758) popular Health: an Essay on its Nature, Value, Uncertainty, Preservation, and Best Improvement (1716, 1748, 1761), not to mention a growing genre devoted specifically to women’s health, and scores of texts concerned with either childhood or senescence. Luigi Cornaro’s (1467–1566) Discourses on a Sober and Temperate Life was reprinted frequently. Anthony Willich’s (d. 1804) massive 700-page treatise, Lectures on Diet and Regimen (1799), rounds out the period. All embrace Galenic categories of medical intervention, even if they are “modernized,” and most confect moral counsel and physic, which rests on a by then well-known notion that virtue is “nothing but a regulated motion, and a Passion moderated by Reason” (Cureau 1661: 1, sigs. A3v–A4r; 2. 141). While physicians were sometimes circumspect in their treatments of the passion—as Thomas Morgan says, he explores passions “so far as they come within the province of a Physician,” and then offers moral strictures (1725: 376, 392)—most focussed on medicalmoral cures for passional disturbance. His Philosophical Principles of Medicine explains passion as “any strong, violent, and preternatural Impression of Motion upon the Organs” or the “nervous elastick Febrillae” (371–4). Healthy passions “quicken the Pulse” and diffuse natural heat, while “painful Passions” depress the blood, weaken the pulse, and dissipate heat (380). Like Charleton and Willis, Morgan advances two sets of nerves—the involuntary nerves of expression, the vagus, and the intercostal—as the “principal instruments of the Passions, by means of which they are variously impress’d, modify’d, and organiz’d.” This Newtonian physician, convinced that the animal body is a machine, dependent for life on the circulation of blood and the secretion of liquors, from glands, and who rejects animal spirits for the “sensible Qualitys of the nervous Fluid” (xiii–xiv), nonetheless focuses on diet as curative (xxxi, 438) and retails traditional views about the constitution of the blood, climate, age, and sex (400ff). That the non-naturals endure testifies to the fact that hygienic attention to the passions was part of ongoing early modern shifts from “passivity” to “activity,” and from passions to emotions. In European thought, appetite is transformed into desire, and desires become the “principal passionate antecedents of action,” in Susan James’s terms, as part of an “urge” to unify—and, I would add, to heal—the mind (1997: 291).

MEDICINE OF THE MIND In Medicina mentis (1687, 1695) German physician, mathematician, and “empirical laboratory worker” Ehrenfried Walther von Tschirnhaus (1651–1708) argues that philosophy heals. Founded on a certain ars inveniendi, attuned to “concrete objects” rather than abstraction, philosophy, especially physics and mathematics, engenders wisdom, tranquillity, and happiness (Schönfeld 1998: 60–76). Similarly, thinking deeply

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with objects, turning the quotidian to pious use, was widely held as a form of moral improvement. As Robert Boyle (1627–91) avers, “conversations with things,” occasional meditations or “meletetics,” comfort and console, refine memory and wit, awaken “good thoughts,” and excite “good motions in the will and affections” (6: 525–6, 2: 343–9). Managed by “a skilful contemplator,” in Boyle’s estimation meletetics is passional and volitional therapy, a form of redescription that reveals both “excellencies” and faults, that tests sagacity, that is a colloquy with self as well as with objects (3: 337–41; 1991: 52). Similarly, David Hume (1711–1776) argues that “serious attention to the sciences and liberal arts softens and humanises the temper, and cherishes those fine emotions, in which true virtue and honour consists” (Hume 1987: 170; Kopajtic 2015). Natural philosophy was held to rectify reason, refine the senses, and provide moral ballast: investigators fashioned and secured their status morally, via the mastery of passion (Gaukroger 2006: 24–5; Jones 2006). Philosophy, askesis, natural philosophy: these are “medicines of the mind,” a phrase that appears frequently between 1566 and 1750. “Medicine of the mind” is an abiding concern in intellectual history: it arises in antiquity only to disclose its fulsome capacities in early modernity, especially in the Baroque period, when intuiting one’s spiritual condition inspired a raft of consolatory material (Schmidt 2007). Medical thought is variously suited for passional therapy, and that “medicina mentis” depends in part on using medicine to probe moorings between bodies, souls, minds. Central is Francis Bacon’s “medicine” or acculturation of the mind, cultura animi (see Wood 1994; Corneanu 2011; Harrison 2012). The understanding should be “purged and purified of fancies and vanities,” Bacon writes in 1620, while in 1605 he insisted that “knowledge of the divers characters of men’s natures” as well as “diseases and infirmities of the mind” are requisite for “medicining of the mind.” Such “diseases” are “no other than the perturbations and distempers of the affections” (1857– 74: 4: 20, 3: 437). As the London physician Edward Strother writes, in a text critical of George Cheyne, “Physicians have occasion to meddle in this Moral Part, as to know how to instruct their Patients, to avoid or conquer those Passions, which throw them into Diseases . . .” Doctors should show sufferers “how to parry them,” demonstrating “how they affect the Body, when they produce Distempers.” For example, sadness contracts the “Ducts and Siphons” of the brain, while cheerfulness helps perspiration and “dilates the Canals of the Nerves,” allowing motility to the spirits. As Steven Shapin has argued, in early modernity “the medical and the moral occupied the same terrain” (2003: 23). What distinguishes physicians from the laity—in their long struggle for hegemony over other practitioners—is not simply a greater store of learning but their moral authority, character, and counsel. Physicians were “moral advisers.” “Contentedness and quietness of mind, and chearful converse” are key: sufferers may listen to a physician before they send for a divine, so doctors should avoid flattery and false hope and offer, instead, “good Counsel for their Souls.” The intrication of frank talk, consolation, and counsel that defined the profession is brought into relief at the bedside, at which the rhetoric of counsel aspired to realise immediate effect. Evidence for sickbed conversation is sparse in historiae and consilia, observationes and records of cure, but advice for physicians in medical texts, critiques, and encomia of the profession, tracts by sufferers, letters, and doctrinal treatises often retail relationships between particular cases and general forms of counsel, evidence and narrative, the passions and illness (Agrimi and Crisciani 1994). While physiognomy assisted practitioners in determining mental states (Gaubius [1758] 1778: 188–9), patient narratives and clinical conversations were especially important in disclosing passion. Medicine and moral inquiry are

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consanguine, especially in a period in which responses to illness disclose disposition and measure character (Wild 2006: 11, 209–13, 248). The character of the physician, his “presentation of self,” was crucial to passional therapy (Scull 1993: 64). As Falconer remarks, physicians should be prudent, steady, trustworthy, in command of temper (1788: 30, 95–8). Clinical bedside conduct was a long-standing concern. The physician Samuel Sorbière’s (1615–1670) Advice to a Young Physician [Avis a un jeune medicin . . .] thought physicians more likely to succeed if they approach their patients with urbanity and good humour. The “aim should be to win the confidence of the patient.” Since cures are sometimes effected by “a strong imagination,” so “the wise physician should bring feelings into play, even the violent ones as well as those that are milder.” Moreover, all physicians should inspire joy in their patients and earn their trust as friends; Sorbière even sanctions flattery. It might well be, he continues, “that a smiling face, a fine appearance, a pleasing voice, and neatness in a physician would contribute to the well-being of a patient, by drawing the vital spirits to the surface through the joy he inspires.” To his young physician, he urges the cultivation of pleasant, diverting stories, as well as the “good grace” to inspire laughter in his patients (Pleadwell 1950: 270–1, 276–7, 279). As a contemporary English physician insists, when “a Sick Person comes to stand in need of the Physitians help, those surely of all others are most likely to do him good, who may be presumed to sympathize with him the most feelingly in his Afflictions” (Griffith 1681: 184). Mental distemper especially must “be gently and softly treated,” the mind fortified with patience, strength, prudence, and tranquillity, virtues which, in themselves, are curative. It follows, for the famous physician Giorgio Baglivi (1668–1707), that “the Physician who knows how to manage dextrously, and sway the Motions of his Patient’s Mind, will happily extirpate Diseases that are commonly taken for incurable” ([1696] 1723: 165–70). Such skills are those of a friend, who responds buoyantly to psychic and physical distemper, to all manner of affliction (Harris 1676: 180). The Scottish physician John Gregory (1724–73) insists on “that sensibility of heart which makes us feel for the distresses of our fellow-creatures, and which of consequence incites us in the most powerful manner to relieve them” (McCullough 1998: 15–172, 267ff.). We should have sympathy for patients, he continues in Lectures on the Duties and Qualifications of a Physician (1772), a feeling that “naturally engages the affection and confidence of a patient, which in many cases is of the utmost consequence to his recovery” (19–20, 69–70). Affection and confidence point Gregory towards friendship, as he muses on the character, manners, and dress that doctors should adopt when visiting sufferers (to his mind, they vary, depending on place and custom). Gregory’s conception of physician– patient interaction conjures Hippocrates’ sense that physicians should know what conduces to amity. In cases where medical remedies are impotent, a physician’s “presence and assistance as a friend may be agreeable and useful, both to the patient and his nearest relations” (Gregory 1772: 35–6). Still, they must be, above all, frank, and not display pique or obduracy (32–5). At the very least, the posture of friendship is meant to ease a patient’s imagination. “Disorders of the imagination may be as properly the object of a physician’s attention as those of the body,” he writes, “and surely they are, frequently, of all distresses the greatest, and demand the most tender sympathy; but it requires address and good sense in a physician to manage them properly.” Striking a medium between negligence and ridicule, sympathy and frankness, a physician should divert the mind, sometimes employing “a delicate and good-natured pleasantry” (24–5).

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This range of intervention and influence is both confirmed and questioned in the work of one of the most famous European physicians of the eighteenth century, Jerome Gaub (see Morris 2009). While specifically concerned with disorders in the solid parts and humours, the Institutiones pathologiae medicinalis (1758) is in part organized by traditional categories of hygiene. In the section on exercise, Gaub (1705–80) pauses to consider the immoderate use of the “rational faculty,” arguing that rest is necessary for the “intimately connected” mind and body (Gaubius 1778: 171ff., 180–1). In fact, “agitations” of the nervous power are more damaging than those of the body, due to “the very great tenderness of the nervous substance.” Exhausting this faculty courts delirium, “confusion of ideas,” disturbing dreams, insomnia, and fatuity; prolonged or vehement “exercises of the mind far more impair health than those of the body” (182, 184). In thinking (his example is “excess of study”), the mind “leans with her whole weight” on the common sense, which is “alone in action” (183). When the common sense is “stretched, fatigued or dissipated,” the “powers of other systems” likewise suffer, and patients experience perturbations of the mind. Torpor in the senses, a dulled or extinguished nervous power, impaired mental faculties: these are the results of neglecting the “culture of the mind” (183–4). This “culture of the mind” demands close management of the passions which, should they excite “commotion” and surpass the limits of “right reason,” are sharply dangerous. Excesses disorder “the whole human œconomy” in what Gaub calls a “truly surprising intercourse” between mind and body (184–5). His phenomenology is instructive: disturbances in the mind affect the body reflexively, as the mind “feels” the body’s reactions “by their very rapid egress and return.” Every passion has its own pathology. Yet they are sometimes useful, for they are “capable of communicating as well a medicative as a deleterious power” (186–9). “Emotions of the mind,” regimen, and hygiene were abiding concerns for a physician wary of medicine’s triumphal claims. While he is occasionally sceptical about the discovery of true moorings between bodies and souls (234, 243), Gaub is certain of their reciprocity. There is in many parts of the body a “sensibility,” and the mind is made “uneasy” when the body is injured (243). The loci for Gaub’s investigations in the latter part of the book are pain and anxiety. Anxiety is “far more terrible” than pain, more “intolerable” than death, in part because a “corporeal cause” excites “horrible” ideas (249). A “prudent physician” attends to anxiety, to the “accidents of the mind” (252). Echoing Galen, and Huarte, Gaub asserts that “the moral no less than the rational faculties” depend on regimen (94). Gaub “shudders” to think of the damage done by an “irrate mind.” Anger inspires a “Pandora’s box” of bodily afflictions, and it attacks the “universal foundation of life” (133–5). Repressed anger, too, has ill effects (139–40). Yet anger is also lenitive. If sufferers are weakened by diseases of some duration, anger can lead “to an unexpected access of strength and an early recovery,” as it distributes vital heat by “forcibly accelerating the movement of the blood.” Terror is similarly effective, especially with hysterics and arthritis, toothache and hiccups, as it “quickly revivifies the vital powers of the whole body” (186–9). Here, Gaub follows conventional medical thought, but argues that physicians have a double obligation to “relieve the ill by making good and skilful use of the mind’s curative faculties” (96). Affections must be moderated, brought to order (200–1) and our desire, our enormôn (what Gaub calls our “agent of arousal,” or appetite) must be checked. Both contribute to virtue: those who “strive to inculcate true wisdom” must account for “the aids and hindrances offered by different states of the body” (38).

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There are limits to psychic care. Gaub praises the “maxims of philosophers” as better in theory than in practice: their techniques, “friendly conversation and cheerful words . . . serious discussions and stern warnings . . . convincing predictions and threats,” have limited power, and are not applicable to all times, places, and persons, especially when distemper is violent enough to impugn reason. Instead, he lauds physical intervention: When we cannot fully rely on the power of reason to control the emotions, and hence cannot govern the mind by the means of the mind itself, the wealth of our art is such that we have many measures available which act at first on the bodily parts and movements only, yet these same effects act equally on the mind, the inhabitant of the body, and can, as with bits and spurs, restrain the overhasty or rouse and stimulate the sluggish. —202–3 Bits and spurs, a “whip and reins” (202): Gaub counsels strong physiological cures for moral and intellectual weakness, including severe conditions, like mania and melancholy. Medicine for the mad discloses the limits of “medicine of mind.”

MADNESSES In 1632, Caspar Barlaeus (1584–1648) wrote to Petrus Cunaeus (1586–1638) that he had “fallen into a melancholy” far worse than his previous episodes: “I fatigued myself by too much exertion in my studies, then I began to suffer from obstructions, after which what I had always found easy appeared to me to be difficult and, finally, through a feeling of anxiety, I began to lose all my self-confidence and felt unequal to my task.” Delusive, he lies “almost dumb and speechless, completely apathetic [excors].” He was, he continued, the “unhappiest” of men (Blok 1976: 40). Barlaeus knew of what he spoke, as he was an occasionally practicing physician as well as professor of philosophy and a poet; in fact, Barlaeus’ friend, Constantijn Huygens (1596–1687) attributes the former’s strong feelings to his deep anatomical knowledge (Pender 2015). For Barlaeus’ hypochondriacal melancholy, Huygens recommends laughing and joking as antidotes (Blok 1976: 58; cf.129), while Barlaeus himself lists friends and God as those from whom he seeks assistance (60, 141). In all his episodes—Blok calls them “depression”—Barlaeus turns to a conventional ensemble of remedies, including “literary therapy” (143ff.), but he is clear that he suffers less “from the obstruction in the hypochondrium” than from his imagination (63). From antiquity through to the eighteenth century, melancholy’s meanings, prognostics, and cures were “relatively stable,” and Robert Burton’s (1577–1640) Anatomy of Melancholy (1621) provides an “accurate, exhaustively detailed, and unquestionably erudite” picture of the disease and its therapies (Gowland 2006: 96). Insanity itself is either mania or melancholy, the former more common, and founded on the imagination of things absent or poor association, on confusion of ideas, on an “unusual excess in the excitement of . . . animal functions,” or “violent emotions or passions of the mind” (Cullen 1777: 144–9). As Edward Strother has it in 1725, the “first Motions of Passion” are “but short Fits of Madness” (414); Arnold agrees: passions are “powerful causes of Insanity” (1782–6: 2. 334, 385ff.). Treatments ranged, and embraced the four cardinal responses—diversion, aversion, counsel, alterations to regimen—but rather more attention was given to sufferers’ surroundings, diet, and passions. Passion finds its most fertile ground in the imagination, and thus it is worth pausing, as do Barlaeus and Burton, on the role of imagination in this portmanteau distemper. The

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FIGURE 1.2: Pieter Xaveri, Two Madmen, 1673, terracotta (clay material), h. 50 cm, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam (http://hdl.handle.net/10934/RM 0001.COLLECT.24819).

imagination is antinomian, “prone to ramble through various phantasms” (Charleton 1674: 49); central to creativity, broadly conceived, imagination was also a source of error, misprision, waywardness. Since the imagination is key, the tasks of diverting, persuading, advising, “reason, art, counsel, or persuasion” are requisite (Burton [1621] 1927: 1.1.2.2, 469). There are also sufferers who were cozened, cured by deception, their imaginations roughly settled, such as the man who thought his “rheumatick nose” bigger than his body, for whom surgeons affixed a piece of meat to his face, while he was sleeping, only to cut off his distended “nose” as cure just as he awakened (Walkington 1607: 70v–71r). A cottage industry in the eighteenth century (Scull 1993: 20ff.), madness is a limit case for the role of the passions in medicine. To take but one example, William Battie

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(bap. 1703, d. 1776) argued that madness results from a “deluded imagination,” from false perception, which itself is “a præternatural state or disorder of Sensation,” as it disorders what he calls “nervous substance” (Hunter and Macalpine [1758] 1962: 6, 41). Madness is “a distracted and irresolute state of mind,” subject to various passions, “any one of which when unrestrained is oftentimes more than sufficient to hurry a sober man out of his senses” (69). More than the healthy, the mad are susceptible to bodily disease (Scull 1993: 57). His therapies are traditional: appetites must be checked, the imagination diverted, clean air, simple food, a variety of amusements, none too long (Hunter and Macalpine [1758] 1962: 69). He singles out passions in suggesting “remote” causes of consequential madness (his none-too-convincing term for conditions not hereditary); overlong indulgence in love, grief, or despair is dangerous, and he recommends the ancient tactic of substituting one passion for another. Should that fail, “bodily pain may be excited to as good a purpose and without the least danger” (84–5). This suggestion raises a detractor’s ire. For John Monro (1715–91), madness is “vitiated judgement,” not deluded imagination, and he rails against the uncertainty, vagary, and cruelty of Battie’s thinking about the mad (4). Munro takes issue with Battie’s prescription of narcotics and his recourse to driving one passion out with another; the first is dangerous, the second “contradictory to common sense,” an error of antiquity. While “frights” and “passions of the mind” suddenly excited have proved salutary in some cases, they are mostly damaging, for any one “prevailing passion” obstructs and weakens the mind, mitigating the effects of a shock or the “attack” of another passion (45–6). Some years later, Falconer is likewise sedulous on melancholy and mania, both of which must enlist “a large scope for the management of the mind and passions.” Melancholy is overmuch attachment, and attention, to one object, remedied by diversion, by introducing “a variety of matter upon which it may exercise itself,” while mania is an “irrationality upon all subjects” (Falconer 1788: 77, 82). Here, Falconer critiques the “substitution of passions” therapy: this advice seems proper, he writes, “but I fear is seldom practicable” (79). The well-known physician James Adair retails the problem, perhaps a solution: “Maniacal, melancholic, hypochondriacal, and hysterical patients have often more vivacity of the imagination than in health, owing to a greater degree of irritability of the nervous system” (1786: 76). Further “as reason has very little power to counteract . . . painful impressions, the attention ought to be diverted by other strong and more agreeable impressions: Hence the benefit of change of place, amusements, and sometimes interesting occupations of the mind, to those who are depressed by grief, or labour under such corporeal maladies as excite painful sensations in the mind; and much relief has been obtained by opposing a passion of contrary nature to that which predominates” (61). The problem is over-activity, as Arnold suggests: a “too active” imagination gives way to “strengthening the passions, by exciting, nourishing, and confirming, prejudice, and error” (Arnold 1782–6: 2: 434). This renders the mind weak, incompatible with judging and reasoning, “subversive of mental perfection, and productive of Insanity” (433, 436). William Cullen’s recommendations for treatment are not dissimilar to those he urges, in more gentle form, for melancholy: restraint and isolation; “stripes and blows”; inspiring fear and eschewing anger; a plain diet; occasional phlebotomy and purging, emetics and blistering; immersion in cold water; exercise, labor, and travel as “diversions”; hard labor; opium and other drugs (1777: 151–65). His discussion of melancholy enlists temperament as ballast (168ff.); it rehearses Aristotelian and Galenic thought about sensitive melancholics (for example, 175–81) even while he explains the condition as “a degree of torpor in the motion of the nervous power,” accompanied by a drier and firm

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texture in “the medullary substance” (181–2). The terms and theories have changed, but intervention is conventional, wonted.

CONCLUSION From the work of Sigerist and T. Bilikiewicz in the early twentieth century to Brian Nance at the century’s end, attempts to certify “baroque” as a qualifier for medicine have met with uneven success. Henry Sigerist asserts William Harvey’s (1578–1657) early seventeenth-century anatomical studies as dynamic, in an analogy with baroque art, against the “static” work of the late sixteenth century; Sigerist intended to open medicine to its cultural, social, and political grounds, to bring medicine and philosophy into conversation (Temkin 1958: 490–1; Rosen 1951). Nance is more convincing. For him, the Huguenot physician, Theodore Turquet de Mayerne accomplished a “baroque synthesis” of old and new medical thought via commitments to detailed clinical notes, to empiricism, and to a rich metaphysics, stipulating that humoral theory and “chemical principles” coexisted, that they were mutually informative about “life.” The Baroque, then, is ornate, dynamic, and natural, but in the service of particular kinds of hermeneutics and philosophical commitments as well as an “heroic” attempt to do justice to empirical data (Nance 2001: 195–8). Perhaps the “Baroque” is eclecticism by another name for, as the physician and medical historian William Black (1749/50–1829) writes in 1782, the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries produced an astonishing range of thinkers on dietetics and medical experiment, on medical jurisprudence and on physicians’ “moral and political conduct,” on all “practical subjects of medicine” (238–41). Black was responsive to contemporary politics, as he excoriates sectarianism, the spur to “jarring systems of Physic,” itself “overdosed with theory” and “speculative bombast,” so much that “we may be said to sail in a boundless ocean without compass or quadrant” (1–4). It was an eclecticism that continued into the Enlightenment. A final case for the persistence of Galenic categories of apprehension and practice is Kant’s 1770s lectures, collected as Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View. Although he is responsive to contemporary medicine, mentioning for example John Brown’s notions of “sthenic” and “asthenic” dispositions ([1798] 2006: 154; see Brown [1780] 1790: 22, passim), Kant endorses temperaments and posits the phlegmatic as most desirable. Phlegm underwrites apatheia, for those who possess that disposition are less susceptible to both affect, which is sudden and “thoughtless,” and passion, which is “weak” but persistent, and can coexist malignantly with rationalizing (150–72; 190, 220; see Larrimore 2001). Kant advocates for certain kinds of passion, ones that allow the understanding to rule without weakening “manly” sensibility (35, 132), but warns that, because they depend on imagination, passions are contagious, unevenly powerful, wayward (72–3, 152–3). As a result, the imagination should be “tamed” (74), a process accomplished, in part, through healthy distraction, a “necessary and . . . artificial precautionary procedure for our mental health,” and effected via collectio animi, recollecting oneself, preparing for diverse circumstances, by licit conversation and laughter (100–2, 161, 181; Pender 2015). Relative bodily health is requisite for, in the Baroque and into the Enlightenment period, “temperament is part of the fabric of consciousness” (Summers 2003: 17).

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CHAPTER TWO

Religion and Spirituality GIOVANNI TARANTINO

FEELINGS (AND SENSES) TOWARDS Exploring the role of emotion in religious and intellectual life, Peter Goldie has argued that not all emotional feelings are bodily feelings, and that feelings may also concern things in the world that reach beyond the body; such feelings, “bound up with thought,” are what he has called feelings towards. “Many of these emotions—such as delight, wonder, awe, courage, doubt, tenacity, and hope—will be common between the intellectual and the religious sphere; others—reverence and contrition perhaps—will be particular to religious experience” (Goldie 2011: 101). Early modern religious writers considered “holy affections” to be morally superior to all other emotions and much more satisfying than bodily pleasures (Newton 2017). (At least since the time of St. Athanasius of Alexandria, to cry while carrying out devotional duties was viewed as a charisma, a divine grace, and was known as the donum lacrimarum (Imorde 2012).) But how religious feelings are defined has changed over the course of history.1 They have been described as commonplace emotions experienced at times when they are directed towards a religious object (being moved by the Word of God); as sentiments that are one of a kind, which, in the tradition of the German theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768–1834), can be viewed as an innate sense of the divine, “a sense and taste for the eternal,” “a feeling of absolute dependence”; or as affects of divine origin to which conversion and sanctification alone can provide access (Hitzer and Scheer 2014; Corrigan 2004). Introducing a special issue of the Journal of Religious History on conversion and emotions, Jacqueline van Gent and Spencer Young observe that all cross-cultural religious encounters, irrespective of whether conversion is the aim, involve emotions, because “emotion is deeply imbricated within the many varieties of religious experience” (Van Gent and Young 2015: 461). What emerges from the collective volume Emotions and Christian Missions: Historical Perspectives is that emotional practices like tears or “shouting,” and feelings such as pity, joy, frustration, had a profound impact in the forging of relationships between missionaries and prospective converts (Vallgårda et al. 2015). Not infrequently the conversion experience—“the theological and phenomenological centerpiece of radical Protestantism”—was understood as “the rapturous union of the female soul with a male Christ,” and true believers were unafraid to describe this experience of mystical marriage with all the passion they could find.” As the poet Edward Taylor put it with typical bluntness, “The Soul’s the Wombe. Christ is the Spermidote, and Saving Grace the seed cast therein” (Juster 2003: 203). Among the key components representing and moulding emotional performance in early modern religious life there are diaries, sermons, conduct books, confessors’ manuals, 35

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didactic dramas, lives of saints, liturgy, ritual scripts, music, material culture, gender, and sexuality (with the feminization of religious ideas and feelings observed by Delio Cantimori in early sixteenth-century Italy being accentuated in the centuries that followed). CounterReformation Italy spied on and studied women, and read their writings. Indeed, they were forced to write, for the sole benefit of confessors, in order to subject them to an inner discipline and, if possible, to isolate them, to avoid the uproar and the great collective agitation that arose around saints and the possessed. Establishing the crime of “affected saintliness” was intended to curb the wave of female charismatic experiences that had distinguished French, Italian, and Spanish religious life in the sixteenth century. The mystical phenomenology that inspired nuns and lay tertiaries endowed with ecstatic powers was based on the medieval model of Catherine of Siena and fueled by the modern institutional successes of Teresa of Ávila and Mary Magdalene de’ Pazzi: fasting, stigmata, visions, mystical weddings, religious ecstasy, thaumaturgical powers, and prophecies (Niccoli 1989; Gotor 2004). But the themes of divine love and mystical weddings extended beyond female writings and became pervasive. Religious devotional literature and art is shot through with erotic imagery. Indeed, as Richard Rambuss has pointed out, Christianity presents us with “a nearly naked man offered up to our gazes (Ecce homo) for worship, desire, and various kinds of identification” (Rambuss 1998: 11).

THE GREATER THE FEAR, THE MORE INTENSE THE PIETY For the most part, Europeans believed in God in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Furthermore, the settlement of 1648, after the Thirty Years’ War—sealed by the treaties of Westphalia—was anything but a disaster for Catholicism, marking as it did the end of the Protestant advance in Europe and the acceptance of Catholic reconquests. In solidly Catholic southern Europe and in those areas of central Europe clawed back from Protestantism, Jesuits managed to popularize the cult of the Virgin Mary and the doctrine that she was conceived without the taint of sex. In towns across Austria and Bohemia, Marian sodalities evolved into popular associations, some for the rich and other for more humble citizens. Going on a pilgrimage to Mariazell or to some other miracle-working shrines was a popular and emotionally charged activity (Zika 2017). A new devotion to the Eucharist, associated in particular with St. Alfonso de’ Liguori (1696–1787), had a massive following. The number of secular priests in proportion to the population rose to its highest known level around the middle of the eighteenth century in France, Spain, and Italy (Pennington [1970] 2014; Silver 2009). Those excluded from the community of the majority found consolation in the belief that they formed part of a limited body of people who had been “saved” or were the “elects” (“The more the world has crushed me in this last persecution of mine, the more I have felt the embrace of God,” wrote Bernardino Ochino, defined as a heretic by all the Churches).2 The Waldensian (Fr. Vaudoise) heresy, in particular, occupied a key position in Protestant accounts of their ancestry as the sole visible church that had preserved the apostolic faith from its Roman Catholic “perversion” in the Middle Ages. Waldensians retained their faith and piety through centuries of hardship and exclusion. This constancy is well captured by an image caption on the inside cover of Jean Léger’s Histoire Générale des Vaudois (1669): “Tritantur mallei, remanet incus” (“the hammers may hit, but the anvil remains”). The horrific massacre of Piedmontese Waldensians in 1655 prompted an

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international campaign on their behalf (see Figure 2.1). Churches in England were painted red as a graphic symbol of the bloodshed, while a Dutch leaflet of the time used an allegorical portrait of Religion to convey the horror of the event: the winged and veiled female figure is reduced to tears by the sight of mutilated children and adults being thrown into Alpine ravines (Tarantino 2014). The poignant prison letters of Sebastiano Basan, who had made his home in the Waldensian valleys, attest to the emotional tactics employed by the Inquisition. In their efforts to get Basan to abjure, the Inquisitors initially used mild, flattering words and even gestures of affection. But he was not won over, and protested with dignity against the violence done to the Christian Religion in his person. He was burnt at the stake on November 23, 1623, and as the flames took hold he could

FIGURE 2.1: Religion in Tears [“Voy la Religion qui pleure incessamment qu’on répand sans pitié le sang de l’innocent”], c. 1663 (attributed to Chr. de Pas in Frederik Muller, De Nederlandsche geschiedenis in platen). Bound with the copy of Jean Léger, Histoire Générale des Églises évangéliques des Vallées de Piémont ou Vaudoises (1669) held by Società di Studi Valdesi (© Biblioteca SSV, Torre Pellice, Fondo Antichi SSV 126.2, carta a1v; Inv. 18156).

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be heard singing the canticle of Simeon. Many of the onlookers, including those of high rank, wept at the sight of him dying (BGE Arch. Tronchin). Discussing the flight of the Vaudoises on a broom, the famous miniature in Martin Le Franc’s Le champion des dames (1451), Charles Zika observes that Waldensianism might have begun to be associated with devil-worshipping witchcraft because the alpine Waldensians used to hold their meetings in private homes at night. Gradually the terms became conflated, especially in the western Alps (Zika 2007). For at least the first half of the seventeenth century, the majority of people in much of Europe were in no doubt that witchcraft was a threatening and ever-present reality, though by 1700 the belief had generally faded into vague superstition, and indeed the disgust and revulsion reserved for those who practiced witchcraft started to be redirected against their accusers. But the notion of witchcraft could not be definitively rejected until religious patterns of thought were separated from those underpinning eveyday life. After all, trials and executions helped to temporarily allay fear, anxiety and envy, and also offered the pleasure of mass revenge. On occasion they even enabled a victim to exact posthumous revenge on old enemies, or for conflicting groups or villages to strike a blow against their enemies. An isolated widow was always a likely candidate to match the stock definition of a witch; but children too, who were just as defenceless, were similarly prone to be regarded as acting in ways that indicated possession by the Devil (Roper 2010a; Dillinger 2013; Millar 2017). The obvious way to explain ordinary world events, especially catastrophic ones, was to attribute them to God. The Northern European merchants who survived the Great Lisbon Earthquake lived thereafter in constant fear for their safety, as this note written by a Hamburg merchant immediately afterwards indicates: “Since yesterday morning, I have spent the time in anguish and terror, without eating or sleeping . . . I was sweating from fear, because I figured that the superstitious populace had put into their heads that this sad destiny had been visited on them because of the heretics” (quoted in Poirier 2016: 171).3 Following an earthquake in London in 1692, which fortunately did not result in any fatalities, the Puritan minister Thomas Doolittle was quick to stress how providential the quake, and the ensuing terror, had been. In his view, “the greater the fear, the more intense the reforming piety” (quoted in Udías 2009: 44). Exceptional events of a kind capable of stirring a groundswell of powerful collective emotions, such as the Thirty Years’ War, the Turkish invasion of central Europe, the Puritan revolution, and the preaching of the Gospel in America and Africa, seemed to many to be signs of the imminent return of the Messiah as prophesied by Daniel. The Jews themselves, when considering the same events, believed the Messiah would come soon. Curiously, in this shared wait for the Messiah, both Jews and Christians turned with trust to the charismatic figure of Sabbatai Zevi (1626–76) who travelled across Europe proclaiming himself to be the Messiah and drawing crowds of followers behind him—until, that is, he decided to convert to Islam (Van der Wall 1989; Popkin 1992).

DENOMINATIONAL FEELINGS The appeal to the emotions in the conversion and proselytizing strategies employed by theologians, preachers, and missionaries in the early modern age became pervasive across confessional lines. The version of religious faith offered by the Calvinist and Lutheran churches was largely shorn of material “baroque” splendor, demonstrative emotionalism, sensual beauty, theatrical imagery, evident miracles, heroic saints, or loving Madonnas. As a result, the Reformation had a hard job competing against a new, highly educated Roman

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Catholicism, infused with a missionary spirit and militant piety (Donnelly and Maher 1999). Exploring early modern German sermons on the Passion, and on death and dying, Susan C. Karant-Nunn found that there are significant differences in the emotions that the Catholic, Lutheran, and Calvinist clergy tried to instil in their flocks. Catholic homileticians aimed for a palpably emotional response to and identification with Christ’s suffering. Lutheran pastors focused more on consolation, letting some aspects of the accounts sink into the background. And Reformed preachers tried above all to encourage their congregations to recriminate themselves for having participated in the sins that made Christ’s sacrifice necessary. Calvin’s sermons on the suffering of Christ were particularly dour; frequently, they dealt first with the need for His sacrifice to redress the wickedness of humankind, before moving on to more cerebral doctrinal issues (KarantNunn 2010). In this regard, as Jan Plamper has shrewdly noted, Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism ([1904–5/20] 1930) can also be viewed as an account of religious feeling: “Calvinists were in the ice blue zone . . . only recognizing the unsentimental, such as commercial success, as signs of God’s mercy”; Pietists “teetered on the red-hot domain of Catholicism,” while Lutherans lay somewhere in between, regarding themselves as “vessels of the Holy Spirit” (Plamper 2015: 48). The proliferation but also, conversely, the removal and prohibition of emotionally powerful religious images (which some Protestant reformers motivated by referring to Decalogue’s ban on idolatry and the manufacture of graven images of God), reflected a widespread interiorization of a hierarchy of senses. Anything but natural, at the top of this hierarchy was sight, a view which has been traced back to Plato. Blindness, or a misdirected gaze, on the other hand, had long been linked to moral incapacity or to a stubborn refusal to recognize religious truth. Significant in this sense was the visual (and textual) representation, cutting across different Christian denominations, of the irreligious (and the Jew) as being blind.4 The blindness of the irreligious, according to the Domenican and “Augustinian” Daniello Concina—of whom more below—consisted of their presumption in wishing to grasp divine mystery within the finiteness of their intellect. Even the iconic stereotype of the hooked-nose Jew would seem to relate to a deliberate accentuation, in some early medieval representations of the Crucifixion, of the facial lines of a Jew obstinately looking away from the Cross, a figurative expedient initially alluding to the emotional and mental resistance of Christians themselves to seeing portrayals of a suffering and humiliated Christ (Lipton 2014). Older representations of heretics show them covering their eyes, ears, or mouth in a stubborn attempt to ignore the voice of God, see the truth or preach it. More commonly, however, was the Catholic Church’s injunction on visual representations of heretics commiting acts of heresy. Instead, as Cardinal Gabriele Paleotti had clarified in his Discorso intorno alle immagini sacre e profane, published in Bologna in 1582, they were to be depicted enduring the terrible punishments and torments that divine justice had in store for them, or with features denoting monstrosity (for example, Luther as a wolf in a monk’s habit) (Simonuttti 2006).

ON PREACHING (AND ON WIGS, MARIONETTES, AND BAKING) Early eighteenth-century English clergymen were not famous for their wit and liveliness. In the post-Puritan Age of Reason, over-enthusiastic preaching was frowned upon and studied moderation the ideal (with temperance and restrained sociability being increasingly

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regarded not just as a much-needed antidote to religious enthusiasm but also as being in keeping with the new ethic of politeness). Not infrequently English congregations had to sit through sermons resembling theoretical treatises, delivered in a dry, flat, unemotional tone. William Hogarth’s satirical etching The Sleeping Congregation (1736) captures this well, with the preacher’s drawling monotony seemingly acting as an opiate on everyone present, including himself (see Figure 2.2). The general absence of sensibility, experientiality and feeling in Protestantism, and the expurgation of the olfactory (Kettler 2016), quite often prompted people to turn to other moral and spiritual options, alongside and outside the established churches. The theme of religious emotions is specifically addressed by Hogarth in his 1763 engraving Credulity, Superstition and Fanaticism. An ironic and highly satirical work, it explores the destructiveness and even madness of religious worship and zeal, focusing on the emotionalism frequently found in Methodist preaching. In the etching, near the pulpit, we can see a sonometer, or “Scale of Vociferation,” ranging from “Nat[ura]l Tone’ to “Bull Roar.” The latter is an evident allusion to George Whitefield, the most prominent Methodist preacher of the age, who was renowned for his booming voice. The instrument hangs from a nose and screaming mouth inscribed “Blood, Blood, Blood, Blood,” a further allusion to Whitefield, who was fond of using repetition for dramatic effect. Elsewhere in the etching, more specifically sticking out of a “Methodist’s Brain,” is an emotions thermometer. This measures a gamut of states ranging from cold, melancholic conditions—“Low Spirits,” “Settled Grief,” even “Suicide”—to hot sexual excitement. What’s more, the preacher’s wig has flown off, revealing the shaven crown of a Jesuit, a reference to the commonly held view that Methodists were actually papists in disguise, because of their fanatical zeal, their emphasis on good works as aids to salvation, and their continual talk of hell and damnation. The dressing up of the priests seems to allude to the incompleteness of the Reformation (only “halfly reformed”), a polemic and recurrent theme in the writings of English freethinkers. The glimpse of a harlequin’s costume beneath the gesticulating preacher’s robe encapsulates the disapproval of the exaggerated theatricality shown by a zealous sectarian demagogue; it also seems to suggest that all priests, accustomed as they are to wearing a mask, are hypocritically false. Full of references to sensational contemporary events, Hogarth’s etching is itself a guise, designed to obtain a less hostile reception. It was an extensive reworking of Enthusiasm Delineated, a more obviously atheistic and irreligious etching made with the same copperplate the previous year; there are just two proofs of this earlier print, the subject of a stunning two-volume study by Bernd Krysmanski and of recent essays by leading emotion scholar Thomas Dixon (Krysmanski 1996; Dixon 2012, 2015a, 2015b). In this original etching the aim was not just to take a polemical swipe at the vehement gesturality or browbeating sermons of the Methodists, or of the experienced Catholic priests they seemed to ape. Its scope was far wider: to attack the inherent blindness and unreasonableness of every religious faith (see Figure 2.3). The blind Jew appears here too, unmoving before the page of the Bible illustrated with Isaac’s impending sacrifice (the typology of features attributed to Jews gradually crystallized into one fairly narrowly construed face, at once grotesque and naturalistic, with the foetor judaicus acting as a further constructed sensory medium of demarcation and exclusion). Hanging on the panels of the pulpit are a number of marionettes. The pair significantly occupying a central position represent the apostles Peter and Paul, respectively distinguishable by the keys and the sword. They are in the midst of an altercation, with mild-mannered Peter attempting to tear a showy wig off the head of Paul, commonly

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FIGURE 2.2: William Hogarth, The Sleeping Congregation, 1736, engraving, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (32.35(25)).

pointed to in deistic and underground literature as the subverter of true Christianity. God himself—one God as three persons—is represented as a puppet, and hence as a human artefact, manoeuvred by the unwigged preacher, who appears to evoke the narrative skills of a story-teller, of a puppeteer, or perhaps even, as Krysmanski says, of an auctioneer. The over-excitement, frenzy, and inebriation prompted by the pull of the sacred and the

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FIGURE 2.3: William Hogarth, Enthusiasm Delineated, 1760–2, engraving, British Museum, London (1858,0417.582). © The Trustees of the British Museum.

story-telling of the priests is witnessed in both versions of the etching by a man with oriental features and an oriental turban, who observes the scene with detached superiority. Hogarth seems here to be deploying and referencing the device of estrangement first used by Gian Paolo Marana in Espion Turc (1684–6) (Ginzburg 1996; Ginzburg 2011). This recognizable reference to the well-known literary fiction of an Eastern traveller’s correspondence calls to mind an even more explosive one published by Voltaire in France

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in the same year. It was brought out in an abbreviated, watered-down version, but it had circulated widely in manuscript form, though in ways that have not yet been adequately studied. The work in question is the monumental Testament of the revolutionary country priest, atheist and materialist Jean Meslier (1664–1729). Discovered as a manuscript upon his death, it contained such a forthright attack on the Catholic church and Christianity that it was not published in full till the end of the century. Meslier’s reflections explored an idea he first happened upon in Marana’s epistolary novel, namely that all religions are human inventions, employed by politicians as a means of duping peoples. Meslier had spent his entire life with the troubled awareness that he was wearing a mask, but impending death allowed him to cast it off and to urge his parishioners to shake off the yoke of blind, servile obedience. His testament mocks and is openly critical of the intellectual malice of Saint Paul (“this great trickster”); the extravagances, ritual sacrifices and “fables” recounted in the Bible; and the greedy, “ridiculously clothed” monks and abbesses. He also graphically describes the Eucharistic host as “an idol of paste and flour,” noting that Jesus never asked to be worshipped in this baked form (Onfray 2006; Benítez 2012; Devellennes 2017). It is worth recalling here a dream recounted to John Locke (1632–1704), the Western philosopher most closely associated with religious toleration, by William Popple, the secretary of the Dry Club in London, a philosophical circle “for the amicable improvement of mix’d conversation.” Popple had heard it from his wife, who had dreamt she was in church one day, when the words of the minister began to be drowned out by “philosophers” dressed “in plain, but decent, apparel.” One by one, they rose from their pews to speak “of plain intelligible things.” The minister, after replacing his gown and wig with “very despicable dress”—“a white wascoat without sleeves, and a napkin about his head, for a cap, like a cook, or a bakers man”—was reduced to silence, standing in the pulpit ignored by everyone. The others “went on teaching plain truths, back’t with strong reason. Not soe much teaching, as speaking their own sentiments” (MS . Locke c. 31; Dewhurst 1963; Tarantino 2011). Once again, a baker is dressed up as a priest.

THE “ECUMENICITY OF EVERYDAY LIFE” The evocation of the tormented affliction of an atheist priest requires attentive consideration by the historian of the emotions, not just in moral and spiritual terms but also with regard to the emotional component intrinsic to the varied kinds of dissimulation and secrecy practiced in the modern age (above all but not exclusively in the sixteenth century). Groups that resorted to such forms of behavior included the marranos (Spanish Jews who converted to the Christian faith to avoid persecution, but who continued to practice Judaism secretly); moriscos (crypto-Muslims); the crypto-Waldensians of the Alps and Calabria; the crypto-reformed (the so-called “nicodemites”—from Nicodemus, the Pharisee who by night went secretly to listen to Jesus—disliked by Calvin for not fleeing or avoiding martyrdom); the renegades (Christian converts to Islam, not infrequently false); English Catholics at the end of the sixteenth century and during the seventeenth, divided between those who complied at least partially with the obligation to attend the ceremonies of the state Church (the so-called “church papists”); and their opponents (recusants), who refused to conform, but as a result were forced to adopt clandestine strategies of self-protection and resistance (Cavaillé 2009). Solidarity and doctrinal conformity among co-religionists was often shaped and consolidated by the experiences individuals and communities had of fleeing from their

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native lands or of living as internal exiles. This was reinforced by a number of other factors: the cherished belief that with transience and marginality came spiritual fortitude; the expectations of a bright future back home; the maintaining, in the host countries, of distinctive practices and objects of worship (for instance, the veneration of saints and relics by the expatriate English Catholic community); and also a shared economic precariousness, despite the obvious social- and literacy-based differences in the ability to integrate, in social mobility, and in language assimilation in the host countries. The emotional response from the host communities also tended to be mixed, ranging from compassion and sympathy to suspicion and fear. The inevitable social intermingling of groups from different confessions or religions, and everyday forms of dissimulation, led not uncommonly to a groundswell of tolerance and sometimes to very personal and eclectic peregrinations and switches between faiths and confessions (Johannes Heinrich Horstmann, born in Borgenstreich in 1663, was baptised as many as twenty-two times during a lifetime of peregrinations between different faiths and religions), though not infrequently such moves were motivated by the desire to escape from unhappy or no longer gratifying conjugal ties (Bethencourt and Crouzet 2013; Sponholz and Waite 2014). The growth in religious diversity thus took place in a context shot through with contradiction. Factors that encouraged uniformity rubbed shoulders with discourses of tolerance and accommodation and, more significantly, the actual practice of plurality, which brought different religious communities in close contact with each other, even though they were antagonistic. As Alexandra Walsham observes, impulses like enmity and amity, prejudice and benevolence, coexisted for a long time in early modern society, forming a “cyclical rather than linear” relationship (Walsham 2006: 231). Periodic outbreaks of prejudice and violence were a means by which individuals psychologically deflected and appeased the guilt they felt about associating with people who wilfully affirmed a “false” creed. The Gordon Riots in 1780, one of the worst civil disturbances in British history, resulting in nearly 300 deaths, is a case in point (see Figure 2.4). The riots were triggered by opposition to the Catholic Relief Act, which granted Catholics living in England some minor respite from discrimination. But there was very little in the Act to cause offense to the Protestant community, which had for the most part become accustomed to having Catholics living in their midst, and were complicit in national policies to quietly ignore some of the stricter restrictions against them. In a rather sympathetic scene in Dickens’ historical novel Barnaby Rudge, Lord George Gordon asks his servant John Grueby if he has ever seen the rioter Barnaby. When Grueby replies that he has, there is the following exchange: —“Did – did it seem to you that his manner was at all wild or strange?” Lord George demanded, faltering. —“Mad,” said John, with emphatic brevity. —“And why do you think him mad, sir?” said his master, speaking in a peevish tone. —“Don’t use that word too freely. Why do you think him mad?” —“My lord,” John Grueby answered, “look at his dress, look at his eyes, look at his restless way, hear him cry ‘No Popery!’ Mad, my lord.” —“So because one man dresses unlike another,” returned his angry master, glancing at himself, “and happens to differ from other men in his carriage and manner, and to advocate a great cause which the corrupt and irreligious desert, he is to be accounted mad, is he?”

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FIGURE 2.4: Francis Swaine, Figures by Chelsea Waterworks, London, Observing the Fires of the Gordon Riots, 7 June 1780, 1780, oil on panel, 15 × 20 cm, Guildhall Art Gallery, London (4443). Photo: Collage.

CHURCHES (FEELING) UNDER SIEGE In 1768, four years after Hogarth’s death, an English translation of a curious collection of brief profiles by Voltaire was published in London. The profiles were of individuals who in one way or another had been charged with attacking the Christian religion. One of them was of Meslier, seemingly reproved by Voltaire for his rash wish to liberate the common people from the socially necessary bonds of religion (after all, as Shaftesbury said, “It is real humanity and kindness to hide strong truths from tender eyes”). Voltaire concluded judiciously: “A priest who, dying, accuses himself of having professed and taught the Christian religion, made a stronger impressions on the minds of many, than the thoughts of Paschal” (1768: 81). The French philosopher and theologian Blaise Pascal (1623–62) had humorously attacked Jesuit casuistry, describing it as the use of rhetoric to justify moral laxity. The polemic rumbled on for a long time in the intricate strands of interconfessional doctrinal controversies between probabilists and antiprobabilists. For the probabilists the law was grounded in liberty (and so, in doubtful cases, it was right to be guided by one’s conscience, provided it was supported by an authoritative opinion, in accordance with the principle lex dubia non obligat: A doubtful law is not binding). For the rigorists, on the other hand, law prevailed over liberty, and so a licit moral action was one that took its cue from the law. This could only be violated when conscience dictated

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a more probable opinion (probabilior) to obtain a good otherwise precluded by the letter of the law. An emblematic case arose in Venice in the 1740s, when the Jesuit father Bernardino Benzi (1688–1768) published his Dissertatio in casus reservatos Venetae Dioceseos, a discussion of reserved cases, that is, sins whose absolution was deferred to bishops or the pope. With shocking imprudence, Benzi stated that if confessors caressed the cheeks of nuns or touched their breasts (genas vellicare, mamillas tangere) without lascivious intent, but simply as a kindly or casual gesture, they were to be regarded as “venial acts of impropriety” (subimpudici de se veniales), and therefore not reserved. If instead they were performed “with a perverse impulse or intention” (ex pravo affectu, vel ex prava intentione), then they were to be regarded as mortal sins and subject to reserved absolution. This short work caused an outcry, prompting an immediate response from the indomitable Dominican friar Daniello Concina (1687–1756), a diehard opponent of probabilism and laxism. Concina anonymously published two letters in Latin entitled Epistolae theologicomorales ad illustrissimum et reverendissimum Episcopum N. N. adversus librum inscriptum: Dissertatio . . ., which ran to several editions and stoked the controversy. To mock and belittle Jesuit casuitry, it came to be known as “theologia mamillaris” (Alfieri 2009). On 16 April 1744, the Holy Office condemned Benzi’s work for propositions judged to be “false, distasteful to hear, and scandalous and offensive for devout ears” (falsas, male sonantes, scandalosas et piarum aurium offensivas). In the emotional disciplining of religious life in the Baroque age, it was necessary, then, not just to dispose the faithful to an overwhelming feeling of reverence, admiration, fear, guilt and acceptance, but also to ensure they were not scandalized and induced by indignation to assume a critical attitude towards religion and the Church. Concina yearned for a Christianity restored to the spirit of its origins—poor, austere, and willing to accept martyrdom. In his best-known and perhaps most contested work, Della storia del probabilismo e rigorismo (Lucca, 1743), he contrasted it with the dissipation of modern Christians: “The exiles, caves, prisons, poverty, disciplines and constant torments of the first Christians have been replaced by large palaces, abundant treasures, marvels, theatres, debaucheries, splendid offices, conspicuous posts, leisure activities and uninterrupted pastimes” (I: 596). His forceful intervention in the controversy over mammary theology has already been mentioned. He also wrote about the need to lead lax brothers back to a strict observance of convent life and personal poverty; about the impossibility of granting absolution to habitual sinners who showed no tangible sign of wanting to change their ways; about the belief in witches and their carnal dealings with the devil, which he defended stubbornly against Arte magica dileguata of Scipione Maffei (Verona, 1749); about the total moral illegitimacy of interest loans; about gluttony and the rigorous observance of Lenten fasting. To discourage the increasing vogue for chocolate and the comfort it offered, he produced detailed Memorie Storiche sopra l’uso della cioccolata in tempo di digiuno (Venice, 1749). The prefatory letter to this work, addressed to “the Christian reader who truly believes,” sums up very effectively both Concina’s indignation about the laxity of customs, which he felt was undermining the moral integrity of his contemporaries in every sphere, and an incipient awareness of his own isolation and the growing impatience that his inflexibility was arousing: The public presses of Europe offer books that tempt us to frequent theatres, parties and games: poetic compositions that delicately whet appetites, and softly enchant the passions. Filthy novels that smear the imagination, and impress base images in the

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mind. Insidious controversialists that attack holy dogmas. Wicked free thinkers, who shed ridicule on divine religion. Who complains . . . of such books? Who mutters against these books? Who raises their voice? Who shouts? No one . . . [On the contrary, against me] indifference will turn into furious agitation . . . They will rail against the rigourist, the misanthrope, the fanatic. But it was above all the Theologia christiana dogmatico-moralis (Venice 1749–51), his most ambitious work, conceived as the bulwark of rigourist doctrine in Italian society, that marked the unbridgeable gulf between Concina and the most modern currents of contemporary thought. If, then, a sense of incessant precariousness, albeit mixed with a kind of minority pride, gripped those who continued along rocky paths of spirituality and inquiry in line with the convictions of their conscience and the dictates of the heart, the tireless custodians of the “truth” harbored a mounting unease. They saw themselves as being increasingly besieged by congregants who failed to feel the right emotion properly or intensely enough, by “naturalists,” atheists, or deists, and “polite” theatre-goers intent only on satisfying earthly passions. Casuistry was also an important part of the training given to missionary priests before they were sent off to post-Reformation England, while the laity received instruction in what to do when confronted with difficult situations, such as having to attend Protestant services, swear an oath of loyalty, or deal with questions about the whereabouts of Catholic priests. The doctrine of mental reservation, designed to steer a path between the moral imperative not to lie and the need to preserve secrets and save lives, came into the public eye in England after two Jesuits, Robert Southwell (d. 1595) and Henry Garnet (d. 1606), were tried on charges of treason. But Catholics were not the only ones looking for guidance: in the face of pressing moral dilemmas, Protestant laymen also sought expert advice, and cases of conscience were a prominent feature of Protestant theological literature at the time. That there was a keenly felt need for a solid framework of Reformed casuistry is demonstrated by the popularity of the works of William Perkins, the first significant attempt in the Church of England to produce what was known as “Practical Divinity.” But whereas Jesuit casuistical works were mainly intended for priests, expounding supposedly arbitrary laws for use in the confessional box in a wide range of cases, the English Protestant tradition held that each case of conscience was unique, and that every believer was their own casuist. The minister was a guide, not a judge, with the result that Protestant casuistry was more therapeutic than authoritarian in spirit (Thomas 1993). In 1755, two young Independent ministers, Samuel Pike (1717?–73) and Samuel Hayward (1718–57), published “some important cases of conscience” that had arisen in the course of regular Wednesday evening sessions held in the church of Little St. Helen’s, Bishopsgate Street in London (Pike and Hayward 1762). In these “casuistical exercises,” the two ministers tackled issues presented by their audience in anonymous, written form, so that “they might with the greater freedom propose their respective cases, and that we, in our solution of them, might be kept from the least degree of fear and restraint.”5 Almost none of the cases detail specific everyday circumstances or activities or behaviour that might represent occasions for sin. Instead they amount to a kind of survey of the scruples of conscience of those who were already tormented in one way or another, perhaps by feelings of inadequacy, a sense that their Christian integrity was crumbling, or that they had slipped into the presumption of believing they deserved divine grace. Other concerns include the fear that they were merely going through the motions of worship

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and the sacraments, or responding to them in a purely emotive way, or that they were unable to find time to comply with the daily obligations to pray, read the Scriptures, practice spiritual meditation and self-examination, and provide spiritual guidance to their spouses, children, and servants. Presumably, then, these collective sessions did provide solace to those seeking advice, who were probably the ones most sensitive to moral dilemmas. Certainly one of the aims of Protestant casuistry was to convince sufferers that, although their sins could not be disregarded, God’s mercy was infinite. But for many, however, these casuistical exercises must have caused great dejection, even if alleviated somewhat by the awareness that everyone present, ministers included, shared the same condition (Tarantino 2018).

REASON, SENTIMENT AND RELIGION(S) IN THE AGE OF ENLIGHTENMENT From around the mid-eighteenth century, as Enlightenment ideas permeated elites across Europe, the Roman Catholic and other established churches were put onto the defensive intellectually, culturally, and politically (the suppression of the Jesuits being the most important single incident in Church history between 1750 and 1789). But though the notion of steady progress along a path towards the affirmation of liberties and freedoms has proved to be an influential narrative, a more nuanced historical interpretation is now emerging. As Derek Beales has noted, the Enlightenment (though the term should now be used in the plural, including the Catholic Enlightenment as well) “[was] much more like a heresy than a denial of faith. It sought to restrict, rather than eliminate, the influence of Christianity in intellectual life and the activity of the Church in politics, education and society” (Beales 2000). Indeed, in advocating an undogmatic “natural religion” based on sentiment, the Savoyard vicar in Rousseau’s Émile (1762) takes issue not only with the perceived weaknesses of the established churches but also with the anti-religious tendencies of the philosophes. In the Reflexions nouvelles sur les femmes (also known as Metaphysique d’amour, and indeed it was translated into English as The Philosophy of Love) the Marquise de Lambert—a prominent salonnière in the France of Louis XIV and the Regency whose religious philosophy leant toward deism—contested the claim of the Oratorian priest Nicolas Malebranche (1638–1715) that women, with their softer cerebral fibers, were dominated by the superficial senses and imagination and could not access reason so as to dig through to truth (Broad 2012). Sentiment, she argued, far from being detrimental to understanding, “furnishes new spirits, which illuminate in such a manner that ideas present themselves more vividly, more clearly and in a more disentangled manner.” Moreover, “one sole feeling, one sole movement of the heart has more credit with the soul than all the maxims of the philosophers. Sensibility aids the mind and serves virtue” (Lambert 1990: 221). Theorizing religious toleration (historically justified not so much by an acceptance of religious difference as by the incapacity to enforce religious conformity) was a problematic and contradictory business. Even the likes of Bayle, Locke, and Voltaire never posited a foundational freedom of religion, and it has become more widely recognized that a practical philosophy of tolerance was widely practiced (Frijhoff 2002). To complicate matters further, tactical considerations also played a part, with many of those who had been marginalized and oppressed being quick to drop their appeals for tolerance after securing institutional respectability for themselves. However, it is

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significant that the eighteenth-century French neologism “tolérantisme,” was described in the fourth edition of the Dictionnaire de l’Académie française (1762) as a “characteristic or system of those who believe that all sorts of religions should be tolerated in a state.” As Lynn Hunt says: The very existence of “tolerationism” as a term [at a moment when the French government did not officially tolerate any other religion than Catholicism] testifies to the growing sentiment in favor of religious tolerance; “tolérantisme” would not have been the subject of attack—indeed, it would not have been invented as a term—if toleration was not considered a growing menace to the status of an established religion. —Hunt 2011: 8 In 1741, a bowdlerized version of Jean-Frédéric Bernard and Bernard Picart’s Cérémonies et coutumes religieuses de tous les peuples du monde (1723–37) was published in Paris (see Figure 2.5). The work of two French Catholic clergymen, Abbé Banier and Abbé Le Mascrier, its purpose, they said, was to rectify its “most extravagant tolerationism” [le tolérantisme le plus outré]. It has recently been claimed that Bernard and Picart’s Cérémonies, one of the first naturalistic accounts of the world’s existing religions, was “the book that changed Europe,” because it encouraged greater receptivity to the religious “Other” ’ (Hunt, Jacob, and Mijnhardt 2010). For example, received views of the supposed barbarity of Congolese and Angolan natives are undermined by Bernard’s withering observation that missionaries sought to impose “the whiteness of the God of the Christians, in opposition to their black Deity” by ensuring that Blacks “exchanged their fetiches for crosses” (Bernard and Picart 1733–9: 4:436–9). The popularity of the Cérémonies, both in the immediate and long term, was to a great extent due to Picart’s rich body of illustrations. Compiled and produced over the course of a decade, they also circulated independently of Bernard’s text, which, in turn, was widely translated, plagiarized, and pirated. Bernard was at pains to draw out the affinities between peoples far removed in time and place. This aspect was accentuated by Picart’s mixing of European and non-European elements in his illustrations, questioning the belief of European readers that they had nothing in common with “savages” in far-flung places. He also graphically contended that some religions, especially Catholicism, were threatening to distort the essence of religious experience with empty ceremonialism. Picart thus provides a proleptic, emotion-driven example of the “orientalism grammar” propounded by Gerd Baumann, which holds that growing knowledge of other religious traditions provided parameters for interrogating one’s own culture (Gingrich and Baumann 2004). It must be said, however, that in seeking to portray distant cultures as fully human, Picart invests them with Europeanized affective traits. As so, despite his sympathetic treatment of the “other,” Picart’s discursive mode may have inadvertently presented whiteness (and perhaps Reformed Protestantism) as the standard, against which other races (and religions) failed to measure up. When they wrote “religion,” most Christian observers of the religious landscape actually meant “Christianity,” with other faiths being variously relegated to the realms of superstition, heresy and cultural infantilism. And the Cérémonies maintained, at least nominally, the traditional four-part classification of Judaism, Christianity, Mahometanism, and Paganism. In a selective translation of the Jesuit Lettres édifiantes et curieuses, published in 1743, the English translator of the Cérémonies, John Lockman (1698–1771), who was also a friend of Hogarth, set out to contrast, albeit with some contradiction, his

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FIGURE 2.5: Bernard Picart, Tableau des principales religions du monde, 1727, engraving, Zentralbibliothek, Zürich. © Zentralbibliothek Zürich.

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emotional accounts of “the most barbarous practices” of the Catholics with the Protestant approach to colonization (Tarantino 2015): Our Jesuits may be considered in two very different lights . . . Can we possibly figure to ourselves a more amiable being, than a man, who, after enriching his mind with the noblest treasures of knowledge, voluntarily quits his friends, his relations, and his native country, hazards himself to all the perils of the sea, and afterwards goes ashore . . . among a barbarous people . . . in danger, every moment . . . of being murthered by wild beasts or by the natives; and all this solely from a desire of polishing their minds, of assisting their corporeal part, and of saving their souls? . . . On the other hand, if we reflect on a man whose only design, in acquiring learning, is to impose upon his fellowcreatures; who under the cloak of religion . . . visits foreign regions, and there ingratiates himself with the several natives of them, in order to make them slaves in their own country, where, amid their virtuous ignorance, they enjoyed undisturbed felicity: Can imagination frame a more horrid creature than this? —Lockman 1762: 12 * * * In the appendix to La Créquinière’s Conformité des Coutumes des Indiens Orientaux avec celles des Juifs et des autres Peuples de l’Antiquité, published in Brussels in 1704 and selectively reproduced in the Cérémonies (Ginzburg 2015; Rubiés 2016), travelers, real and metaphorical alike, receive the following warning: When one travels . . . thro’ many people of different religions, it grows so customary to hear people mention God, and the worship that is due to Him, after so many different ways, that is very dangerous, lest by this means he fall into a kind of indifference about religion, which borders upon deism: and upon this account, an able man in our time, viz. Mr. Bruyere, has said, That commonly a man brings home from his voyages, much less of religion than he had before. Religion was never a wholly private matter in the eighteenth century, and certainly did not cease to impinge on the lives of the vast majority of Europeans and Euro-Americans. But, at least for the educated, new ways of thinking about religion, documented and to a certain extent elicited by textual and visual representations of the variety of religious practices around the world, had a deep effect. As Lynn Hunt points out, “religion became one of the many categories of thought, like politics or society, rather than being the foundation of all other categories of thought” (Hunt 2011: 12). What is more, it ultimately made it thinkable to unpack all the emotional implications thrown up by religion with regards to specific historical contexts and cultural tangles, such as, for instance, the anxieties intrinsic to practices of everyday dissimulation, or affective ties as precursors to paths of conversion or to practices of tolerance.

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CHAPTER THREE

Music and Dance TIM CARTER

Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle’s (1657–1757) famous quip “Sonate, que me veux-tu?” (“Sonata, what do you want of me?”) smacks of curiosity and exasperation in equal measure.1 While music and its embodiment through dance might seem to be the art that appeals most directly to the emotions, how it does so remains a bone of contention, as is whether it did so differently at different times within the Western art tradition. Unlike the figurative or literary arts, music exists somewhere in the air: its critical interpretation requires first and foremost a performative one, if only in the mind’s ear. And while this might make a musical score seem like a playscript to be acted on the stage, the “text” it contains is far less precise, and much more fragile, it seems. This creates a typical fear of bursting music’s emotional bubble: that knowing is irrelevant, or even an impediment, to feeling. That fragility leads to some curious paradoxes. It is now widely accepted that music of a given time and place should be performed in a manner consonant with the expectations of its original creators: with the right number of performers, on appropriate instruments, in the correct style, and so on. Interest in Historically Informed Performance began with “early music” (from the medieval, Renaissance, and Baroque periods) though it has now extended its reach through the eighteenth century well into the nineteenth. There are still pockets of resistance among the traditional providers of high-art music—symphony orchestras, opera houses, and some conservatoires—which see their core repertories shrinking on either side, squeezed by historicism on the one hand and the failures of the modernist avant-garde on the other. Some might also deem the practice more typical of the “Olde Tea Shoppe” fakery of the heritage industry. But in general, Historically Informed Performance has gained more traction in modern musical spheres than in, say, theatrical ones, where the idea of staging a Shakespeare play with its original forces, sets, costumes, gestures, and pronunciation remains an exotic curiosity (Butt 2002). The assumption that such performance generates a listening experience that is itself historically informed, whatever that might mean, would seem commonsensical. But whether and how we should “perform” our listening historically remain unanswered questions. What need we know to tune our ears to the music of a given time and place? And how might this affect our responses to an art-form that is too often, if wrongly, considered to be somehow transcendent and universal? In this chapter I trace a path through these troublesome issues by considering emotional and other discourses about, and also within, music of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in the context of some of the communities which it served.

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THREE LISTENING EXPERIENCES In 1777, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756–91) embarked on yet another European tour to establish his reputation on an international stage. One goal was to write an opera for Paris, but things turned out differently. Instead he was asked to produce an orchestral work for the Concert Spirituel: his Symphony no. 31 in D major (K. 297/300a) was premiered on 18 June 1778. The rehearsal the day before went so badly, Mozart said, that he almost decided not to go to the performance. But things turned out better on the night: I prayed God that it might go well, for it is all to His greater honour and glory; and behold—the symphony began. Raaff was standing beside me, and just in the middle of the first Allegro there was a passage which I felt sure must please. The audience were quite carried away—and there was a tremendous burst of applause. But as I knew, when I wrote it, what effect it would surely produce, I had introduced the passage again at the close—when there were shouts of “Da capo” [From the top!]. The Andante also found favour, but particularly the last Allegro, because, having observed that all last as well as first Allegros begin here with all the instruments playing together and generally unisono, I began mine with two violins only, piano for the first eight bars— followed instantly by a forte; the audience, as I expected, said “hush” at the soft beginning, and when they heard the forte, began at once to clap their hands. I was so happy that as soon as the symphony was over, I went off to the Palais Royal, where I had a large ice, said the Rosary as I had vowed to do—and went home.2 —Mozart to his father, July 3, 1778 In the case of Mozart’s “Paris” symphony, it is striking that the composer knew exactly what “I felt sure must please” listeners who behaved “as I expected”: he catered to their tastes by a careful mixture of familiarity and surprise. The audience actively intervened in the performance in ways that might be found today in jazz clubs or rock concerts but would meet with disapproval in the concert hall and other modern temples to high art. However, both Mozart and his Parisians clearly understood the rules of the game, and from it gained significant pleasure, perhaps even a form of jouissance. A much earlier account of listening to music reveals another mode of response. In his Rime published in 1598 (fol. 130v–131r), the Italian poet Battista Guarini (1538–1612) included a madrigal extolling the virtues of the female “Singer’s Throat” (Gorga di cantatrice, so the poem is titled). Mentre vaga Angioletta ogni anima gentil cantando alletta, corre il mio core, e pende tutto dal suon di quel soave canto. ...

While charming Angioletta entices every well-born soul with her singing, my heart races and hangs completely on the sound of that sweet song ...

“Angioletta” can be a personal name or a “little angel,” but Guarini’s poem is less about her than about the (male) listener’s response, whose heart takes on a “musical spirit”: Tempra, d’arguto suon pieghevol voce, e la volve, e la spinge con rotti accenti, e con ritorti giri

It tempers with sparkling sound the lissom voice, and turns it, and pushes it with broken accents and twisting turns,

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qui tarda, e là veloce; ...

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here slowly, and there quickly; ...

The poem continues at great length, using terms that seem to draw on contemporary treatises on how singers should ornament music. But in fact Guarini is quoting almost directly from Pliny the Elder’s long account in his Naturalis historia (10:43) of the nightingale heralding the arrival of spring. This is music in its pure, rather than any artificial, state. And as a result: Così cantando e ricantando, il core, o miracol d’amore, è fatto un usignolo, e spiega già per non star meco il volo.

Thus singing and singing again, my heart— oh miracle of love— becomes a nightingale, and spreads its wings in flight so as not to stay within me.

The singer’s performance sets up all manner of sympathetic vibrations in the listener, moving humours around the body in Galenic fashion, and prompting the heart to take flight on wings of song in an out-of-body experience. Here is another kind of jouissance in response to music: an intense erotic thrill. The nightingale is an absent presence in another representation of musical listening from our period. In the mid–1630s, the French artist Abraham Bosse produced a series of engravings each dedicated to one of the five senses (Les Cinq Sens). “Hearing” is represented by way of a cozy domestic scene typical, we assume, of well-to-do households of the time (see Figure 3.1). We see a man and a woman singing, a woman playing the lute, a boy singing, and a man playing the viola da gamba; the music on the table is a French chanson with what seems to be an amorous pastoral text. The apparent age differences, plus the facial similarities between the women, suggest that here we have three generations of a well-ordered family guided by the man on the left who also directs the ensemble by beating time. They sit in a room decorated by tapestries containing military scenes, one from ancient Rome, and another a battle against the Ottoman: a timely reminder that music offers respite in the midst of war. On a side-table at the far left is an object covered with a cloth that one might guess is a birdcage, its avian occupant kept silent so as not to intrude on the songful scene around the table. Bosse makes the connection by way of one of the two quatrains at the foot of the image: the Latin text (bottom left) refers to the “wondrous songs” of the nightingale.3 For Bosse, the pleasures of music derive less from audience participation (Mozart) or erotic thrill-seeking (Guarini) than from some manner of harmonious sociability. We are left, however, with a problem typical of such generic representations of music-making where the viewer is on the outside looking in. We see five members of a happy family singing and playing together. But how might we listen with, or to, them?

BEYOND THE PLEASURE PRINCIPLE None of my three listening experiences involves the silent contemplation we now expect for music. Nor, save perhaps for the Guarini, do they involve any expression or purgation of strong emotions by way of some homeopathic or allopathic catharsis. However, pleasure for pleasure’s sake was always a risky business that needed to be carefully controlled. Plato had long ago advised the need for music to be regulated in order to serve the well-ordered Republic; likewise St. Augustine argued in his Confessions that music in

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FIGURE 3.1: Abraham Bosse, Auditus/L’Ouye (“Hearing”) from Les Cinq Sens, c. 1638, etching, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (26.49.22).

church could certainly be beneficial, but it was also dangerous when taken to excess, or as cause of distraction. Renaissance conduct manuals argued in favour of the art up to a point—in terms of an ability both to make music (though not too professionally) and to understand it—but not where it might seduce the listener into feminized depravity (see, for example, Austern 1993). Music needed to be disciplined to avoid the perils of sensual excess. One typical solution is presented in the second, French quatrain in Bosse’s engraving, which invokes the conventional connection between music and the celestial harmony of the spheres: the proportions inherent in musical consonances reflect the planetary motions guided by divine hand.4 Thus music offers a sense of what had been lost to earthly ears since the expulsion from the Garden of Eden: the singing of angels. In terms of the seven liberal arts, those proportions located music within the quadrivium alongside the other numerical arts of arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy. Other rule-bound systems governed composers’ handling of the elements of music, whether melody, rhythm, or harmony and counterpoint. But just as astronomy was turned upside down by claims from the likes of Galileo Galilei that the planets did indeed revolve around the sun, so did Galilei’s father, Vincenzo (d. 1591), upset the applecart by proving the practical impossibility of the pure and simple proportions presumed to operate in music (2:1 for the octave, 3:2 for the fifth, 4:3 for the fourth, etc.). If music was in fact disproportionate, it could not represent perfection: in a world already riven with dissension by way of the Reformation, it seemed in 1600 that everything was close to collapse.

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Vincenzo Galilei attacked the foundations of Renaissance music theory in other ways as well. According to classical authority, music affected the listener by way of pitch (from high to low) and rhythm (fast to slow). Vocal polyphony that combined multiple parts in counterpoint mixed different pitches and rhythms such that they canceled each other out, confusing both the ear and the mind. His solution was to advocate for a simpler form of solo song for voice and instrumental accompaniment. The reins were picked up by such Florentine composers as Giulio Caccini, with his selection of chamber songs published as Le nuove musiche in early 1602, and Jacopo Peri, who developed a new form of declamatory musical recitative for the first operas, Dafne (1598) and Euridice (1600). Here music was to be disciplined by way of the text which it set. In his Republic (3:398d), Plato noted that melos (song) was made up of three elements: logos (word), harmonia, and rhythmos. The most significant Italian composer of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, Claudio Monteverdi (1567–1643), made this the crux of his defense against the Bolognese theorist, Giovanni Maria Artusi, who accused him of breaking the standard rules of counterpoint by introducing illicit dissonances and other errors in his polyphonic madrigals (Carter 1992). Monteverdi claimed that while such rules might fairly apply within the “first practice” of Renaissance music, in the more modern “second practice” (seconda pratica) they could plausibly be overturned when the words justified expressive extremes. A parallel argument was made in the same period by the poet Battista Guarini in support of the seemingly “irregular” genre of the pastoral tragicomedy (in his play Il pastor fido): theory was subservient to practice, and art was to be judged according to its appeal to the perceiver. By virtue of this emphasis on the clear delivery and expression of the text, music shifted ground between the numerical arts of the quadrivium and the verbal ones of the trivium (grammar, logic, and rhetoric). In his Musica poetica of 1606, the north German composer and theorist Joachim Burmeister submitted a five-voice motet by Orlande de Lassus (“In me transierunt”) to rigorous analysis by way of its form and its use of rhetorical figures. This became a standard mode of musical analysis: Johann Mattheson did the same to the music of an aria by Benedetto Marcello in his Der vollkommene Capellmeister (The Perfect Musical Director; Hamburg, 1739), in this case even without reference to its text. In turn, if music was a form of rhetoric, the process of its creation could be parsed through the traditional five-step canon of invention, disposition, elocution, memory, and delivery. Inventio and dispositio were largely the responsibility of the composer, and memoria and pronuntiatio lay in the realm of the performer. Elocutio stood somewhere between the two depending on the extent to which the composer’s score was complete of and for itself, or was more akin to a skeleton that needed fleshing out in performance. Likewise, a musical “speech” could be divided into the traditional six parts, with an exordium, narratio, divisio, confirmatio, confutatio, and peroratio. And its purpose conformed to what Cicero defined as the prime directives of oratory in general: to teach, delight, and move (docere, delectare, et movere).

SIGN AND SYMBOL St. Augustine’s ambivalence over music was common within the Church, though those who would ban the art had to overcome a formidable range of arguments in its favour within the Bible (not least, the Psalms) and various patristic writings. By the early seventeenth century, the chief propagandists of the Catholic Counter-Reformation, the Jesuits, also accepted music’s potential to teach, delight, and move souls that needed

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guiding down the true path to salvation. Indeed, music’s evident appeal to the senses, bypassing the faculty of reason, was especially useful in this regard so long as it was properly contained. But if the notion of music as rhetoric was to be anything more than mere analogy, the question was how words taken separately or together might best find their proper musical counterparts. Composers could rely on various conventions that in turn enabled listeners to hear and feel what lay behind the music itself. A straightforward example is provided by a standard text from the Ordinary of the Mass: Gloria in excelsis Deo et in terra pax hominibus bonae voluntatis. Laudamus te, benedicimus te, adoramus te, glorificamus te, gratias agimus tibi propter magnam gloriam tuam, Domine Deus, Rex caelestis, Deus Pater omnipotens. ...

Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace to people of good will. We praise You, we bless You, we adore You, we glorify You, we give You thanks for Your great glory, Lord God, heavenly King, O God, almighty Father. ...

The Gloria begins with the words of the angels announcing to the shepherds the birth of Christ (Luke 2:14), so something tumultuous, high, and energetic for the full choir is appropriate. Et in terra pax (and on earth peace) prompts something lower (for “earth”) and slower (“peace”), but still using all the voices (the angels continue speaking). The text then moves to first-person plural statements (the collective “we” of those at worship): the rhetorical shift needs to be made clear, although how that “we” is represented musically will vary (a solo voice or duet to make it more personal?). As for gratias agimus tibi, it continues the first-person statements, but giving thanks may require something more sombre than “bless,” “adore,” and “glorify,” and could also prompt some communal expression (so, all the voices again). The magnam gloriam for which we give thanks might then encourage a musical reference back to the opening (Gloria . . .). And so on and so forth. In this light, Monteverdi’s setting of the Gloria for seven voices, two violins, and continuo (plus optional instruments doubling the voices) in his Selva morale e spirituale (1640–1) makes perfect sense. It begins with a solo tenor that references the traditional plainsong intonation in practice (though not in melodic content) before bringing in all the voices first energetic and high, then slower and low (for et in terra pax); it then has duets for two sopranos and two tenors (laudamus te . . .) moving to triple time (glorificamus te); it brings in the full voices together again (gratias agimus tibi); and it has a return to the music of the beginning (for gloriam). These sections are not yet separate movements— though later settings of the text would move in that direction—but they reveal where musical figures can operate easily enough (angels on high and peace on earth); where the emphasis shifts, instead, to more rhetorical concerns (representing the “we”); and where purely musical issues take over, such as the need for formal repetition to create coherence. Monteverdi, however, fudges a significant grammatical problem in the text: whether Domine Deus concludes a sentence (the “Lord God” is the “you” whom we bless, adore, glorify, and thank)—which it does (it precedes the period)—or whether it initiates a new

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set of vocatives (continuing with Domine Fili unigenite; “Lord Jesus Christ, only begotten son”), which it does not. Even Bach could get it seriously wrong in his B minor Mass, while other composers (such as Vivaldi) avoided the problem by treating Domine Deus . . . omnipotens as a free-standing musical movement, which it cannot be given the lack of a verb. Such demonstrable errors might or might not be relevant to what the music is generally trying to do, or to express: it might also seem impertinent to point them out. But they help explain why some ascetics could be suspicious of musical mischief. Having high, fast notes for angels on high, and low, slow ones for peace on earth, is an obvious case of “word-painting,” predicated on a correlation between textual and musical content by some manner of resemblance. As another example, musical settings of the Nicene Creed (in the Credo of the Mass) would conventionally have a descending melodic line at descendit de caelis (Christ came down from Heaven), and a rising one at et ascendit in caelum (and ascended into Heaven). Such word-painting was usually obvious to the ear, assuming one accepts the equation of rising up a musical scale with physical elevation. However, there was a special category of word-painting apparent only to the eye (socalled Augenmusik), such as “black” notes for “night” or the use of musical pitches inflected by a sharp sign (raised by a semitone)—a Kreuz (cross) in German—associated with Christ’s crucifixion: Johann Sebastian Bach (1685–1750) was fond of this. Such eyemusic might be counterintuitive (“black” notes are fast, whereas one might consider “night” to require something slow), or wholly imperceptible to the listener. The same is true of more complex numerologies and cyphers, or even just arcane note-spellings, although B–A–C–H (where, in German, “B” is B-flat and “H” is B-natural) tends to be obvious enough. It can be a game for the composer, for the performer, or just for the hearing or sight of God. More troublesome, however, are musical signifiers that bear scant resemblance or other obvious relation to their signifieds and therefore need to be learnt in the manner of code. One part of the Credo of Bach’s B minor Mass provides a useful example: Crucifixus etiam pro nobis sub Pontio Pilato; passus, et sepultus est, et resurrexit tertia die, secundum, Scripturas, et ascendit in cælum, sedet ad dexteram Patris.

He was crucified for us under Pontius Pilate, and suffered, and was buried, and the third day he rose again, according to the Scriptures, and ascended into heaven, and sitteth on the right hand of the Father.

Multiple signifiers come together in Bach’s setting of the “Crucifixus.” The meter is a slow 3/2 with the second-beat accents of a sarabande (we shall see below what dance has to do with it). The key is E minor, but the falling semitones leaning into the fifth degree of the scale (soh) in the sopranos and to the first (doh) in the altos refer, instead, to the older Phrygian mode (the white-note scale from E–E), which was often associated with lament. The orchestration includes two transverse flutes in reference to mourning (compare Jeremiah 48:36 and Job 30:31). And the movement is constructed over a repetitive ground bass—the same four-measure pattern descending chromatically by semitones from tonic to dominant (doh down to soh) heard thirteen times, an “unlucky” number. That pattern changes only at the end so as to prepare harmonically for the more festive “Et resurrexit,” where the meter changes from 3/2 to 3/4, the tempo speeds up, and the flutes change from mourning to celebration (see Job 21:12), joined by trumpet fanfares.

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That ground-bass pattern has a long history of signifying “lament” going back at least to the diatonic version of the descending tetrachord (A–G–F–E) underpinning Monteverdi’s Lamento della ninfa in his Eighth Book of madrigals of 1638. It can then be found in diatonic or chromatic forms in seventeenth-century operatic laments by Francesco Cavalli (in Gli amori di Apollo e di Dafne and Didone), Jean-Baptiste Lully (Atys), and Henry Purcell (Dido’s “When I am laid in earth” in Dido and Aeneas), to cite only the most obvious examples—there are many others, also in sacred works of the Baroque period (Rosand 1979). Not every appearance of the trope is necessarily in a lamenting context—it sometimes appears in less plaintive love-duets—but the resonance is so powerful that just a brief allusion to it (as in a single or even partial statement) can be enough to make the association if the circumstances are right, and of course, even a love-duet might hint at lament as a cause or potential outcome. There is nothing inherently “lamenting” in a descending tetrachord, nor even in its ground-bass repetition, for all that the latter could denote some kind of obsession. In the case of figurative word-painting, an untutored ear might easily pick up on the association of a rising scale with ascent. But any musical signifier that represents, rather than resembles, its signified presumes prior knowledge of the code, and also of the intertexts that generated it. Here, of course, is where the issue of historically informed listening comes most into play. This is independent of what our preferred response to Bach’s “Crucifixus” might be, whether pleasure in the act of decoding, meditation on a matter central to the Christian faith, or empathic suffering with Christ’s torment on the cross.

MODES AND KEYS Mozart began his String Quartet in D minor, K. 421/417b (1783)—the second of the set of six quartets that he dedicated to Joseph Haydn (1732–1809)—with just such a descending tetrachord in the bass. Add to that his choice of key, plus the pacing and mood, and we might feel inclined to read the quartet as containing some manner of lament. One could be encouraged in that regard by other uses of D minor at the time, as in Haydn’s Symphony no. 26 (1768 or 1769), which early on became nicknamed “Lamentatione,” in part because it incorporates in its first movement a plainchant melody associated with the Passion: Haydn probably wrote the “symphony” for performance in some church context at Easter. But D minor would also come to have other resonances for Mozart given that it dominates his opera Don Giovanni (1787) and here seems to be associated with some form of divine retribution; thus the same key returns in his last, unfinished work, the Requiem (1791). That Don Giovanni D minor also reappears in the slow introduction to the symphony (no. 38 in D major, K. 504) that Mozart wrote specifically for performance in Prague in January 1787, some ten months before his opera had its premiere there. And this D minor manner had already been adopted in his Piano Concerto no. 20 in D minor, K. 466, which Mozart first performed in Vienna in February 1785. Here it could mean, well, anything at all. Plato discussed in his Republic (3:398–403) which musical modes (tonoi) were desirable, and which not, for the well-ordered state. He disapproved of the Lydian mode (“expressive of sorrow”) and the Ionian (associated with drunkenness, softness, and indolence). That left the Dorian (the “accent which a brave man utters in warlike action and stern resolve”) and Phrygian (expressing “willingness to yield to the persuasion or entreaty or admonition of others”). Other Greek theorists, however, considered the Phrygian tonos conducive to madness or tending toward the effeminate. Much later,

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Renaissance Humanists were left to make the best they could of such inconsistencies when they applied the same labels to what they identified as musical modes that had absolutely nothing to do with the ancient Greek ones despite their similar names (Dorian, Phrygian, Lydian, Mixolydian, Aeolian, Ionian). These Renaissance modes were identified as octave scales distinguished by the position of each of the two semitones within them: in the case of the Phrygian mode, for example, they come between the first/second and fifth/sixth degrees (hence those falling semitones in Bach’s “Crucifixus”). Thus the modes are readily distinguished by the trained ear, and music theorists in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries regularly noted which were appropriate for which kinds of texts: the Dorian as “grave,” Phrygian as “lamenting,” Mixolydian as “cheerful,” and so on. In the course of the seventeenth century, the “modal” system gradually mutated into a “tonal” one by a process of simplification that in effect left just two modes in play: the Ionian (what we now call the “major” scale) and the Aeolian (the “minor” scale), each of which could be built on any pitch of the twelve-note chromatic scale (with C, C-sharp, D, E-flat, etc., as the tonic or doh) thereby creating twelve “major” keys and twelve “minor” ones. The difference between the major and minor scales still hinged on the position of the semitones and thus remains audible. But this drastic reduction in the number of modes removed a great deal of nuance from the system: hence the commonplace but wholly incorrect notion that music using the major scale is generally “happy,” and the minor, “sad.” No less significant was the adoption of tuning systems (or “temperaments”) that sought by necessity to iron out the kinks in the system of intervals created by “pure” proportions (2:1, 3:2, 4:3, etc.) so as to permit harmonic movement through the full chromatic range (Duffin 2007). Simply put—although it is far more complex—such proportions generate differently sized tones and semitones such that the so-called “circle” of fifths is not a perfect circle because of the discrepancy known as the “Pythagorean comma”: the further one moved around it (e.g., to keys such as E major or A flat major), the more “out of tune” things sounded by way of impure “wolf ” intervals. Various tuning systems were in place to solve the problems—including mean-tone tuning that narrowed the fifths to make purer thirds—the most drastic but efficacious of which was “equal temperament.” Here all semitones have the same size, and so do all tones (as two semitones), but larger intervals are noticeably altered from their “pure” state. Equal temperament, or something close to it, enabled J. S. Bach to write his two separate books of instrumental preludes and fugues for Das wohltemperierte Klavier (The Well-Tempered Keyboard; 1722, 1742): each book runs through the chromatic cycle of major and minor keys—C major, C minor, C sharp major, C sharp minor, etc.—producing two separate sets of twenty-four preludes and fugues (hence Bach’s “48”). This was a compositional exercise, and also a pedagogical tool for keyboard players learning to play music in every key. Issues of tuning and temperament have a significant role to play in Historically Informed Performance. In non-equal temperament, different keys will sound differently by virtue of their intervallic properties. With true equal temperament, all keys are transpositionally equivalent and so should sound the same save for their overall pitch level. Indeed, some of Bach’s preludes were written in one key and then transposed to another to fit the scheme. Nevertheless, instruments themselves often sound different in different keys: broadly speaking, string instruments favour “sharp” keys, wind instruments “flat” ones, and “natural” brass instruments (lacking the valves invented in the nineteenth century) are very limited in tonal range. But even without such constraints, Bach’s preludes and fugues in different keys have what one might call different characters. Thus theorists continued to provide tables identifying the affective nature of each major key, even though there

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should be scant difference between them, and likewise each minor one (Steblin 2002). Some of this may reflect properties inherent in the music itself; some is due to tradition and convention; and some is just wishful thinking. But it can hardly be a coincidence that so many of Mozart’s “seduction”-duets in his operas are in A major, even if that leaves open the question of what that means for his purely instrumental works in the same key. The Well-Tempered Clavier became a vade mecum for subsequent composers: in effect, one can trace the lineage of Bach’s “D major” manner, or his “C minor” or “E flat major” ones (or any others) through the long tradition of tonal music into the early twentieth century and even beyond. Likewise, one aspect of a composer’s choice to write in a specific key was a desire to explore the various musical possibilities of its specific properties and (perhaps) emotional connotations: this is one reason why the sets of suites, sonatas, or string quartets published to serve one segment of the musical market in the course of the eighteenth century comprised separate works in different keys. There are obvious pitfalls, however. Mozart’s Symphony no. 40 in G minor, K. 550 (1787), is now often read as a “tragic” piece, but for some eighteenth-century theorists the key would have denoted “sadness” and for others, “nobility,” while later in the nineteenth century, Robert Schumann felt that the work contained a “Grecian lightness and grace.” Likewise, to return to my Mozart “D minor” examples cited above, there are many possible reasons why he might have opted for that key rather than any other in those specific cases. One of them is that it was just a compositional game.

TOWARD A (MUSICAL) VOCABULARY OF THE EMOTIONS Reading the emotional content of a given piece of music remains a fraught enterprise. As my prior examples have shown, the issue is easier when the music accompanies a text, given that the words help explain what is going on. And matters should be clearest, in principle, in the most public, and preeminent, genre in our period: opera. There were plenty of precedents for using music on the Renaissance stage. But the idea of throughcomposed musical drama emerged in Florence in the 1590s and was taken up with varying degrees of enthusiasm in the north Italian courts in the early seventeenth century. The genre then found a more favourable home in the “public” opera houses of Venice (the first one opened in 1637) and elsewhere, and it quickly spread through Europe in both courtly and civic contexts, adapted to other languages and cultures (English, French, German, and Spanish). Save in France, however, opera in Italian tended to dominate the field, as did Italian composers and singers (Carter 2015, esp. Chapters 1–3). Opera posed obvious problems of verisimilitude, which could be mitigated by the choice of mythological or pastoral subjects, or those drawn from romance epic, wherein exotic characters might plausibly be allowed to sing. Thus it was no coincidence that two of the most prominent early operas, Peri’s Euridice (Florence, 1600) and Monteverdi’s Orfeo (Mantua, 1607), told the story of Orpheus, the greatest musician of Classical Antiquity. Their primary musical vehicle was a declamatory style of musical speech now known as recitative. However, more songful elements—arias—soon gained greater weight within the genre as it sought more popular appeal: when Monteverdi’s Orpheus loses Eurydice a second time, he laments in recitative, but Christoph Willibald von Gluck’s (1714–87) Orfeo ed Euridice (1762) gives him an aria (“Che farò senza Euridice?”). Audience responses varied, inevitably. Some who attended the first operas in Florence and elsewhere noted their being bored by the long stretches of recitative, but it was also

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reported that all the ladies in the audience of Monteverdi’s Arianna (Mantua, 1608) shed “some little tear” (qualche lagrimetta) at Ariadne’s poignant lament on having been deserted by Theseus on the island of Naxos (Cusick 1994). There are plenty of accounts of later opera audiences carousing, gambling, and flirting in their theatre boxes while turning their gaze to the stage only intermittently, usually when a favourite singer appeared. Periodic efforts to regulate the genre by purging its dramatic improprieties and licentiousness—the aim of the group of Italian poets forming the Arcadian Academy in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries—also had mixed success, as did various attempts at civic censorship. But opera was flexible enough to be all things to all people, whether as an instrument of court and state propaganda (as with Jean-Baptiste Lully’s tragédies en musique for Louix XIV ), of Carnival entertainment crossing social boundaries (in Venice and elsewhere in Italy well into the eighteenth century), or in various more “popular” forms catering also for a rising middle class (in various German cities or London). The task of the librettist of what became known as “serious” opera (opera seria)—as distinct from “comic” (opera buffa)—was to concoct dramatic situations that would allow for a sequence of contrasting emotional states running the gamut of the basic affects as defined by René Descartes in his Les Passions de l’Âme (The Passions of the Soul; Paris, 1649) and by subsequent writers. Each would be expressed by way of single arias that would be allocated to individual characters according to their rank in the cast, and that of the singer taking the role (the primo uomo, prima donna, etc.). This allowed the composer, and the singers, to demonstrate different sides to their respective arts. These arias referenced specific emotions (love, anger, etc.) but were not necessarily specific to particular characters or situations. Thus an aria expressing joy, sorrow, or whatever could easily be switched from one opera to another, and often was. Indeed, some operas (known as pasticcios) could be constructed by arias culled from any number of sources by any number of different composers and still make some kind of dramatic sense with the right libretto. Likewise, arias can easily be categorized in affective terms by way of systematic musical characteristics such as tempo, metre, key, scoring, and style, almost to the extent that one hardly needs the words to grasp their meaning. Italian operas therefore provided a kind of musical dictionary of the emotions—or at least, of singular affective states—the terms of which could then extend to other genres. By the early eighteenth century, arias were usually in the “da capo” form, consisting of two stanzas of poetry that would be set in a three-part structure, with an A section for the first stanza, a B section for the second, and then a reprise of the A section (hence da capo—“from the top”). The convention was that the singer would add embellishments to the A section second time round. George Frideric Handel’s (1685–1759) well-known “Lascia ch’io pianga” from his opera Rinaldo (London, 1711) is a simple example. This opera has a farrago of a plot based very loosely on episodes from Torquato Tasso’s epic poem, Gerusalemme liberata (1581), dealing with the First Crusade. Almirena, in love with Rinaldo, laments her captivity in Armida’s magic garden, and Handel’s glorious setting (in F major) is in the style of a sarabande, the slow triple-time dance that we heard also in the “Crucifixus” of Bach’s B minor Mass: Lascia ch’io pianga mia cruda sorte, e che sospiri la libertà.

Let me weep over my cruel fate, and let me sigh for freedom.

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Il duolo infranga queste ritorte de’ miei martiri sol per pietà.

May grief break these chains of my torments, if only out of pity.

Such lamenting women had long been a staple of the operatic stage as a form of emotional catharsis, as a way of instructing female audience members how to behave, and offering male ones a prurient, voyeuristic thrill. But we should be wary of assuming that the music of “Lascia ch’io pianga” on its own contains any affect specific to Almirena’s situation, or even to the state of lament in general: Handel had already used a version of it in his oratorio Il trionfo del Tempo e del Disinganno (Rome, 1707), where it is sung by the allegorical character Piacere (Pleasure) with a quite different text on the virtues of seizing the day given the future uncertainties of life (“Lascia la spina, / cogli la rosa . . .”). As a rule, the musical style of the Baroque period tended to prefer affective consistency within any single movement: mixed signifiers ran the risk of mixed messages, causing humoural confusion. Problems arise, however, where contrast occurs. The text of “Lascia ch’io pianga” is consistent across its two stanzas, so the da capo structure is not inherently implausible. But a very similar dramatic situation in Handel’s Giulio Cesare in Egitto (London, 1724) works in a different way. Cleopatra has been imprisoned by her brother, Ptolemy, for having supported his enemy, Julius Caesar. She, too, laments, again in triple time but now in the exotic (and “out of tune”) key of E major—she is, after all, an Egyptian: Piangerò la sorte mia, sì crudele e tanto ria, finché vita in petto avrò. Ma poi morta d’ogn’intorno il tiranno e notte e giorno fatta spettro agiterò.

I will lament my fate, so cruel and so harsh, for as long as I have life in my breast. But when dead, all around and night and day will I the tyrant torment as a ghost.

Here the second stanza shifts the focus from lament (Piangerò) to the notion that Cleopatra will haunt her brother without mercy after her death (agiterò): thus for the B section Handel changes tempo (to an agitated Allegro) and meter (from 3/8 to 4/4), with slashing arpeggios in the violins. The A section contains many of the “lament” signifiers we have seen in Bach’s “Crucifixus”: a flute doubling Violin 1, and a bass line built on repetitions of a descending tetrachord. The question, however, is what to do on its return. Does Cleopatra remain dejected, her fury spent in that violent but brief B section? Does her lament change into some other emotion that enables her to go bravely to her death? Or does she fall even deeper into despair? The singer’s embellishments on the da capo will affect matters significantly, as will other such gestures, but they will involve interpretative choices: the music provides the potential for them but does not force one over any other.

DANCE MEASURES Handel’s “Lascia ch’io pianga” began life quite literally as a sarabande—an instrumental one included in his very first opera, Almira, Königin von Castilien (Hamburg, 1705). Here the plot concerns the search for an appropriate husband for Almira, Queen of Castille, and includes at the beginning of Act 3 a representation of a court masque where various male characters involved in the intrigue represent different continents each by way of an

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aria and a short dance: a rigaudon (Africa), a sarabande (Asia), and a gigue (Europe). This was a case of art imitating life imitating art, probably with satirical intent. Molière’s comédie-ballet, Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme (1670), with music by Lully, concerned the absurd pretensions of Monsieur Jourdain who reaches the social heights of being declared a Turkish “Mamamouchi” in a hilarious mock ceremony; the work then ends with a long “Ballet des Nations” representing the Spaniards, Italians, and French. Molière was himself poking gentle fun at the French court’s taste for such ballets de cour where different “nations” would appear. In Handel’s case, there is nothing inherently “Asian” about a sarabande: this slow triple-time dance emerged from the Spanish colonies in central America in the sixteenth century, but by Handel’s time it was widespread across Europe. The advantage of such ballets based on presumed national characters, however, was that they allowed for a wide variety of costumes in addition, of course, to presenting clear political messages (as different nations come to pay homage to the ruler in question). French ballets de cour and their English equivalent, the masque, would construct some loose narrative thread that essentially provided an excuse for formal dances by the nobility. Such dances were more than just an opportunity for spectacle or social display: their carefully choreographed geometrical movements were a physical representation of the well-ordered state (Franko 2015). But the idea that a ballet could somehow present a coherent drama on its own came only later in the period, principally in the ballets d’action from the 1750s on (Nye 2011). These were by such choreographers as the French JeanGeorges Noverre (1727–1810) and the Italian Gasparo Angiolini (1731–1803). Angiolini, for example, collaborated with Gluck on the ballet Don Juan, ou Le Festin de pierre (Vienna, 1761) that plays out an abbreviated version of the Don Juan story based on Molière’s play of 1665. The score has an overture and thirty-one short orchestral movements that run through the plot, starting with Don Juan’s serenading of Donna Elvira, the death of her father at Don Juan’s hand, a banquet (with courtly dances) interrupted by the stone guest, and Don Juan’s eternal punishment in the graveyard. As the gates of hell open up, Gluck writes a fiery Allegro (but marked non troppo) in D minor with dissonant diminished harmonies plus blaring trumpets and also a trombone, an instrument that had long been associated with Underworld scenes. The influence on Mozart’s treatment of the similar moment in his opera, Don Giovanni, is clear. In Gluck’s Don Juan, the music shifts between what would now be called the diegetic, representative of a “real” performance such as a minuet at a banquet, and the mimetic in the sense of being somehow imitative of a particular action or state (the rushing scales and discords of hell). Whether that imbues wordless music with narrative potential is another matter, however: even with Angiolini’s choreography, an audience would need to know the Don Juan plot in advance to make sense of the ballet’s narrative structure or expressive shifts. Likewise, hearing Gluck’s instrumental movements on their own would not somehow tell the story absent some extra-musical prompting. This is why Bernard de Fontenelle was so exasperated by his sonata in the first place.

WORDLESS RHETORIC Could the senses construe meaning independent of reason? Could reason construe meaning independent of words? In the early seventeenth century, at least, the answers to both questions would have tended toward the negative: instrumental music was generally considered unable to communicate in any specific or even generalized way. It might serve various functions (as with dance music), fill some gap in time and space (an organ interlude

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in the Mass), or allow a display of dexterous virtuosity (a violin sonata). But the most one could expect from it, aside from the pleasure of performance itself, was some kind of fanfare-like sonic splendour on the one hand, or a mind-lulling meditative state on the other. Instrumental dances separately or together (in the latter case, as “suites”) could stand well enough alone, as could shorter toccatas or similar improvisatory genres. Writing instrumental music at any greater length, however, required some manner of formal construction so as to create a proper beginning, middle, and end. One way of doing so was to take a musical “subject”—a melodic idea—and develop it by way of various contrapuntal techniques (the basis of the ricercar and, later, the fugue) or of successive variation whether melodically or as a ground-bass ostinato. Another was to create some kind of “argument” based on the presentation and development of similar or contrasting musical patterns organized according to particular structural principles, such as recurring orchestral ritornellos in concerto movements, or rounded binary or ternary forms involving various degrees of repetition. In addition to its form and concomitant content, however, instrumental music might be deemed to have character by virtue of its inherent qualities or mimetic intent, as well as by analogy with similar vocal music and its sonic signifiers (such as the descending tetrachord representing lament). Those inherent qualities could include not just key, tempo, meter, and so on, but also styles recognizable as “French,” “Italian,” “German,” or “English” (hence J. S. Bach’s “French Suites” or “Italian Concerto”). Mimetic effects became popular in keyboard music, particularly in France. Thus Louis-Claude Daquin’s Premier livre de pièces de clavecin (First Book of Pieces for Harpsichord; Paris, 1735), dedicated to his pupil Mademoiselle de Soubise, contains four suites each including the traditional dances (allemandes, courantes, etc.) as well as movements with fanciful titles that refer to the imitation of natural sounds (“The Angry Winds”; “The Cuckoo”) and of musical instruments (“The Tambourine”; “The Guitar”), or to the creation of a particular mood (“The Joyful One”). The book ends with “The Pleasures of the Hunt” comprising the call to the hunters, a march, rounding up the dogs, catching the stag, and so forth, leading to general celebration. More imprecise, but no less evocative, are the contents of Heinrich Biber’s (1644–1704) sequence of suites for violin and basso continuo known as the “Mystery” or “Rosary” sonatas (composed in the 1670s), each presenting a kind of meditation on the fifteen Mysteries of the Rosary (The Annunciation, The Visitation, The Nativity, etc.) and concluding with an extended passacaglia for solo violin based on the descending tetrachord ground bass. This became a popular game. Antonio Vivaldi (1678–1741) wrote four violin concertos in 1723 (published in 1725) known as Le quattro stagioni (The Four Seasons—“Spring,” “Summer,” “Autumn,” “Winter”) which contain both mimetic elements and evocative ones. However, one needs to read the explanatory sonnets that precede the set in order to grasp what is being represented in each movement, and additional moment-to-moment explanations were provided in the instrumental parts as well, although to whose benefit remains unclear (see Figure 3.2). Arcangelo Corelli’s (1653–1713) Concerto Grosso in G minor, op. 6 no. 8 (published posthumously in 1714), on the other hand, bears the title “Fatta per la notte di Natale” (“Done for the night of Christmas”; hence its being nowadays commonly called the “Christmas Concerto”), but it does not seem to have much to do with the Nativity save for its final pastorale, and even in the case of that lilting movement one might argue over whether it represents the rocking of the Christ child in the manger, the shepherds abiding in the fields, or angels singing overhead. The Scottish philosopher and poet, James Beattie, wondered precisely about this in his 1762 “Essay on

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FIGURE 3.2: Antonio Vivaldi, Il cimento dell’armonia e dell’inventione: concerti a 4 e 5, op. 8 (Amsterdam: Michel Charles Le Cène, 1725), Violino principale, p. 6 (The Four Seasons: Summer, mvt. 1 continued).

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Poetry and Music, as They Affect the Mind,” deciding that while Corelli’s music was in some sense “heavenly,” the object of its imitation could not be determined and, indeed, did not really matter (Bonds 2014: 104–5). Other instrumental music, however, might best be viewed as just being about itself. In the seventeenth century it was often associated with a stylus phantasticus, described by the theorist Athanasius Kircher in his treatise Musurgia universalis, sive Ars magna consoni et dissoni (. . . or The Great Art of Consonance and Dissonance; Rome, 1650) as “the most free and unfettered method of composing” that is “bound to nothing, neither to words nor to a harmonious subject,” and “organized with regard to manifest invention, the hidden reason of harmony, and an ingenious, skilled connection of harmonic phrases and fugues” (Barnett 2005: 526). Such high praise for instrumental music portends a series of striking transformations that would resonate into the next century and beyond. J. S. Bach’s “Goldberg Variations,” published in 1741 as the fourth and last of his volumes each called Clavier Übung (Keyboard Exercise), is a set of thirty variations on what Bach calls an “Aria”; the latter starts out like a French sarabande but switches to the Italian style at the end. The variations present a dazzling array of treatments of the bass line (containing elements of our favourite descending tetrachord), with every third one an elaborate canon (at the unison, second, third . . . ninth). The last variation is a galumphing Quodlibet that brings in popular German songs of the time, prior to a reprise of the Aria that now appears transformed by what has been done to it. Through fantasy, craft becomes art. The pleasure gained from the “Goldberg Variations” by the performer or listener seems to be an aesthetic one based on the experience or contemplation of what Eduard Hanslick (1825–1904) would later call “the beautiful in music.” Such elevated abstraction, however, already had its critics. Mattheson argued in Der vollkommene Kapellmeister (1739) that composers of keyboard music aimed more at the touch of the fingers than touching the heart. The six “Prussian” sonatas for harpsichord that J. S. Bach’s eldest son, Carl Philipp Emanuel (1714–88), published in 1742, the year after the “Goldberg Variations,” sought, precisely, to reach the heart through purely instrumental means. These three-movement sonatas invoke a new “sentimental style” (empfindsamer Stil) that spread across Europe in literary and artistic circles: Samuel Richardson’s Pamela of 1741 and Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s early plays are often taken as prime examples. C. P. E. Bach himself said in his Versuch über die wahre Art das Clavier zu spielen (Essay on the True Art of Playing Keyboard Instruments; Berlin, 1753, 1762) that the performer needed to play from the soul, adopting the same emotional state to be aroused in the listener. His version of the “sentimental style” avoided Baroque complexities in favour of a more flowing lyricism, drawing on elements of the free fantasia to create contrasts within musical movements, and even allowing passages of instrumental “recitative.” Composers in the third quarter of the eighteenth century then took the “sentimental style” in new directions under the influence of the proto-Romantic Sturm und Drang (“Storm and Stress”) movement in literature (Goethe, Schiller, and early “Gothic novels”) and in the other arts (Piranesi): the term comes from the title of Friedrich Maximilian Klinger’s play (1776) about the American Revolution. For music, Gluck’s Don Juan has been linked to this new emphasis on more extreme emotions, as have the minor-key works of Haydn and early Mozart. While the Sturm und Drang style was common in operas as well, for obvious reasons, its influence on instrumental works established new ways of thinking about their role in emotional arousal, less by way of coded signifiers than as some means of bypassing them to “speak” directly to the heart and soul. Instrumental music—especially German instrumental music—therefore found a way to escape the hegemony of Italian opera by claiming a more

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immediate, and unmediated, impact on its performers and listeners. Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–78) might have deplored the separation of musical sound and speech given their purportedly primordial common origins (1781). But the very primordiality of music offered the potential of its becoming some kind of language in its own right, no longer constrained by imitation or representation but somehow autonomous or even “absolute” in terms of invoking the sublime. The nightingale was now an oracle (Riley 2004).

TOWARD A (MUSICAL) HISTORY OF THE EMOTIONS The attentive reader will have noted some slippage in my text. I have focused largely on issues of musical vocabulary and syntax: that is, on what the historically informed listener needs to know in order to understand music from distant times and places. My argument fosters notions of an aural literacy on a par with the visual literacy required properly to “read” seventeenth- and eighteenth-century paintings, or any verbal one for contemporary texts. I also suggest that the way this music speaks (or is made to speak) to us today is not the way it spoke (or was made to speak) at the time, and that there is some benefit to knowing the difference. However, I have tended to equivocate on whether and how the minds and bodies of listeners of the period might actually have been moved by the musical sounds they heard. Here we enter difficult terrain typical of the history of emotions as a whole. On the face of it, music would seem to be a prime candidate for investigation within the field given its performative aspects, the apparent immediacy of its appeal to the senses, and the fact that emotional expression seems to lie at its heart. One might seek to argue that music’s emotive force (and for that matter, its “emotives”) enabled it to participate in, or even regulate, emotional practices within specific communities, offering its listeners some manner of education and experience in the realms of feeling, and enabling a receptivity to them by way of attraction or repulsion. But for all Rousseau’s belief in the power of music (whether in its original or its modern state) to articulate social relations, the listener largely remains silent, both in the act of listening and in the too few sources that describe it. Even just the attempt to detect within the music itself how its creators wished listeners to respond is beset with difficulties. In one of the earliest treatises to engage specifically with the problem—Charles Avison’s Essay on Musical Expression (1752)—the author tied himself in knots. Music “elevates the Soul to Joy or Courage, sinks it in Tenderness or Pity, fixes it in a rational Serenity, or raises it to the Raptures of Devotion,” but how it does so remains unclear. Avison certainly knew what to avoid: he disapproved of mere word-painting as much as of “a pompous Display of Art.” But all he could recommend instead was “an unaffected Strain of Nature and Simplicity” (“that which gives rise to the Pathetic in every other art”) plus “agreeable Variety,” while admitting in the end that it is all “a Matter of Taste rather than of Reasoning” (56–88). If seventeenth- and eighteenth-century listeners paid any attention to the issue at all, they might well have felt the same way. But as music divorced itself from oratory in favour of absolute aesthetic autonomy, greater assistance was needed in order to comprehend it. Johann Nicolaus Forkel’s Ueber die Theorie der Musik, insofern sie Liebhabern und Kennern nothwendig und nützlich ist (On the Theory of Music Insofar as Is Necessary and Useful for Amateurs and Connoisseurs; Göttingen, 1777) was an early example of what became a trend: a “how-to” guide to musical listening. The phenomenon arose from a number of social, economic, and cultural shifts. But it also reflects the gradual emergence of a quite different set of answers to Fontenelle’s troubled question: “Sonate, que me veux-tu?”

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CHAPTER FOUR

Drama PETER HOLBROOK

This chapter advances a simple thesis, one bearing some connection, I think, to T. S. Eliot’s famous “dissociation of sensibility” argument: that is, that the development of the post-Shakespearean drama sees a drastic schematization, and simplification, of the representation of the emotions—of interior life generally. Eliot’s vaulting assertion was that human experience became a less complex and involved thing in the course of the seventeenth century. Literature, in particular the influence of John Milton (1608–74) and John Dryden (1631–1700) on English poetry, was the occasion for Eliot’s essay, but the argument really had more to do with a cultural history of secularization and rationalization, of the rise of science and reason, and, from Eliot’s perspective, the concomitant loss of a culture of faith and belief. For Eliot, the fall away from the world he imagined pre-English Civil War poets to have inhabited—in which thought and feeling were united into a complex whole—constituted a catastrophic breach in Western culture, the splitting apart of sensibility and reason, the destruction of an organic order within which, up until the emergence of the technological, scientific, commercial regime inaugurated in the middle and later years of the seventeenth century—the culture, that is, of the Royal Society—human life had flourished. For John Donne (1572–1631), in the famous example, “a thought . . . was an experience; it modified his sensibility”: thought and sensuous experience and feeling formed a complex whole—a whole shattered with the emergence of a more materialist, and rationalist, worldview. “In the seventeenth century a dissociation of sensibility set in, from which we have never recovered.” (Later poets, Eliot ([1921] 1953: 117) asserted, “do not feel their thought as immediately as the odour of a rose.”) We have sometimes, I think, lost sight of just how radical Eliot’s thesis was. Although apparently preoccupied with questions of style in the history of English poetry, he was essentially writing about the ways in which the emergence of capitalism, and the kinds of knowledge shaped by capitalism, fundamentally changed human experience. What was it like to live in a world in which the rationalistic category of individual economic interest was not taken as fundamental? We can hardly imagine such a time. For Eliot, it seems to me, this was the value of literature from that, as it were prelapsarian, period: it could summon up a world that had not yet been disfigured by the category of private material interest, a kind of rationalism in which thought is purely thought, unconnected to other experiential modes. In what follows I use Eliot’s thesis as a prompt for a (more restricted) argument about the drama in the period from about 1600—the year in which, or close to which, Hamlet was written—up to around 1700, by which period a very new type of civilization had emerged in Britain, one characterized by a fully developed commercial-scientific culture. Of course what follows is largely gestural, a sketch, and not to be taken for a thorough 71

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cultural history. But I do think that transformations in dramatic writing in this period— which are very conspicuous—tell us something important about the ways human experience changed during this century or so of radical cultural and economic progress. My assumption is that such changes—signally, the emergence of the Scientific and Industrial Revolutions in Britain in this period—must have triggered deep changes in human experience, in the ways in which human beings conceived of themselves, and, indeed, what it meant to be human. The long social and economic transformation throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when Britain moved from a largely feudal-agrarian economy to an increasingly industrial, scientific, capitalist regime, is one of the most profound developments in human history that we know of, the consequences of which are still with us. In what follows I offer readings of the language of certain plays that seem to me to tell us something significant about the ways in which the conception of the human may have evolved during this time span. I suggest we see a certain simplification of emotional life in the drama, one that bespeaks a more “scientific,” a rationalistic, conception of the person. Two changes in particular stand out: the first is formal, that is, a change in the language of drama, away from a certain indistinctness or vagueness about motivation and character—a vagueness, I would suggest, very characteristic of drama in the age of William Shakespeare (1564–1616) in particular— and towards a greater clarity and definition of the nature of personhood. In the later drama, I suggest, and under the impress of the rise of a scientific-materialist conception of the human and of nature generally, a new type of dramatic character is born, one more clearly motivated and sharply drawn. Second, and connected to this development, I think, is the growth of a new understanding of the human person as a utility-maximizing ego, one freed from traditional constraints and operating in an essentially materialistic universe. Again, I take these changes to be symptomatic of a larger cultural transformation, a passage from a society based on a non-materialistic conception of the human to one based on a scientific view. In each of the works I discuss, I’ll be looking at the ways in which human experience is figured—or not—as a complex of feelings and thoughts connected to the natural world itself. For what I think we see in the earlier drama is a sense of Creation itself, and of human beings as part of Creation—that is, as creatures, in the full Christian sense of the word. But in the later works a new understanding of the human emerges, as an autonomous interest-bearing or goal-directed being, not integrated into a larger, cosmic order. What is lost is the notion of that larger complex of being, feeling, and meaning—in which, for example, the natural world participates in feelings, and in which thought and feeling are understood as part of the one unified whole. We get instead a separating out, a winnowing, of feeling from thought, of extra-personal reality from personal experience. There is a splitting off, a marked reduction or carving-up of experience into different sectors. And ultimately, as I have suggested, we meet the implicit assertion that the principal reality is that of the profit-maximizing individual. “Sentiment” and “feeling” are separated out as particular, optional aspects of human life, and categorized as such, rather than being understood as imbuing all experience. The separation, of course, prepares the way for a major reaction (in Romanticism).

HISTORICAL PRELUDE: CHARACTER, COSMOS, SELF First, however, I want to begin some way further back in time, with an anonymous late medieval play, Everyman (written circa 1485) as a way of indicating the kind of world lost under the emerging technologico-scientific materialism of the mid- to late seventeenth

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century. What was lost, it seems to me, was a world in which spirit and feeling were taken to exist in a larger order, as part of an organic connected whole. What is very noticeable to any student of medieval drama is what we might call its explicitness—the ways in which works are governed by a didactic intention, and display a certain clarity of statement and exposition. The manner of Everyman is highly schematic: as Everyman approaches death, all his worldly plausible friends (Fellowship, Goods, Beauty, Five-Wits, etc.) abandon him to his fate, with only Good Deeds standing by him at the end, ensuring his soul is received by the Lord. And what we notice above all is how much more restricted, less sophisticated, the expressive resources are by comparison with the drama of Shakespeare’s age. The play itself is enormously powerful, in its own way deeply affecting, as it explores the fear of death. But there is no ability to depict character in the round, as it were, convincingly, with life-like accuracy: the comparison would be with the sort of artistic power we associate with the early Italian painters. Nevertheless what is conveyed by the writer of Everyman is a sense of the human as a creature, part of a cosmos. Everyman in the play is not an isolated “ego” or “self,” with “interests”: he is rather a soul, and his life part of a meaningful divine drama, involving God, Devil, Mankind, and Angels. Moreover, the entire cosmos participates in, and feels with, his story, which is in no sense separable from the whole created order. By the time we get to Shakespeare, in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century, something quite different has emerged in the drama: there has been an enormous expansion in the ability of dramatists to depict, in naturalistic and convincing fashion, character; and there is also an emerging sense of the human person as a “self ” with interests at odds with other “selves”: one thinks of the villainous Edmund in King Lear (c. 1605–6), in particular his thrilling declaration that “Thou, Nature, art my goddess” (I.ii.1).1 But the picture is extremely mixed: Edmund may or may not exist in a world governed by the gods; in one way or another nature herself seems to participate in the human tragedy of the play (though the moral or spiritual meaning of the storm on the heath is quite unclear); and, in general, the Shakespearean drama seems to represent for us a world poised between an almost Hobbesian conception of the human person as a mere ego in competition with others and an understanding of the human as deeply enmeshed in a spiritual order. Thus, against Edmund’s “Nature,” we can cite the speech of Duke Senior in As You Like It, in which the exiled Duke, living in harmonious companionship with his “co-mates and brothers in exile,” finds “tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, / Sermons in stones, and good in every thing”: the natural world explicitly endorses the loving community, far away from “the envious court,” established in the green wood (II .i.1, 16–17, 4). What I emphasized just before was the quality of distinctness in Everyman. The drama of the medieval period lacked, as a simple matter of technique, the ability to depict human character in any significant degree of complexity or ambivalence: rather than looking into the depths of motivation, or signalling that there are depths, everything is on the surface, made explicit. The point is that the story of Everyman is one he shares with the rest of the human race: he must make a choice—God or the World—and he is taking the primrose path to perdition, until at the end he is put right. The play’s lack of opacity, its quality of bright clearness, is essential to its didacticism. All this is of course radically transformed by the time of the Shakespearean drama. For Shakespeare, human experience is radically obscure or opaque; very often the springs of action in the plays cannot be rationally accounted for. Yet, at the same time, the Shakespearean drama still frequently works with a sense of the human as part of a natural created order imbued with feeling, meaning, and value. So, in Shakespeare, we see a new, deeper conception of the individual self as

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separated out from the world of which, in the traditional Christian conception, it was properly a part, operating in concert with a lingering intuition that each “self ” is in fact a “soul,” a part of Creation. Yet as we will see, this ambiguity in the Shakespearean drama—the emergence of a psychologically complex or deep sense of character, combined with the traditional conception of human creatureliness—is succeeded by a one-sided development in the later history of the drama. In essence, as the drama develops throughout the seventeenth century, two things happen. First, the sense of human experience as part of a divine order drops away, we are left with a purely material, social, worldly scene. Second, the notion of a psychologically obscure or deep sense of self gives way to a rationalistic, materialist conception of the human, as a Hobbesian bearer of interests: “I put,” wrote Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) in Part One of Leviathan ([1651] 1985: 161), “for a generall inclination of all mankind, a perpetuall and restlesse desire of Power after power, that ceaseth only in Death.”2 In Everyman, no feelings or thoughts remain unarticulated: all is open, communicated. There is no impression given of a reserve of feeling, of, as Hamlet puts it, “that within which passes show” (I.ii.85), or—from a much later period—“thoughts . . . too deep for tears,” as William Wordsworth (1770–1850) would write in the “Immortality” Ode. Each “character” in the play is actually better conceived of as a moral viewpoint or position— there is nothing left over, as it were. This leads to certain paradoxes of exposition, for example the figure of Goods telling Everyman that “My condition is man’s soul to kill” (line 442); or his statement that “Therefore to thy soul Good is a thief ” (447).3 That is, the moral critique of “Goods,” of the desire for worldly pelf, is enunciated by Goods himself. No character (the word is clearly inadequate) in the drama is in any sense opaque to himself, as Hamlet certainly is to Hamlet (much of the play being taken up with his wrestling with the question why he does not immediately avenge his murdered father). Partly this is indeed an effect of the verbal technology available to writers in the later sixteenth century: for a simple explicitness is the given mode, and rhetorical distinctness the fundamental feature, of the dramatic writing of the late Middle Ages. The language is quite external, as it were, to the character. Consider Everyman’s lament at line 580: O eternal God, O heavenly figure, O way of righteousness, O goodly vision, etc.—what is obvious in such speech is that its formal patternedness virtually precludes any mimetic force, any illusionistic effect that the language is shaped under the impress of actual strong feeling; it remains somehow “outside,” external to whatever we imagine the feelings of the “person” speaking, as if the emotions were being reported upon rather than experienced. Everyman here seems to comment on his experience of despair and guilt (in the face of his “grievous offense” (586) and sinfulness) rather than have it, the very ceremoniousness of the language (the parallelism, repetition) ruling out psychological verisimilitude. All this changes, drastically, with the emergence of a psychological drama in the late 1580s and 1590s, in which we feel we actually witness, despite whatever rhetorical mechanisms the writing draws upon, the movement of thought and feeling. This is a truly momentous advance in mimetic capacity. The key figure here is Shakespeare, and one of the first to notice his supreme gift for life-like characterization was Margaret Cavendish, the Duchess of Newcastle (1623–73), in one of her Sociable Letters (1664): “so Well,” Cavendish writes there, has Shakespeare “Express’d in his Playes all Sorts of Persons, as one would think he had been Transformed into every one of those Persons he hath Described”; and of his “Tragick Vein,” in particular, Cavendish observes that “he

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Presents Passions so Naturally, and Misfortunes so Probably, as he Pierces the Souls of his Readers with such a True Sense and Feeling thereof, that it Forces Tears through their Eyes.”4 Of course, the mode of Everyman hardly excludes eloquence or poetry. What it does exclude is the illusion of a character actually undergoing a psychological experience. It is unnecessary to go into detail on this development in the drama of the later sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries: it is too well-known a story. The principal critical document is of course Bradley’s Shakespearean Tragedy of 1904, with its devotion to the charismatic power of Shakespeare’s heroes and heroines, but, as the quotation from Cavendish makes clear, the intuition of a new naturalness and convincingness in the depiction of character on the Shakespearean stage long predates that landmark book. Perhaps some indication of the extent of the change can be conveyed by focusing on one very noticeable feature of Shakespeare’s writing: those instances in which characters are depicted as not speaking what is in their minds, as unable to express particular feelings. There are a number of occasions in Shakespeare’s drama where we find characters unable to say what they are thinking or feeling, in which language fails them. The most famous lines on this predicament, Hamlet’s, have already been cited: “I have that within which passes show,” Hamlet says in response to Gertrude’s request that he unburden himself and tell her, and the Court, what is going on with him. But perhaps the most

FIGURE 4.1: After Henry Fuseli, King Lear Casting Out his Daughter Cordelia (Shakespeare, King Lear, Act 1, Scene 1), 1792, Stipple engraving, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Gertrude and Thomas Jefferson Mumford Collection, Gift of Dorothy Quick Mayer, 1942 (42.119.540).

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momentous instance of it occurs in Coriolanus (c. 1608), at that point in the play at which the patrician Coriolanus must decide whether to continue to prosecute his vengeful war on Rome or not. Confronted by his mother Volumnia, sent to her son as part of a Roman embassy desperate to avoid destruction at the hands of Coriolanus’s new allies, the Volscians, Coriolanus is finally overcome by her pleas, but the Folio stage direction is staggeringly simple and powerful: “He holds her by the hand, silent” (V.iii.182). What is conveyed is that Coriolanus is overcome by such a powerful set of passions, of contradictory feelings—love for his mother, hatred of Rome being the most prominent—that he is reduced to silence, quite unable to express in words those impulses either to relent or attack. The character’s feelings, for a short interval, are unable to be expressed rationally. We notice a similar moment in Lear when Cordelia, in the famous opening sequence of the play, confesses herself unable to “heave / [Her] heart into [her] mouth” (I.i.91–2). The sort of glib eloquence of a Regan or Goneril is completely unavailable to her: she has feelings for her father that are simply too inaccessible to be conveyed in words, either for herself or others. And, of course, again and again in Shakespeare we find characters who confront themselves as something of a mystery—who can’t understand why they act as they do (Hamlet; Iago; Leontes in The Winter’s Tale among them). Again, this forms a stark contrast to the clear motivatedness, the bright clarity, of the personae of Everyman.

RATIONALISM AND THE HISTORY OF THE DRAMA None of what I have said so far will surprise anyone who knows these plays: to say that Shakespeare seems to have a working idea of the unconscious, of the lack of explicit motivation in character, is a truism. But what happens after Shakespeare’s example? Is it picked up on? My sense is that it is not, that in this respect there is something unique about Shakespearean writing and its ability to depict the passions. My hunch is that Shakespeare does not have what I will call a rationalist understanding of human nature— in other words, he does not see human beings as fully present to themselves or others. For this reason there is often a significant gap between characters’ speech and their experience. There is, strange to say about Shakespeare, a certain lack of articulacy: we recall the praise of Theseus, in A Midsummer Night’s Dream (c. 1595), of the local worthy, called upon to give an encomium of the prince and overcome with stage-fright, whose inarticulacy is all the more valuable for its indicating heartfelt devotion to the magistrate—a feeling that confounds rhetorical ease. For Theseus, such “tongue-tied simplicity” is always to be preferred to “the rattling tongue / Of saucy and audacious eloquence” (V.i.104, 102–3). By contrast with Shakespeare, and with other playwrights of his age, later writers, I think, do see human beings as describable within explicitly rationalist terms; consequently nothing remains unsaid; there is an expansion of logically coherent statement. Here I want to look at examples from four plays: Dryden’s tragedy, written in heroic couplets, Aureng-Zebe (first performed 1675); William Congreve’s prose comedy, The Way of the World, first performed in 1700; Samuel Johnson’s verse tragedy, Irene (1749); and Richard Sheridan’s prose city comedy The School for Scandal (first performed 1777). What all of these plays demonstrate (if only in attenuated form, as in Sheridan’s satire) is the effect of a new, rationalizing aesthetics, one derived ultimately from French and Italian take-ups of critical doctrines associated originally (in the minds of Renaissance critics, at least) with Aristotle and Horace.5 This avant-garde aesthetics was essentially rationalistic in spirit: it demanded that plays observe the so-called “unities”—that is, that the plot had a basic degree of coherence, and that it did not violate mimesis by, for

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example, drawing out the action of the drama through great stretches of time and space. “Decorum” was also to be observed: plays should not promiscuously mingle kings and clowns, as the Elizabethan theorist Sir Philip Sidney complained, but instead protect the purity of genres. All of this was a conscious repudiation of the frequently sprawling, medley-like plays of the Elizabethans and Jacobeans (with their mingle-mangle social character), amounting to a deliberate and programmatic rationalization of English theatre, an attempt to improve upon the naïve and untheorized practices of the previous (that is, pre-Civil War) age. And this rationalization—involving too the development of a logical and more communicative language for the drama (Shakespeare’s language being censured by later writers such as Dryden as regrettably obscure)6—is itself connected to a new conception of the human person and the world. Aureng-Zebe is a drama of oriental court intrigue and competition set in Mohgul India; the Emperor’s son Morat has rebelled against him, while his other son, Aureng-Zebe, remains a model of filial piety, notwithstanding the Emperor’s outrageous pursuit of Aureng-Zebe’s beloved, the chaste and faithful Indamora. The story is further complicated by Aureng-Zebe being himself pursued by the Emperor’s detested wife, Nourmahal, step-mother of AurengZebe. The extremity of the passions depicted in the play, however, is rather offset by the lucidly external manner of the verse, frequently made up of strongly end-stopped heroic couplets. Dryden seems to have intuited the problem in his well-known “Prologue”: Our Author by experience finds it true, ’Tis much more hard to please himself than you: And out of no feign’d modesty, this day, Damns his laborious Trifle of a Play: Not that it’s worse than what before he writ, But he has now another taste of Wit; And to confess a truth, (though out of time) Grows weary of his long-lov’d Mistris, Rhyme. Passion’s too fierce to be in Fetters bound, And Nature flies him like Enchanted Ground. What Verse can do, he has perform’d in this, Which he presumes the most correct of his: But spite of all his pride, a secret shame, Invades his breast at Shakespear’s sacred name: Aw’d when he hears his Godlike Romans rage, He, in a just despair, would quit the Stage; And to an Age less polish’d, more unskill’d, Does, with disdain the foremost Honours yield.7 What is interesting about the passage is Dryden’s frank acknowledgement that the language of the “less polish’d, more unskill’d”—that is, less regular and “correct”—drama of the earlier “Age” is also more powerful than his own: Shakespeare’s blank verse is more affecting than the regular couplets, and “Rhyme”, of Aureng-Zebe. Passion is indeed “too fierce to be in Fetters bound”—there is a mismatch between the highly constrained formal vehicle of the play and its extravagant erotic, passionate content. (And, in fact, this was the very last play Dryden was to write in rhyme.) At the same time, the mode does lend itself to a certain kind of ethos, and makes more plausible the representation of a certain type of character. Although Aureng-Zebe’s endurance is stretched to the limit (at one point he is driven to suspect even Indamora’s fidelity), he remains throughout his trials a model of

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patient rationality and virtue. As Arimant, Governor of Agra, declares, Aureng-Zebe is “by no strong passion sway’d, / Except his Love,” and indeed anxious possessiveness over Indamora is his sole weakness; he refuses to cede to his father’s demands that he relinquish her, yet also (what would be more than justified) declines to rebel against him. His character is, as Arimant rightly observes, preternaturally “temp’rate” and “weigh’d”: so it is left up to Aureng-Zebe the “sinking State” to “uphold,” his virtues encompassing both prudence and valour (in “Council cool, but in Performance bold”). But his principal virtue is that of remaining, against all provocations to the contrary, “a Loyal Son” (I.i.102–7). But it is the highly disciplined verbal texture of the play—the compression of thought into tightly circumscribed rhyming couplets—that is at issue here, and which we can say fosters a noticeably external treatment of the passions. Clarity of statement, dialectical wit, the indulgence of moral generalities: these are the preferred manner. In Act IV Nourmahal attempts to seduce Aureng-Zebe; but what is most obvious about the exchange is how the voices of both characters are virtually indistinguishable. Aureng-Zebe is scandalized by Nourmahal’s advances—“Heav’ns! can you this, without just vengeance, hear? / When will you thunder, if it now be clear?” (IV.i.127–8)—but from the point of view of style, Nourmahal’s defence of her incestuous desire is wholly continuous with Aureng-Zebe’s manner, which is one of unambiguous description and generality: “Custom our Native Royalty does awe; / Promiscuous Love is Nature’s general Law: / For whosoever the first Lovers were, / Brother and Sister made the second Pair, / And doubled, by their love, their piety” (129–33). In both cases, we seem to have characters speaking about their passions—generalizing about them—rather than experiencing them. The stylistic mode is simply not capable of conveying the actual movement of feeling, its dynamic, complex, organic development. This mode is instead one of rational declamation and the indication of feeling. The debate between Aureng-Zebe and the Emperor at the end of Act II , when the latter confesses to his son his helpless attraction to Indamora, is typical; what is not conveyed is the actual press of feeling: Witness yee Pow’rs, How much I suffer’d, and how long I strove Against th’ assaults of this imperious Love! I represented to my self the shame Of perjur’d Faith, and violated Fame. Your great deserts, how ill they were repay’d; All arguments, in vain, I urg’d and weigh’d: For mighty Love, who Prudence does despise, For Reason, show’d me Indamora’s Eyes. What would you more, my crime I sadly view, Acknowledge, am asham’d, and yet pursue. —II .i.451–61 This is desire described rather than felt, far removed from, say, the dynamism of feeling in one of Hamlet’s soliloquies.

HOBBESIAN SELVES It is clear enough what is lost by this manner; but we need to think as well about what it affords. And what I think is made possible is a view of humanity consonant with the kind of pessimistic natural or mechanical philosophy we associate with Hobbes (pessimistic

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because it understands reality, including human reality, as a matter of inevitably competing forces). Aureng-Zebe’s soliloquy at the end of his interview with the Emperor sketches such a world of interests, of material push-pull factors: The World is made for the bold impious man; Who stops at nothing, seizes all he can. Justice to merit does weak aid afford; She trusts her Ballance, and neglects her Sword. Virtue is nice to take what’s not her own; And, while she long consults, the Prize is gone. —II .i.508–13 It is not that such sentiments could not have been expressed in the drama of the previous age (Marlowe’s and Shakespeare’s villains did express them). It is rather that the fiercely analytical character of such writing virtually predisposes the dramatist to such a vision. We encounter this same pessimistic materialism in Aureng-Zebe’s despairing speech in Act IV: When I consider Life, ’tis all a cheat; Yet, fool’d with hope, men favour the deceit; Trust on, and think to morrow will repay: To morrow’s falser than the former day; Lies worse; and while it says, We shall be blest With some new joys, cuts off what we possest. Strange couzenage! none would live past years again, Yet all hope pleasure in what yet remain; And, from the dregs of Life, think to receive What the first sprightly running could not give. I’m tir’d with waiting for this Chymic Gold, Which fools us young, and beggars us when old. —IV.i.33–44 The dry formal rigour of such writing, its predilection for terse, cold, clear statement, accords with this naturalistic, disenchanted vision of the world. Wit here consists in a form of bleak scientistic realism which views the world as, inevitably, a scene of competing interests or wills: Indamora: Tell me, what is ’t at which great Spirits aim, What most your self desire? Morat: Renown, and Fame, And Pow’r, as uncontrol’d as is my will. —V.i.85–7 Nonetheless, the effect I am describing is also evident in the more flexible and less artificial medium of prose, in William Congreve’s (1670–1729) The Way of the World. The play concerns Mirabell’s ultimately successful efforts to win Millamant in marriage, the obstacle being that her marriage-portion is controlled by her aunt Lady Wishfort, Mirabell’s sworn enemy (he has earlier pretended love to her in order to gain access to Millamant, but that ruse has been exposed). The social milieu of the action is that of polite London society, the antithesis of the exotic heroic and courtly setting of Dryden’s play. But what links this play to Dryden’s is the dry, crisp tone of the writing, which of

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course seconds its high valuation of wit or intelligence. And what emerges out of this emphasis upon intelligence is a certain tough realism about human motives and tendencies. Mirabell and Millamant are genuine lovers; but they never forget themselves so much as to lose sight of their respective material interests. In the wry and witty exchange in Act IV between Millamant and Mirabell about their prospective marriage, the famous “proviso” scene, what is understood on the part of each is that marriage is properly an object of negotiation: each of them is, at bottom, an ego with interests requiring protection. And there is really nothing outside or beyond this egoism—no larger context of meaning or feeling that would qualify it, by understanding it within some supernatural order. Mirabell and Millamant exist in a world of interests, pure and simple, material ones primarily. The high intelligence of both characters’ speech expresses their awareness that their world is the naturalistic or Hobbesian one dedicated to the pursuit of individual advantage; and what Mirabell and Millamant do prior to their eventual marriage is negotiate these interests. Cruelty is taken as a given: Millamant: Mirabell, did not you take exceptions last night? Oh, ay, and went away.— Now I think on’t, I’m angry.—No, now I think on’t I’m pleased, for I believe I gave you some pain. Mirabell: Does that please you? Millamant: Infinitely; I love to give pain. Mirabell: You would affect a cruelty which is not in your power; your true vanity is in the power of pleasing. Millamant: Oh, I ask your pardon for that. One’s cruelty is one’s power, and when one parts with one’s cruelty, one parts with one’s power; and when one has parted with that, I fancy one’s old and ugly. Mirabell: Ay, ay, suffer your cruelty to ruin the object of your power, to destroy your lover—and then how vain, how lost a thing you’ll be! Nay, ’tis true, you are no longer handsome when you’ve lost your lover; your beauty dies upon the instant. For beauty is the lover’s gift; ’tis he bestows your charms, your glass is all a cheat. The ugly and the old, whom the looking-glass mortifies, yet after commendation can be flattered by it, and discover beauties in it; for that reflects our praises, rather than your face.8 The scene can of course be compared to the wit-combats of Shakespearean lovers such as Benedick and Beatrice, or Petruchio and Katherine; but the comparison is superficial. It is true that Millamant later lets her guard down sufficiently to declare that “if Mirabell should not make a good husband, I am a lost thing—for I find I love him violently” (IV.i: 382). But whereas in Much Ado About Nothing (1598–9) and The Taming of the Shrew (c. 1590–3) we see characters slowly abandoning the hard carapace of selfhood to become genuine couples, neither Mirabell nor Millamant can be said to be transformed in this way: they remain sharply defined selves-with-interests—the use of a lover is to make one feel better about oneself in front of a looking-glass—as is made fully clear in the “proviso” scene. Here both lay down the conditions under which Millamant may agree to “dwindle into a wife” (IV.i: 380). The tone of the interview between them is archly cynical and playful, yet beneath it is a hard-edged awareness that the egoistic interests of each are the beginning and end point: Millamant insists Mirabell must always knock before entering her room, that he must not pry into her acquaintances, that he must leave her free to come and go as she pleases, and so on. As she puts it, “Ah! I’ll never marry, unless I am first made sure of my will and pleasure” (IV.i: 379). Once again, the atmosphere is one in which it is taken for granted that both parties are entering into a contract which is to be

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FIGURE 4.2: “The Way of the World” by William Congreve—Mr Baddeley in the character of Petulant, 1777. Photo: Alamy.

founded upon the reality of two, essentially atomized, egos. Nor is there any suggestion that there is anything over and above this scene of egoistic competition and desire for gratification; this is a completely worldly—rationalist and materialist—setting. With Samuel Johnson’s (1709–84) Irene, we are once again back in the world of exotic heroic action: set in a demoralized Greece recently conquered by the Turks, the play follows the conspiracy of a band of courageous resisters of tyranny, along with the choice of Irene whether to succumb to the Emperor of the Turks’ offer of marriage (and thereby “receive the Faith of Mecca”) or not; Irene’s sister, Aspasia, is a militant champion of Greek freedom, but Irene proves to be made of weaker stuff.9 Perhaps the chief characteristic of the play is its relentless and sometimes wearisome articulacy: there is really nothing, one feels, that language cannot express in the play-world. The entire play is composed of clear and distinct ideas—there is no suggestion (as there so often is in Shakespeare) of areas of human experience that cannot find their adequate linguistic vehicle. Thus we find characters indulging in a hyper-conscious clarity of speech: Irene’s choice (fidelity to Christendom and Greece on the one hand, or betrayal of her homeland and faith on the other) is presented by herself to herself, in a moment of high emotion, with schematic lucidity: “Stay,” she implores the loyal Greek, Demetrius, who is attempting to win her back to Christianity and patriotism,

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. . . in this dubious Twilight of Conviction, The Gleams of Reason, and the Clouds of Passion, Irradiate and obscure my Breast by Turns: Stay but a Moment, and prevailing Truth Will spread resistless Light upon my Soul. —V.v: 141 For Irene, her mental struggle is easily presented as a conflict between “Reason” and “Passion”—the feelings and thoughts follow well-formed grooves. There is no awareness in the play that any thought or emotion might lie outside the expressive resources of language: all is known, all experience containable within conventional shapes of understanding. “Passion” and “Reason” are sharply opposed, and no aspect of life can not be marshalled under one or other rubric. Similarly, when the Emperor learns of the Greek plot to kill him, he can expatiate lucidly on the effect on him of the beautiful Irene’s approach, and orders his counsellors to take over the handling of the conspiracy themselves—he has more pressing matters to attend to: The strong Emotions of my troubled Soul Allow no pause for Art or for Contrivance; And dark Perplexity distracts my Counsels. Do thou resolve: For see IRENE comes! At her approach each ruder Gust of Thought Sinks like the sighing of a Tempest spent, And Gales of softer Passion fan my Bosom. —II .vi: 97 What is remarkable about such a passage, which is perfectly typical of the play as a whole, is the pronounced rationalist outlook: these are personages who comment on their emotional disturbance, and in perfectly ordered and complete lines, rather than undergo it. It is all done in an indicative or discursive mode rather than presented as an actual representation of emotion. Aspasia’s shock at being reunited with her husband, the patriot Demetrius, is experienced in a similarly external manner: What well known Voice pronounc’d the grateful Sounds Freedom and Love? Alas! I’m all Confusion, A sudden Mist o’ercasts my darken’d Soul, The Present, Past, and Future swim before me, Lost in a wild Perplexity of Joy. —III .x: 116 Of course there is always a gap, a mismatch, between medium and content in drama— people do not normally express themselves in measured speech, or in rhyme (as in Dryden’s play), etc. But my point pertains to the model of human consciousness that Johnson holds to in Irene, one that appears to take for granted the notion that everything that is in the mind is accessible in words. The essentially descriptive manner of the play is clear from Cali’s characterization of ambition: This sov’reign Passion, scornful of Restraint, Ev’n from the Birth affects supreme Command, Swells in the Breast, and with resistless Force, O’erbears each gentler Motion of the Mind. —III .i: 102

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The balanced periods, the emphatic declamatory style, the sheer luminous perspicuousness of what is being said: all contributes to the play’s complete effect of a rational account of human nature (even of its follies or extremities). The characters in the play are slaves of passion, ambition, love, and so on—but such facts are disposed within an overarching rationalistic account of the human. Irene is far less materialist in its understanding of humanity than Dryden’s Aureng-Zebe: ultimately, it makes much more space for a lofty moral idealism. Nevertheless it, too, is invested in the rationalistic aesthetic ultimately governing both Dryden’s and Congreve’s plays. Richard Sheridan’s (1751–1816) School for Scandal is in manner much closer to Congreve’s play than to either Irene or Aureng-Zebe: it is a satirical prose comedy about the contemporary glittering social world of London. Nevertheless, its grasp of human nature is in no way different from that of the earlier play: its horizon of understanding, the background against which the action takes place, is a cynical ethic of competitive egoism, in which it is accepted that reputations exist only to be torn down by the envious and malicious, and that virtue and genuine natural kindness are the exception proving the rule. Sir Peter Teazle is unhappy with his wife Lady Teazle’s new friends: “a set of malicious, prating, prudent gossips, both male and female, who murder characters to kill time, and will rob a young fellow of his good name before he has years to know the value of it.”10 But Lady Sneerwell, Snake, Mrs Candour, Sir Benjamin Backbite, and so on simply express the prevailing understanding of the play-world as a whole, which is that the individual competitive ego is the ultimate reality of human life. The “School for Scandal” is really a school for life in the mercenary world of London society; and its mode of wit conforms exactly to Hobbes’s ([1650] 1997: 458) definition of laughter, that is, “sudden glory,” the emotion “arising from some sudden conception of some eminency in ourselves, by comparison with the infirmity of others.” As Lady Sneerwell owns, “there’s no possibility of being witty without a little ill nature; the malice of a good thing is the barb that makes it stick” (I.i: 390). She was herself, she confesses, earlier in life “Wounded . . . by the envenomed tongue of slander,” and as a result now knows “no pleasure equal to the reducing others to the level of my own injured reputation.” For Snake, “Nothing can be more natural”—the desire to hurt is a given (I.i: 387). The basic intuition of the play is that social life is a scene of ceaseless combat, one of “plot and counterplot” (V.iii: 451), between rival egos; nor does it provide the faintest conception of a larger supernatural moral scheme in which this struggle for dominance and assertion of individual power is finally to be understood; the outlook is instead thoroughly naturalistic or materialist. All that can be hoped for is the occasional eccentric dissent from such a ruthless scene, which is located by Sheridan in the easy-going, farming ways of the country gentry (disastrously, the pliant and well-meaning Sir Peter has taken Lady Teazle from her simple rural life to the town; and Sir Oliver, his good-hearted old friend, has lived his life for many years in the colonies). In the city, however, the mercenary but plausible Joseph Surface is the norm, a man who does everything in his power to disinherit his brother Charles, whose folly of innocent sensualism is made up for by an essentially good heart. The worst thing about having to appear to be good, Joseph declares, is that “it invites applications from the unfortunate” for material assistance: the pretending to “pure charity is an expensive article in the catalogue of a man’s good qualities” (V.i: 440). Again, the basic understanding of the play is that individual, competitive selfishness is the norm of its world. When Snake betrays Lady Sneerwell at the end of the play, it is not because of a sudden access of virtue, but because he has been made a better offer: Lady Sneerwell, he admits, “paid [him] extremely liberally” to lie, but he has “unfortunately been offered

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double to speak the truth” (V.iii: 451). But his main concern is that his “good deed” not become widely known: after all, he has nothing but his “infamy to depend on,” and, “if it were once known that I had been betrayed into an honest action, I should lose every friend I have in the world” (V.iii: 452). The point is that Snake, Surface, Sneerwell, and so on form the background against which the sentimental action of the play (Lady Teazle’s eventual resignation from the “Scandalous College,” and Charles Surface’s vindication in the eyes of his father Sir Oliver [V.iii: 451]) is to be understood. The easy-living Sir Oliver heartily distrusts the appearance of prudence in one as young as Joseph Surface—as he says, “I hate to see prudence clinging to the green succors of youth; ’tis like ivy round a sapling, and spoils the growth of the tree” (II .i: 408). But prudence—the cold calculation of interest and advantage, the Hobbesian rather than Christian or simply ethical understanding of nature—remains, despite Sir Oliver’s misgivings, the fundamental social fact of the play-world. Dryden’s Aureng-Zebe, Congreve’s Way of the World, Johnson’s Irene, and Sheridan’s School for Scandal: each of these are distinctive plays (Irene, for example, allowing much more scope for human nature’s capacity for exalted virtue than any of the other works considered here); they can hardly be seen as simply doing the same thing. But all ultimately participate in a rationalistic poetics that lends itself to a “scientific” or naturalistic conception of personality, as essentially part of a system of forces (that is, of other personalities or interest-driven egos). In each play we find, to varying degrees, a sense of humanity as made up not so much of souls, or creatures, who form part of a larger cosmos or moral order, but, instead, selves, driven in various ways by largely passional and material interests. This is the most momentous way in which the drama of the later seventeenth century departs from that of the previous age.

CHAPTER FIVE

The Visual Arts LISA BEAVEN

INTRODUCTION The relationship between a work of art and the emotions it provokes in the viewer has always been an unstable one. Figurative painting depends on a reciprocal understanding or recognition of facial expression, body language, and gesture. As Montagu (1994: 2) expressed it: “Art is a medium of communication and there would be little purpose in providing the most meticulously accurate image of an expressive figure, if its expression could not be recognised by the beholder.” The success of this transmission of emotion from canvas to viewer was dependent on both the skill of the artist, and a shared language of gesture and expressive codes. These are culturally specific, and change over time, so that paintings which once were considered deeply moving, may now appear stagey and unconvincing. Art is not reality, and the gap between the two is what psychologists have described as “the paradox of fiction.” Just as classical writers were intensely aware of this paradox, often reminding readers of the fictive status of a spectacle they were describing in order to convince them of their skill, artists during the period interrogated the boundaries between reality and illusion. Furthermore, all artists in the Renaissance and Baroque periods were conscious that they were navigating the literary and visual heritage of antiquity and the Renaissance. Many were strongly influenced, for example, by that most expressive of ancient sculptures, the Laocoon statue group, and were mindful of the existence of exemplary ancient works of art from textual accounts. To create a work of art, it was necessary to enter into a dialogue, or contest, with the cultural heritage of that past, and attempt to improve upon those prototypes. The period covered by this essay was concerned with emotion in art as never before. There was intense interest in the passions of the soul in the seventeenth century, when a rash of treatises on the subject were published (for summaries see Boros 2006: 126; Smith 2008), which led to a general consensus among art critics that the goal of art was to emotionally affect its audience. At the same time, there was a shift in art practice towards a greater realism, and a concentration on painting and drawing from life, which led to more realistic emotional expression. Increasing verisimilitude was closely tied to the Roman Catholic Church’s reform agenda, which reaffirmed the importance of the visual in worship and was acutely concerned with legibility in art. Catholic reformers believed that art had an important role to play in devotional practice by moving and instructing its audience. Moving the viewer meant that art became overtly about efficacy, a means of persuasion. And finally the rapid development of the art market in Europe in the seventeenth century, particularly in the Low Countries, saw the development of new types of collectors, who were not ecclesiastic institutions or aristocrats, but members of 85

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the middle classes. These viewers did not necessarily want mythological or devotional works of art, but rather images of everyday life, provoking the production of a wide range of specialized genre paintings that entered completely new emotional territory.

THE PASSIONS AND ARTISTIC EXPRESSION: THEORY AND PRACTICE Where painting was concerned, the popularity of the Horatian dictum, Ut Pictura Poesis (“as is painting, so is poetry”) in the first Renaissance art theoretical treatises encouraged the idea that the painted istoria could narrate a story and in so doing express the passions of its protagonists by means of expression, gesture and setting. Leon Battista Alberti (1404– 72) in his De Pictura (Latin MS 1435, Italian translation 1436) wrote: The istoria will move the soul of the beholder when each man painted there clearly shows the movement of his own soul. It happens in nature that nothing more than herself is found capable of things like herself; we weep with the weeping, laugh with the laughing, and grieve with the grieving. These movements of the soul are made known by movements of the body . . . Thus all the movements of the body should be closely observed by the painter. —Alberti [1435] 1956: 77 While no universal word for expression existed in the Renaissance period, the outward manifestation of emotion in the form of gesture and facial expression was referred to in Italy as the affetti, while strong emotions were described as passions, derived from the Greek word pathos. The word passion acquired another meaning in Christianity, associated with the pain and suffering of Christ on the cross. The singular of affetti, affetto, referred to the movement of the mind or soul, and could encompass hand gestures, the pose of the figure and facial expressions. Ripa noted the importance of the position of the head for registering different emotional states as well as the disposition of the limbs (Ripa 1593, prologue). Alberti encouraged artists to use the affetti in a rhetorical way, to evoke the desired emotion in the spectator. Another term for emotion is “moti” or “moti dell’anima,” used by Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519) who wrote about the effect of emotions on the viewer in his Trattato della Pittura. It derives from the Latin emoveo, “to move out or move away” or “to transport an object,” from which “emotion” is also derived (Gouk and Hills 2005: 16). Costume, originally a French word, was also used in Italy to describe character, and sometimes appearance, in the early modern period (see Barasch 1975). In the sixteenth century the most significant art theorist to discuss expression was Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo (1538–1600). Lomazzo’s Trattato dell’arte de la pittura, strongly influenced by da Vinci’s ideas, was published in 1584 and his Idea del tempio della pittura in 1590. His treatise on the art of painting enjoyed widespread popularity, and Richard Haydocke (1570–c. 1642) translated the first five books of Lomazzo’s text as A Tracte containing the artes of curious painting for an English audience in 1598, censoring those parts of the text he considered too Catholic as he went. In this treatise Lomazzo dedicated a chapter to the “strength and efficacy of the emotions” (“Della forza, & efficacia dei i moti”). Reflecting the period in which it was written, when painting reform was underway in Northern Italy, Lomazzo stressed the importance for painting to be drawn from life, and argued that viewers should believe in, and share, the emotions they saw depicted on canvas. He wrote:

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So a picture artificially expressing the true naturall motions will (surely) procure laughter when it laugheth, pensivenesse when it is grieved &c And, that which is more, will cause the beholder to wonder, when it wondereth, to desire a beautiful young woman for his wife, when he seeth her naked . . . to be mooved and waxe furious when he beholdeth a battel most lively described; and to be stirred with disdaine and wrath, at the sight of shameful and dishonest actions. —Lomazzo 1598: Second book, 1–2, Haydocke’s translation Eleven of these “motions” or passions are articulated by Lomazzo—love, hate, desire, horror, happiness, pain, hope, desperation, courage, fear, and anger—and he discusses their outward manifestations in terms of bodily reactions. For each passion or “motion,” he provides an example of a character from history or myth experiencing this emotion. The significance of his text was that it went far beyond Alberti to explicitly instruct artists on how to bring about specific intended emotional states in their audience. Very shortly after his treatises were published, artists in Italy began experimenting with representing emotion as the primary subject of a painting. For example, in his paintings of Boy Bitten by a Lizard (c. 1596–7), of which two principal versions exist, Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1571–1610) broke new ground by painting an expression of pain (see Figure 5.1). A young boy, reaching for some of the fruit, has been bitten by a lizard and is shown flinching, his hand jerked backwards with the lizard still attached to his finger. His other hand is flipped up at an unusual angle, palm out and fingers bent in an awkward gesture. His face with its emphatic frown and open mouth reflects shock, pain, and surprise as he violently reacts to the bite. In 1642, Giovanni Baglione (1566–1644) described the painting as follows: “boy bitten by a lizard emerging from among the flowers and fruit, and his head seems truly to cry out and the whole is painted with diligence.”1 Baglione’s description suggests that for contemporaries the work appeared intensely real and its novelty lay in Caravaggio’s exploration of emotional and psychological responses to pain, motivated, as Mina Gregori has argued, by “investigative and mimetic intent” (Metropolitan Museum of Art 1985: 236). But if Caravaggio’s Boy Bitten by a Lizard represents an experiment, a practical application of the moti, then invenzione, the idea of creating or fabricating subject matter, was also transformed in his hands. His genre paintings of the Cardsharps and The Fortune Teller turn on the idea of deception. The composition and subject of the first of these, two cardsharps fleecing an innocent youth, makes the viewer complicit in the trick, by showing one of them from the back, pulling cards out of his belt (see Figure 5.2). The observer becomes the fourth presence at the table. The hapless and innocent young man being fleeced by the cardsharpers, who are dressed in striped silk and damask doublets, finds his mirror image in the The Fortune Teller in the figure of elegant young man having his palm read by an attractive gypsy girl while she slowly pulls a ring off his finger. This type of subject finds an intriguing parallel, as Langdon observes, in Leonardo’s drawings, such as A Man Tricked by Gypsies. The difference is that while Leonardo demonstrated an equivalence between the physiognomy of his gypsies and their behaviour, in Caravaggio’s painting the facial features of the gypsy conceal rather than reveal her treacherous character. Caravaggio’s interest in facial expression in particular transforms Cardsharps into an intense psychological portrait of two predators completely focused on the young man, regarding him with the acute concentration of hunters intent on their prey, while

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FIGURE 5.1: Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, Boy Bitten by a Lizard, 1594–6, oil on canvas, 65.8 × 52.3 cm, Fondazione Roberto Longhi. Florence. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.

he gazes down at his cards with untroubled serenity, his smooth white forehead a stark contrast to the furrowed brow and grotesquely dilated eye of the villain behind him. But if compassion for the victim is the vehicle by which audiences today engage with the work, it was not necessarily the emotion felt by early modern audiences. Jonathan Richardson’s description in 1722 instead suggests that viewers enjoyed the young man’s misfortune. He wrote that it was “a Picture excellent for the Expression. A young Fellow

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FIGURE 5.2: Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, The Card Sharps, c. 1595, oil on canvas, 94.2 × 130.9 cm, Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth, Texas (AP 1987.07).

is cheated of his Money by sharping Gamesters; in Them there is so much Roguery, and Craft, and in Him so much Stupidity, and Fright, that ’tis deservedly very Famous” (Langdon 2012: 50–1).

HORROR PICTURES: THE EXPRESSION OF PAIN AND FEAR The communication of emotional states to those viewing a painting was dramatically amplified in Peter Paul Rubens’s (1577–1640) Prometheus Bound (see Figure 5.3). Prometheus, punished by Zeus for giving the human race the gift of fire, was chained to a rock, and subjected to the enduring torture and pain of having his liver plucked out by an eagle. The monumental inverted, naked male figure in a twisted and foreshortened pose falls forward toward the viewer. The animal and still-life painter Frans Snyders (1579–1657) painted the source of his suffering, the enormous eagle, whose talons penetrate the flesh of the Titan, one claw piercing his eye while his sharp beak plucks the entrails from the wound in his torso. Prometheus’s thrashing legs, taut, clenched fist, and blue lips, which are half open as he cries out, reveal his agony. The theme of a Titan tied to the rock while a bird of prey feasted on his body had been famously interpreted in the Renaissance period by both Michelangelo Buonarotti (1475– 1564) and Titian Vecellio (c. 1488–1576). Furthermore, Prometheus was also the subject

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FIGURE 5.3: Peter Paul Rubens, Prometheus Bound, begun c. 1611–12, completed by 1618, oil on canvas, 242.6 × 209.6 cm, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Purchased with the W. P. Wilstach Fund, W1950-3-1.

of an ancient lost painting by Euanthes, which was described in a poem by Tatius. As a subject then, as Aneta Georgievksa-Shine (2009: 31) put it, it represented “one of Rubens’s most intense encounters with the visual and literary canon of antiquity and the Renaissance.” In its turn it proved very influential, prompting both Gerard Seghers (1591–1651) and Theodor Rombouts (1597–1637) to paint their own versions of the subject (Raggio 1958). It also prompted an ekphrastic description that focused squarely on the beholder’s response. Written by Leiden professor Domenicus Baudius (1561–1613), and dated April 7, 1612, it reads in part:

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Here, with hooked beak, a monstrous vulture digs about in the liver of Prometheus, who is given no peace from his torments as ever and again the savage bird draws near his self-renewing breast and attacks it punishingly . . . . He would fly murderously on the spectators, did not his chained prey detain him. He can do no more than terrify the frightened onlookers by turning his flaming eyes from one to the other. Blood flows from the chest and every part where his claws leave their mark, and his piercing eyes dart savage flames. You might think that he moves, that his feathers tremble. Horror grips the onlookers. —Georgievksa-Shine 2009: 32. Georgievksa-Shine’s translation As Baudius’s description reveals, the painting functioned as a perfect vehicle for the expression of the violent passions of the soul, a topic so dear to philosophers and painters alike during the period. The conduit for the fear of the audience was the eagle, its realism praised in the conceit that it was about to fly on the terrified spectators. Olga Raggio explicitly linked Rubens’s emphasis on the expression of the passions in this painting to Lomazzo’s definition of pain (dolore) within his chapter on the passions of the soul, in which he provided the example of Prometheus as a means by which artists could express the effect of unbearable pain on a human body (Raggio 1958: 62; Lomazzo 1584: 165–6). Charles Dempsey (1967: 420–5) argued instead that the painting was intended as a more ambitious re-imagining of the ancient lost original by Euanthes. Rubens’s implicit challenge to his ancient exemplum was made explicit through the iconography of the subject. During the Renaissance Prometheus was increasing associated with artistic creativity itself, and was sometimes identified as the first sculptor, while his actions of stealing fire to give to mankind made him a challenger of the established order of things. The subject therefore became the perfect means for Rubens to express his artistic ambition and invention. But if Rubens was attracted to the subject primarily as a means of pitting his skill against canonical works of the Renaissance and antiquity, other baroque artists were indeed drawn to it by the opportunities it provided to depict extreme suffering. Jusepe di Ribera’s (1591–1652) painting of Prometheus is essentially a representation of torture, in which the face and body of the Titan are contorted in agony. The term terribilità (terribleness or awfulness) originally used by Vasari to describe the work of Michelangelo, was defined by Maravall (1986: 212) as “what grandiosely attracts us with an irresistible force in whatever we are viewing,” and perhaps is directly applicable to Ribera’s painting. Haydocke, translating Lomazzo (1598: 37), described terribilità as having “direfull, haynous, horribe [sic], and harde motions, but with a kinde of Magnanimitie, as we read in the Histories of the ancient Romans.” Ribera’s Prometheus differs from that of Rubens in that Ribera is not interested in conveying courage but rather is intrigued by the abject state the Titan is reduced to, his very being on the verge of being obliterated by pain. Ribera also painted more than one series of paintings of the four giants—Tityos, Ixion, Sisyphus, and Tantalus—derived from four prototypes painted by Titian for Mary of Hungary (also known as Mary of Austria, 1505–58). Tityos, like Prometheus, also endured the agony of having his liver eaten by two birds of prey (Matthiesen Catalogue 1985: 104). The Spanish word to describe this genre of painting was furor, literally meaning rage or fury. One set of these paintings was commissioned from Ribera, according to Sandrart, by Lucas van Uffel (1586–1637) of Amsterdam in 1632. Sandrart describes the painting of Ixion as showing him in gloomy Hell with snakes on his hands, body, and feet, bound fast to a great wheel and bitten, who unceasingly tormented in the hot steam by those raging, infernal

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Furies, all ugly naked old women with more snakes than hair on their heads, is turned around and tortured, whereby he screams terribly and wrings his snake-infested hands. The fingers on them seem to be cripsed [sic] with pain and therefore so horrible that Frau Jacoba von Uffel, when this great work of art was set up on the threshing floor at Amsterdam was so badly frightened that the next boy born to her had crooked, misshapen fingers, whereupon this picture, heartily disliked by this self-same family was banished at once and afterwards sent to Italy. —Du Gué Trapier 1952: 82–4 While apocryphal, this story points to the power paintings were perceived to possess in early modern Europe. Their potential to cure or hurt was taken very seriously by art theorists and writers. Francis Gage (2016) has recently drawn attention to the extent to which the physician Giulio Mancini’s (1559–1630) advice for art collectors was based on the belief that a painting could change a person’s character or alter their emotional state. Franciscus Junius, for example, wrote that beholders within chambers and galleries hung with paintings could be “purged of ‘violent’ and malicious passions such as envy, hatred, and blind love” (Gage 2016: 6). In the case of Ribera’s painting the opposite effect is claimed, that the painting deformed the unborn child. The agency of paintings is also acknowledged by Grégoire Huret (1606–70), a French engraver and theoretician, who argued that an artist should never depict frenzy since it can only injure the health of beholders with sensitive imaginations, “filling their spirit with horrible ideas” (Van Helsdingen 1978–9: 130). Gabriele Paleotti (1522–97), the Archbishop of Bologna, in his discourse on art also strongly disapproved of paintings of horror and torture, describing them as “fierce and horrendous pictures,” and adding that “they are not only not useful, but sadden greatly the human sense, like wounds, and are outside of every reason.”2 The fact that such paintings remained so popular, in spite of the opinions such as those expressed above, points to another important aspect of emotional responses to art and music during the seventeenth century, the concept of wonder. There was an aesthetic delight and astonishment felt by spectators in front of such paintings, in the oscillation between pity and compassion for the agony being endured by the subject, and in the admiration of the seductiveness and verisimilitude of the technique, that made such emotional engagement possible. As Georgievksa-Shine (2009: 57) expressed it, “[t]he real paradox is that precisely because of the familiarity of his source forms, Rubens can also compel his ideal viewer to understand Prometheus Bound as a work of art, and thus move from the vicarious experience of the hero’s suffering to a contemplation of his virtue as an artificer.” Beholding such images, then, was to experience an intense combination of pain and pleasure. This concept is made explicit by the poet Giambattista Marino’s (1569–1625) description of Guido Reni’s (1575–1642) Massacre of the Innocents. He wrote: What are you doing Guido, what are you doing? The hand that paints angelic forms now treats of bloody deeds? Do you not see that while you are revivifying the bloody throng of infants you are giving them new death? O compassionate even in cruelty, gentle artificer, well you know that a tragic event is also a precious object, and that often horror goes with delight.3 While Marino’s remarks reflect the legacy of Aristotle and his belief in the cathartic effects of tragedy, another element contributing to the vogue for visual representations of horror may have been Longinus’s On the Sublime, the first modern edition of which was published in 1554 in Basel by Francis Robortello. In 1652 it was translated into English,

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and the famous French edition, by Nicolas Boileau, appeared in 1674. In these editions, the sublime was defined as “a certain distinction and excellence in expression” whose effect on the reader was “not persuasion but transport” (Nitchie 1935: 586).

GIOVANNI PIETRO BELLORI’S IDEA, NICOLAS POUSSIN, AND CHARLES LE BRUN The increasing prominence of expression in art criticism at the time is apparent in Giovanni Pietro Bellori’s (1613–96) Lives of the Artists. His close friend Nicolas Poussin situated expression, not istoria, at the heart of invenzione, stating that “Novelty in painting does not consist primarily in the subject that has never been seen, but in good and novel arrangement and expression, and in this way the subject that was commonplace and stale becomes singular and new” (Bellori [1672] 2005: 339). Bellori’s discussion of emotion represented an essential weapon in his defense of history painting and classical art theory against the emergence of genre painting. Hence his definition of expression relied heavily on the affetti, which were not directly observed from nature but rather retained in the mind. He advocated a position between excessive fidelity to nature and an artificial mannered style of painting. The key to this middle ground lay in returning to the example of the ancients, who had excelled in this. In the Idea he wrote: We must furthermore consider that as painting is the representation of human action, the painter must at the same time retain in his mind examples of the affetti that correspond to these actions, just as the poet preserves the idea of the wrathful, the timid, the sad, the joyful, and likewise that of laughter and tears, of fear and of daring . . . . it is necessary to form an image of them (the passions) based on nature, by observing human emotions, and coordinating the movements of the body with the movements of the heart, in such a way that the former and the latter depend upon each other reciprocally. —Bellori [1672] 2005: 60 Largely absent from Bellori’s Lives was the humoral philosophy and cosmological charts that had characterized Lomazzo’s treatise, revealing that the century between them was informed by major new discoveries in science and medicine, in which traditional Hippocratic ideas were increasingly being challenged. The concept of the Galenic humoral body, with its concentration on the four bodily fluids of blood, phlegm, black bile, and yellow bile, was called into question by new dissection practices and a greater understanding of anatomy in the seventeenth century. L. J. Rather (1965: 1), for example, has argued that the middle of the seventeenth century witnessed a shift away from the belief that the heart and blood played a central role in the physiology of emotions, to a focus instead on the brain and the nerves, attributing the beginnings of this alteration to William Harvey’s (1578– 1657) demonstration of the circulation of the blood in 1628. Publications such as Everard Maynwaring’s (c. 1628–99) Pains Afflicting Humane Bodies (1682) also explicitly critique the Galenic theory of pain as humoral imbalance and argue that it should be understood instead as a distinct medical condition (Van Dijkhuizen and Enekel 2009: 7–9). For Bellori, the contemporary masters of the affetti were the artists Domenichino (1581–1641) and Nicolas Poussin (1594–1665), and he pitted these artists considered to

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have a seriousness of purpose against the realistic style of painting practiced by Caravaggio and Dutch and Flemish artists. Nicolas Poussin attempted a new way of expressing emotions in the Israelites Gathering the Manna (commissioned by his friend Paul Fréart de Chantelou (1609–94) in 1638), as he explains in a letter to a fellow artist, Jacques Stella (1596–1657): I have found a certain distribution for M. de Chantelou’s painting and certain natural attitudes which show the misery and hunger to which the Jewish people had been reduced, and also the joy and happiness which came over them, the admiration which had struck them, and the respect and veneration which they feel for their Lawgiver, with a mixture of women, children and men, of different ages and temperaments – things which will, I believe, not displease those who know how to read them. —Blunt 1995: 223. Blunt’s translation This painting (Figure 5.4) became canonical in French academic circles when it became the subject of a Conférence by Charles Le Brun (1619–90) in 1667. Le Brun identified nine antique models that lay behind the painting, including the most expressive of all, the Laocoon, while emphasizing that Poussin did not copy the statues, but rather infused aspects of their character into his figures. For Dempsey, this painting marks the point at which Poussin moved away from the traditional concept of the affetti as facial expression and gesture, to introduce the “critical concept called expression by the French.” He

FIGURE 5.4: Nicolas Poussin, Israelites Gathering the Manna, c. 1639, oil on canvas, 149 × 200 cm, Louvre Museum of Art, Paris. © RMN -Grand Palais (Musée du Louvre)/Mathieu Rabeau.

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observed that “affetti emblematise emotion but do not embody expression, according to which the viewer’s primary response derives from an instinctive, virtually emphatic identification with the character and forms of the figures themselves” (Dempsey 1988: liv). In other words, in this painting, Poussin relied on an interdependence and balancing of all of its parts to convey emotion and mood. From the point of view of the contemporary viewer, Israelites Gathering the Manna pales in comparison with the raw emotion Poussin conveys in his Landscape with Man Killed by a Snake, commissioned by Jean Pointel (d. 1660) in 1648 and illustrated here by the later engraving by Baudet (Figure 5.5). In the left foreground, in what appears to be a grotto, a body lies partly submerged in the water, with a large snake draped over it. A young man who has just noticed this horrific sight is shown in the action of running away. Another figure in the middle background, either noticing the movement or perhaps having heard him cry out, starts in surprise, her arms spread out in alarm, while in the distance the fishermen on the water continue to fish, oblivious to the drama. Alarm ripples through the painting from foreground to background in stages. The reaction of the young man to the gruesome sight is not just fear, but terror. The painting was recognized at the time as a representation of the passions, but seems to go beyond this to explore the concept of emotional contagion itself. It was painted just one year before René Descartes (1596–1650) published his treatise, The Passions of the Soul. In it Descartes argued that the body and soul worked

FIGURE 5.5: Étienne Baudet, Landscape with a Man Killed by a Snake (after Nicolas Poussin), 1701, engraving on paper, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam (RP-P-OB -73.302).

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together to produce passions, but that the seat of the soul was located in the pineal gland in the brain, and this was able to regulate bodily reactions through the animal spirits which acted as “messengers” flowing through the veins, nerves, and organs of the body. In spite of not including fear as one of the six “primitive” passions, Descartes’ description of fear closely parallels Poussin’s visual depiction: Furthermore, if that shape is very unusual or very frightful, that is, if it bears a close resemblance to things that have previously been harmful to the body, this excites the passion of apprehension in the soul, and thereupon that of boldness or that of fear and terror, according to the differing temperament of the body or the strength of the soul, and according to whether one has previously secured oneself by defense or by flight against the harmful things to which the present impression bears a resemblance. —Descartes [1649] 1989: 39 Poussin’s paintings and Descartes’ Passions of the Soul exerted a considerable influence on Le Brun’s Conférence sur l’expression générale et particulière, published in 1698,4 although it also drew on an earlier French tradition of scholarship into facial expression and appearance, which was divided into physiognomics (features of character) and pathognomics (transitory display of emotions) (Macsotay 2013: 24, n.5). In France Marin Cureau de La Chambre (1594–1669), personal physician to Louis XIV (1638–1715), produced his first volume of Les Caractères des Passions in 1640, followed by a second in 1647, the same year his Traité de la Connoissance des Animaux was published. In these treatises he discusses passions and their effects on facial expression and the body. What made Le Brun’s publication so instrumental was his application of Descartes’ ideas about the passions to facial expression in an attempt to provide a correlation between facial expressions and emotional states.5 Le Brun drew on Poussin’s treatment of the affetti in order to create a series of descriptions and engravings of the effect of elemental passions on facial expression. Le Brun’s attempts to “establish a finite repertoire of human expression by applying a mechanistic model of affective behaviour” (Allen 1998: 83) to some extent prefigures Paul Ekman’s experiments to isolate and identify facial expressions corresponding to universal emotions (see, for example, Ekman and Friesen 1978). The difficulty with both projects is that static images often do not convey emotion in the same way that transitional expressive states do; it is precisely the mobility of the face that communicates an interior emotional shift (Montagu 1994: 1–3). While painters were aware of this, and often careful to show either faces in transition or to incorporate a range of facial expressions within a painting to reveal a developing emotional response, Le Brun’s project, by definition, had to isolate one expression at a time. Le Brun argued that the eyebrows, more than the eyes, were crucial to how the passions were expressed in facial expression. He believed that two movements of the brows, up and down, corresponded to two appetites in the sensitive parts of the soul. In the irascible passions, such as fierceness and cruelty, the brows rise towards the center of the brain, while with other passions the brows sink down over the eyes. Simple passions are expressed by straightforward movements of the brow, while complex passions by composite movements. Horror resembled fright (Figure 5.6), in that in both cases the brows were knit, with the mouth half open, the corners of the lips drawn back and the face pale and livid (Le Brun [1734] 1980: 30).

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FIGURE 5.6: Robert Sayer, A frightened and an angry face, left and right respectively, after Charles Le Brun, c. 1760, engraving, Wellcome Library (32382i).

THE CATHOLIC REFORMATION AND THE EXPRESSIVE POWER OF DEVOTIONAL IMAGES The other major factor affecting both the production of art, and the representation of emotion within works of art during the period, was religion. While the Reformation had begun much earlier, the religious wars that afflicted Europe in the seventeenth century resulted in a hardening of positions within the Protestant and Catholic church with regard to images. While the Catholics reaffirmed the importance of images in devotional practice, the Protestants were wary of them. In some places, particularly France and parts of the Low Countries, they resorted to iconoclasm, itself an extreme emotional response to images. The Council of Trent, convened by the Roman Catholic Church in 1545 to discuss strategies for countering the Protestant heresy, took a formal position on images in its session of December 3, 1563, at the urging of the Cardinal of Lorraine, Charles de Guise (1524–74), who was concerned about the Huguenot destruction of monuments in France (Besançon 2000: 173).6 The Council’s decree discussing images and relics was directed specifically at bishops, and reinforced the role of images in Catholic devotion, arguing “that great profit is derived from all sacred images . . . and their salutary examples are set before the eyes of the faithful; that so they may give God thanks for those things . . . and may be excited to adore and love God, and to cultivate piety” (Council of Trent [1545–63] 1848: 235). The ruling came with provisos. Images should not inspire superstition or lust, and all lasciviousness should be avoided. Furthermore, there should be nothing that is “disorderly, or that is unbecomingly or confusedly arranged, nothing that is profane, nothing indecorous” (Council of Trent [1545–63] 1848: 236).

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The vague nature of the decree meant that it was left to reforming bishops such as Cardinal Gabriele Paleotti (1522–97) to further refine the attitude of the church to paintings. Paleotti’s Discorso intorno alle imagini sacre e profane was first published in 1582. It is remarkable for his awareness of the beholder, constantly reminding the painter of his or her existence, and dividing them into different types. He was particularly mindful of illiterate viewers, and argued that “[p]ictures . . . serve as a book open to the capacities of everyone, because they are composed in a language common to persons of every sort” (Paleotti [1582] 2012: 115). He goes on to stress that while books take time and use up lamp oil, paintings can convey “their message to persons very quickly,” and that they do so with the “utmost sweetness and recreation” (115). With regard to affect (affetto) Paleotti argues that there are three parts of cognition required to understand painting, the first of which is delight (diletto). Delight in pictures is, for Paleotti, a given, as he remarks that “there is no one so stupid and senseless that he does not feel great pleasure from beautiful pictures” (111–2). He goes on to explain that the nature of this delight is threefold: sensual, rational, and spiritual, the third of which brings “greater and more perfect delight” and is superior to the others (111–4). In discussing the ways in which paintings can move viewers, Paleotti writes: To hear the story told of the Martyrdom of a saint, or the zeal and constancy of a virgin, or the passions of Christ himself—those are things that really hit one inside. But when the saintly martyr practically materializes in front of your eyes in vivid colour, with the oppressed virgin on one side and Christ pierced by nails on the other—one would have to be made of wood or stone not to feel how much more it intensifies devotion and wrenches the gut. —Paleotti [1582] 2012: 119 Also important for Catholic reformers was the legibility of art, particular for the illiterate. The Jesuit Luis Richeôme (1544–1625), for example, in his book Le Peinture Spirituelle explained that the form of things came to the mind through the senses, and thus their naturalistic portrayal was associated with “truth” (Viladesau 2008: 208). Renewed emphasis on meditative tracts such as Ignatius of Loyola’s (1491–1556) Spiritual Exercises saw paintings functioning explicitly as prompts for imagining the Passion of Christ. One such example is Alessandro Turchi’s (1578–1649) The Lamentation, c. 1617 (see Figure 5.7). On an intimate scale intended for private devotion, and painted with delicacy and an intensity of colour, it shows the dead Christ propped up to be viewed against a white shroud, in a dramatic nocturnal scene lit with the single torch held up by an angel, the light picking out his lean body. There is very little blood, but the twisted nails and the crown of thorns in the foreground indicate its devotional function, and the Virgin Mary stretching out her arms in a gesture of grief provides a model for the viewer’s response. The expressive power contained in such images was designed to enable worshippers to reach increasingly intense emotional states. As Gian Battista Armenini (1530–1609) wrote in relation to convents: In the nuns’ cells it is good to [have sacred images] on the walls and on panel . . . And so that their emotions are aroused more intensely, I would have them painted only by the best masters. In fact, because the stories are so vivid and the nuns are so full of piety, they would be more moved by suffering and inflamed by the fire of charity and divine love. —Armenini [1587] 1988: 196

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FIGURE 5.7: Alessandro Turchi (called Orbetto), The Lamentation, c. 1617, oil, heightened in gold, on copper, 26.19 × 20.96 cm, Minneapolis Institute of Art, The Ethel Morrison Van Derlip Fund 66.47. Photo: Minneapolis Institute of Art.

Another version of this subject, now in the Borghese Gallery, is even more dramatic.7 Turchi uses a grey slate support that forms the background to shut down any chance of recession, thus foregrounding the figures and enhancing the dark mood of the painting. Ultimately both works by Turchi reveal the influence of Annibale Carracci’s (1560–1609) Pietà, now in the Museo Nazionale di Capodimonte, Naples. In this painting the Virgin’s face is a mask of grief as she regards her dead son, cradling his head with her hand (see Figure 5.8).

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FIGURE 5.8: Annibale Carracci, Pietà, c. 1600, oil on canvas, 156 × 149 cm, Museo Nazionale di Capodimonte, Naples. Photo: Alamy.

She holds out her hand, palm up in a gesture of despair, which effectively conveys her anguish, and in the process models the beholder’s emotional reaction to the work. Carracci painted this subject repeatedly, but this example was immediately recognized as canonical and was extensively copied. The themes of death and grief are also communicated to us by the putti, one of whom holds Christ’s limp, grey hand, while the other looks directly out at the viewer while touching the Crown of Thorns. The combination of facial expressions, gestures, and colouring all contribute to create an image of great pathos. In Spain the rise in affective piety with an emphasis on increasingly emotive and vivid portrayals of the sufferings of Christ, Mary, and the saints often took the form of polychrome, three-dimensional, and life-size wooden statues. Compared with other European religious works of art, these statues appear macabre, in their emphasis on the extreme suffering of Christ, showing him bruised, bleeding, and emaciated. The combination of their size, and the addition of human hair, glass eyes, and painted flesh ensured they were closely analogous to the human body; an effect that would have been enhanced as some were carried on floats in religious processions and viewed by candlelight. They were designed explicitly to elicit strong emotional responses from the viewer, including compassion and sorrow. An example of one of these sculptures is Gregorio Fernández’s (1576–1636) Dead Christ, in the Church of San Miguel, Valladolid, (Figure 5.9)

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FIGURE 5.9: Gregorio Fernández, Dead Christ, Church of San Miguel, Valladolid. Photo: Wikimedia Commons (Luis Fernández García).

which shows Christ’s body after his death, with blood still pouring down his chest from the wound in his side, his facial features sunken, eyes and mouth half-open. It is remarkable for its proximity to human expressivity and it is interesting that Calvinist agitators of the previous century in the Low Countries had laid particular emphasis on the destruction of sculptures, which they considered more dangerous than paintings because their three-dimensional qualities reinforced the impression that they were real (Westerman 1996: 48). As Freedberg (1991:325) noted, “once the body is perceived as real and living . . . we invest it with life and respond to it accordingly.” There is a close relationship between such statues and religious texts such as Luis de Granada’s (1504–88) The Book of Prayer and Meditation (first published 1554), which amplifies some of Loyola’s teachings in the Spiritual exercises. He writes in detail of the range of emotions the devout should feel when meditating on Christ’s passion (or indeed when gazing on such a sculpture), which included compassion, guilt, sorrow for one’s sins, sorrow for the suffering of Christ, and grief for his pain.

SENSUAL AND EROTIC IMAGES Images of Christ, the Virgin, and saints proliferated in all Catholic parts of Europe in the seventeenth century, and their emotional resonance lay in their perceived power to intervene in people’s lives, advocating on their behalf with God and protecting them against illnesses. Strategies used by artists to make devotional images as naturalistic as possible could, however, have unintended consequences. One of the most popular saints during this period

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was St. Sebastian, who together with St. Roch, was prayed to as a plague saint. St. Sebastian was increasingly depicted from the fifteenth century onwards as a handsome youth, naked except for a loincloth, his beautiful flesh marred by an ever-diminishing number of arrows, exemplified in the paintings of him by Guido Reni (see Figure 5.10). Bette Talvacchia has argued that the convention of an accentuation on Sebastian’s physical beauty came about by means of an analogy with Apollo, based on their shared iconography

FIGURE 5.10: Guido Reni, Saint Sebastian, c. 1620–30, oil on canvas, 170.1 x 131.1cm, DPG 268. By Permission of the Trustees of Dulwich Picture Gallery, London.

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of the arrow, an analogy that was then extended to include their physical appearance (2010: 234). Pamela Jones (1999: 35), on the other hand, has drawn attention to the influence of religious dramas such as S. Bastiano sacra rappresentazione, which describe his physical beauty. For Catholic reformers, the danger of this emphasis on St. Sebastian’s youth and magnificence was that it could arouse emotions other than pious ones. Cardinal Federico Borromeo (1564–1631) lamented the fact that St. Sebastian was always painted as a young man (Brown 2001: 282), while Giovanni Andrea Gilio da Fabriano insisted that artists should remain faithful to the actual suffering and torture experienced by the saints, which in the case of St. Sebastian meant that he should be “full of arrows resembling a porcupine” (Gilio 1564: 87–8). Richard Spear has argued it was precisely the quality of grazia in Guido Reni’s paintings of St. Sebastian, arguably the same quality that lent them an erotic dimension, that made them so successful as devotional images (Spear 1998: 136). Catholic reformers were particularly worried about what they described as “lascivious” images, with the Tridentine decree on images stating “one should avoid all that is lascivious, so that images are not painted or adorned with a beauty that arouses carnal desires” (translated in De Clippel 2001: 201). This was a problem especially with images of female saints. The penitent Mary Magdalene was usually depicted in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as a beautiful young woman in the desert, unmarked by years of austerity and fasting. In two paintings of her by Ludovico Cardi (called Il Cigoli) (1559– 1613) she appears completely naked, covered only by her hair (see Figure 5.11). Both versions of the painting were painted for men, with the larger destined for Cigoli’s friend Carlo Guidocci (or Guidacci). The point of departure for Cigoli, as for other seventeenth-century artists, was the famous painting by Titian, which conveys both her sensuality and the remorse she is experiencing (Figure 5.12). This combination of physical beauty and female distress gave the painting a powerful erotic charge, found also in other subjects involving naked, distressed women, such as Susanna and the Elders, or Andromeda.8 As Dickey has argued, male viewers would have found erotic pleasure, as well as compassion, in the emotional distress and pain of these female protagonists (2010: 58). Erotic paintings could also be subject to iconoclasm. In France the widow of Michel Particelli d’Emery (1596–1650), shortly after her husband’s death in 1650, ordered her servants to destroy Guercino’s (1591–1666) Bacchus and Ariadne because of its excessive nudity (Madocks 1984: 545). The eroticism of this particular painting had earlier troubled Cardinal Francesco Barberini (1597–1679), who was reluctant to send it to Protestant England: “I have received the painting but, both for the story and for the way in which the painter has chosen to depict it, the painting appears to me to be lascivious. I hesitate to send it for fear of further scandalising these Heretics, especially since the subject of the work was chosen here in Rome” (Madocks 1984: 545). Elsewhere he suggested it should be covered by a curtain and kept in a locked room. The painting had originally been commissioned by Queen Henrietta Maria (1609–69) for the ceiling of her bedroom, one of the places Giulio Mancini, in his Considerazioni sulla pittura, written around 1620, recommended hanging sexually provocative pictures. He also suggested they should be covered. Sometimes nudes were also painted over at a later date, as had happened to Michelangelo’s Last Judgement in the first fervour of the Counter-Reformation. André Félibien’s Entretiens (1685) informs us that the three naked graces in Rubens’s painting of the Education of the Virgin, from the series painted for Maria de’ Medici and destined for the Luxembourg Palace in Paris, were clothed at some point after they were painted:

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FIGURE 5.11: Ludovico Cardi (called Il Cigoli), The Penitent Magdalene, 1598, oil on canvas, 149.9 × 114.9 cm. Courtesy of Sotheby’s.

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FIGURE 5.12: After Titian, Penitent Mary Magdalene, c. 1550–1750, oil on canvas, 114 × 97 cm, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam (SK-A-595).

It is true that these three figures [The Graces] are not the same today as they once were; because after several years they were covered with light garments; & for reasons of Christian modesty, one sought to withdraw not from the eyes of the learned, but from the pleasure of the sensual, that which Art had rendered so skilfully in the bodies of these three Graces, which are surely the most beautiful ever made by this painter. —De Clippel 2011: 209

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As De Clippel (2011: 212) observes, this passage reveals that, like Paleotti, Félibien distinguishes between the learned and the “sensual” (that section of the audience Paleotti calls “idioti”). Without the education to appreciate the artistic merit of such pictures, the latter risked responding to them as they would to an actual naked person, as an object of lust. It seems that in the view of Artemisia Gentileschi (1593–1651/3), her lover, Francesco Maria Maringhi, belonged to the “sensual” category. In an exchange of correspondence to which Patrizia Cavazzini (2014: 132–3) has recently drawn attention, Artemisia wrote to him in a fit of jealousy having heard that he was frequenting other women. He replied assuring her that he was betraying her “only with his right hand” (Cavazzini 2014: 132). Somewhat pacified, Artemisia wrote back, urging him not to use “to this end” the selfportrait she had sent him as he would be committing a grave sin, which Cavazzini interprets as meaning that this self-portrait showed her full-length and naked, and she is urging him not to masturbate over it.

DUTCH GENRE PAINTING AND THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY The third identifiable shift in the seventeenth century in relation to art and emotion was the emergence of an independent art market. While this had in fact begun earlier in the Low Countries, the sheer scale of art production in the seventeenth century in the Dutch Republic meant that the range of artistic experimentation was unprecedented. Not only did artists develop new genres and sub-genres of painting, and specialized as never before in different aspects of portraiture and still-life painting, they also experimented in creating works of art that entered new emotional terrain. One of the most popular categories of painting in the United Provinces (the modern Netherlands) was the painting of scenes from everyday life, known as “genre painting.” While its foundations can be found in the work of artists such as Pieter Brueghel the Elder (c. 1525–69) in the previous century, it was not until the 1600s that it became a widespread and popular art form. The study of genre painting has attracted a wide range of theoretical viewpoints. In particular, the extent to which Dutch paintings were intended to be moralizing in intent is contested by scholars. Interpretation of humour is complicated by the fact that it often represented a breach or subversion of norms of behaviour and was designed to both amuse and instruct, but how audiences responded may also have depended on their social status. Frans Hals (1582/3–1666) could be said to have specialized in the smile, and it is never entirely clear to what extent audiences would have smiled back. If they did so, it was probably at his characters rather than with them. Hals’s Young Man and Woman in an Inn, (also known as Jonker Ramp and his Sweetheart), painted in 1623, illustrates the complexity of humorous Dutch painting (see Figure 5.13). It powerfully communicates a sense of joyfulness and ebulliance, as we see a young man, caught in a moment of celebration, emphatically raising his glass in a toast, and laughing while the young woman beside him smiles out at the viewer. Her reddened cheeks and his boisterous gesture suggest they have been drinking, and the presence of the innkeeper behind them identifies the setting as a tavern. The young man’s toasting gesture has led some scholars to conclude that the painting actually represents the Prodigal Son of the New Testament squandering his inheritance. Seymour Slive has linked specific

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FIGURE 5.13: Frans Hals, Young Man and Woman in an Inn, (also known as Yonker Ramp and his Sweetheart), 1623, oil on canvas, 105.4 × 79.4 cm, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (14.40.602).

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motifs like the toasting to the engraved title page of W. D. Hooft’s farcical play Hedendaeghsche verlooren soon (The Contemporary Prodigal Son), with its depiction of Juliaen (the contemporary prodigal son) carousing with a prostitute (Franits 2004: 24). Franits has observed that the play itself does not moralize in a heavy-handed way and in contrast to his biblical counterpart, the contemporary prodigal son is not genuinely remorseful about his profligate ways (2004: 25). Could viewers have simply enjoyed such a scene without recognizing it an allegory of the prodigal son? Possibly, but the smile itself was loaded with cultural significance at the time, as Angus Trumble (2004) has demonstrated. A wide-open smile like this one, which includes showing the teeth, was an indicator of lasciviousness and other base desires and was usually restricted to the depiction of children, too innocent to have learned the conventions, or prostitutes, drunks, and gypsies who were perceived to be outside of societal norms (Hill 2004: 109). In fact Hals’s Gypsy Girl, now in the Louvre, with her sideways glance, sly grin, and prominently displayed breasts, serves to reinforce this point,9 as does Hals’s portrait of Malle Babbe, a title which could be translated as Silly Betty or Mad Meg of Haarlem (Liedtke 2007: 299), and whose manic grin, showing her teeth, reflects her status as an alcoholic and possibly also mental patient, confined to an institution. Writing in 1703 St. Jean-Baptiste de la Salle wrote that baring the teeth was entirely contrary to decorum, “which forbids you to allow your teeth to be uncovered, since nature gave us lips to conceal them” (Trumble 2004: 1). Together with the context of the inn, the smiles in Young Man and Woman in an Inn would have coded this scene for the viewer as one representing lust. Jan Steen’s (1626–1679) Doctor’s Visit is painted with a more calculated expectation that the viewer will bring a certain level of sophistication to the viewing experience (see Figure 5.14). It shows the doctor, a comical figure in his outmoded costume, pronouncing on the nature of the ailment of his patient. Slowly burning in the brazier is the ribbon dipped in urine, a form of diagnosing pregnancy beloved of quack doctors. Directly above the patient is a painting of Venus and Adonis, another reference to the nature of her plight, while Steen also inserts Frans Hals’s Jester Pickle-Herring, at top right. A later engraving of the Hals painting identifies him as Peeckelhaering, a buffoon famous in European farces, and known for his impressive capacity for drinking, “induced by his similarly immense appetite for salty herring”. His gap-toothed grin reinforces the overall comic qualities of this character. By means of these intertextual references Steen directs the viewer’s response, reinforcing the humorous nature of the scene with Hals’s character, and including also a young boy with the arrows who looks directly at the viewer. The spectator therefore is encouraged to make connections between the Venus in the painting and the boy as Cupid, as well as enjoying the comic elements of the lovelorn girl and her incompetent quack. Dutch seventeenth-century genre painting was a phenomenon which reached far beyond the borders of the Low Countries. Partly because of the sheer numbers of these paintings, and partly because of their quality and diversity, they exerted a strong influence on the art of both England and France in the following century. Eighteenth-century French artists turned their back on the depiction of extreme, violent and heroic passions to follow the example of everyday subject matter seen in Dutch painting, and focus on a new repertoire of subjects. Aesthetic thought in this period was consumed with the question of whether aesthetics “is best considered a distinctive form of knowledge, an emotional experience or an exercise of the imagination that is more like play than it is like knowledge or emotion—or whether it can only be understood

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FIGURE 5.14: Jan Steen, Doctor’s Visit, c. 1658–62, oil on panel, 49 × 42cm, Wellington Collection, Apsley House, London. © The Wellington Collection, Apsley House, London.

through a combination of all three of these approaches” (Guyer 2014: 7). In 1709 art theorist and critic Roger de Piles (1635–1709) published Cour de Peinture par Principle avec une Balance des Peintres (The Principles of Painting with a Balance of Painters), in which he deliberately uncoupled painting from literary theory, arguing that the visual medium was unique, and that rather than being read, it should be comprehended as visual sensation, with pleasure at its core. The goût du plaisir characteristic of Louis XV ’s reign is reflected in the development of new genres of painting, like the fête galante, or Boucher’s pastoral subjects. Both forms of painting were closely linked to the theatre, and to aristocratic court culture in France.

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With the regular establishment of Salon exhibitions in France in 1737, other artists became popular, such as Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin (1699–1779), and Jean-Baptist Greuze (1725–1805). Greuze concentrated on stirring the emotions of his public, using the family unit as his affective material. In doing so he appropriated the language of history painting, specifically rhetoric and the affetti, for a new context. He also employed narrative and dramatic action in a way that Denis Diderot (1713–84) described as linking together “events in ways that would enable the writing of a novel” (Jones 2014: 72). Greuze’s painting of Filial Piety (Figure 5.15), depicting a family gathered around their paralyzed and elderly father, was extremely popular with Salon crowds. Diderot documented their reactions, including one woman who cried: “Oh, my God! How he touches me! If I look at him any longer, I think I will cry” (Kavanagh 1996: 243). For Diderot, this was a “moral” painting, imbued with the same noble sentiments more commonly found in history painting, containing the power “to touch us, to instruct us, to correct us, and to encourage us to virtuous action” (Kavanagh 1996: 243). In conclusion, the period from 1600 to 1780 saw people engage emotionally with paintings and other forms of art on an unprecedented scale, as artists used all their skills to elicit emotional responses from their viewers. As grand, dramatic, and highly religious imagery gave way to more secular subject matter in the eighteenth century, in part due to the development of more open and democratic venues for the reception of art, there was a growing awareness that art was something that could be enjoyed for its own sake, regardless of whether it was morally improving. By the mid-eighteenth century, there was a consensus that the emotions aroused by art could act as an important catalyst for the free play of the imagination. The celebration of art as something intrinsically valuable in and of itself in the eighteenth century represented a fundamental shift in the reception of art.

FIGURE 5.15: Jean-Baptist Greuze, Filial Piety, 1763, oil on canvas, 115 × 146 cm, Hermitage Museum, St Petersburg. Photo: Alamy.

CHAPTER SIX

Literature JOHN D. STAINES

THE PASSIONS OF RHETORIC, POETICS, AND AESTHETICS How well (poore heart) thou witnesse canst, I loue, How oft my grief hath made thee shed forth teares, Drops of thy dearest blood; and how oft feares Borne testimony of the paines I proue? What torments hast thou suffer’d, while aboue Ioy thou tortur’d wert with racks, which longing beares: Pinch’d with desires, which yet but wishing reares Firme in my faith, in constancie, to moue. Yet is it said, that sure loue cannot be, Where so small shew of passion is descri’d: When thy chiefe paine is, that I must it hide From all, saue onely one, who should it see. For know, more passion in my heart doth moue, Then in a million that make shew of loue. —Mary Wroth, Pamphilia to Amphilanthus, Sonnet 36 ([1621] 1992) In this sonnet from her sequence Pamphilia to Amphilanthus, appended to her romance The Countess of Montgomery’s Urania (1621), Mary Wroth (c. 1586–c. 1653) speaks in the voice of Pamphilia, “all-loving,” about her passion for the unfaithful Amphilanthus, “lover of two,” a loose allegorical representation of her adulterous love for William Herbert. Pamphilia addresses her heart, the seat of the passions, as a witness that can testify to the world about her grief. Tears are the outward signs, “drops of [the heart’s] dearest blood,” the proofs of her torments. “Move” is a key word in her poem, coming at the final rhyme of the opening octave, right before the sonnet’s volta or turn. “To move” suggests the flowing motions of the passions within the body, but it is also a term from rhetoric for how language stirs the emotions and moves an audience towards persuasion. At the volta, though, Pamphilia enters the skeptical minds of others and realizes that the heart does not reveal its secrets so easily, particularly when she must hide her feelings to conform to the rules of social propriety and decorum that govern a woman’s behavior: “Yet is it said, that sure love cannot be, / Where so small shew of passion is descri’d.” Passion here connotes the pain and suffering of emotion, a passive experience inflicted upon a body and soul, particularly here in the meaning, not seen before the 1590s, of intense love and desire (Auerbach [1941] 2001; OED: “passion, n.”). 111

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“Descry” has a double meaning, encompassing perspectives of both the subject and object. How can one “descry” or observe a passion in someone else when it is an interior state? And how can one “descry” or describe a passion in a way that can both prove its intensity and move others to share the feeling? The final couplet resolves the problem by bringing back the word “move”, rhymed with “love,” a sound that has run as a thread through the poem: love, prove, above, move, move, love. The lover insists that the passion moving in her hidden heart is greater than any “shew of love” that a “million” others can put forth as proof. Wroth’s sonnet belongs to a rhetorical and poetic tradition of speaking about desire rooted in the sonnets of Francesco Petrarca (1304–74) and transmitted to her through sequences like Astrophil and Stella (written c. 1582) by her uncle, Philip Sidney (1554– 86). There, the poet’s wit, the creative use of words and rhetorical tropes, was given precedence over the sorts of clear and direct expressions of feeling preferred in the eighteenth century. Understood through rhetoric, poetry was a public experience of passion with ethical and political engagements, never walled off in a private space. We can see this in Wroth’s ambivalence about making her private passion public: she writes about an experience that she otherwise keeps hidden, making a public show of a private passion, an act that her final couplet shows is suspect. Reading in such a partially literate society remained public; not only did people regularly experience literature as oral performances in churches, theatres, and other public spaces, texts were often read aloud and shared among family and friends. Throughout this period, however, reading was becoming ever more a private activity, with readers retreating to closets and private studies whose very existence in architecture is a function of new European understandings of the private, individual self. A century after Wroth, in Samuel Richardson’s 1741 epistolary novel Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded, Mr. B—attempts to control the heroine by invading her private reading and writing space, and she experiences that violation of intimacy as a threatened rape. That episode reflects the increasing privatization of both reading and the emotions it generates. Although the novel continued to be read aloud and shared communally, it was becoming the record of an individual consciousness experienced by an individual reader, much along the lines of a private letter between friends. Most of the social experience came after, as readers shared and discussed their experiences among friends and colleagues in salons, coffeehouses, and other communal and public spaces. Richardson (1689–1761) actually began writing his novel as an instructional manual for young women to learn to write letters, and the epistolary form that shaped the early novel created the immediacy and intimacy that early readers came to expect as they eavesdropped upon characters’ (apparently) open expressions of emotions. Reading became a private, subjective emotional experience in sympathy with a character imagined to be real. This chapter will look at the developing literature of sympathy that reaches its peak in the modern novel. When we today speak of literature and the literary, we are using categories that did not exist in quite the same way during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (for an overview, see Eagleton 1996: 1–46). Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary of 1755 defines “literature” as “Learning; skill in letters” (1755: 1212). In some ways, that category was more expansive than today, capable of including not just works of fiction and poetry but history, natural sciences, philosophy, and other texts that would now be put in different disciplines. In other ways, it was more exclusive, particularly when it came to vernacular writing. In 1612 Thomas Bodley famously warned his librarian about collecting “idle bookes, & riff raffes,” popular entertainments that included “Almanackes,

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plaies, and proclamacions” (Bodley [1612] 1926: 219). Much of what today counts as “literature,” from plays to novels, would have been kept out of Oxford University’s collections as “riff-raff.” The word “literature” makes a value statement about writing that counts as learning, that counts as worthy of being read, and during these two centuries, there was a shift from valuing texts grounded in rhetoric and politics to those grounded in a separate, distinct category of the imagination. There would also be a change in who gets to decide those values, with power moving from patrons in the church and nobility to a market of middle-class readers shaped by the taste-makers of what was called “polite society.” In 1600, “poetry” could refer specifically to verse or more generally to fiction, but certainly the poet’s vocation was seen as a public one, understood through rhetoric and patronized by royalty, nobility, churches, and governments. By contrast, by the nineteenth century, literature would come to be valued for its practical uselessness, for having no purpose beyond itself. Literary critics and philosophers would create a new category to name this experience, the “aesthetic,” a concept that has its origins in the eighteenth-century middle-class print market and the salons, coffeehouses, and magazines of polite society (Abrams 1985). Aesthetic judgment, which for much of the eighteenth century was known in English as a critic’s “taste,” concerns the reader’s disinterested emotional response to the object, with no concern as to its intended purpose. Whereas Aristotle and Horace and their Renaissance heirs defended poetry by claiming that it was dulce et utile, sweet and useful, art that could instruct while pleasing, aesthetics approaches poetry and all the fine arts as having no purpose beyond art itself. Writers and readers would embrace this new understanding of literature fully in the nineteenth century as a means of rebelling against the utilitarian norms of the industrial age, but it has its origins in the increasingly individualized emotional experiences of the poetry and narrative fiction of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, writing that was becoming a commodity for sale in the new print market. This chapter will thus follow a shift from viewing literary texts as self-consciously artificial, rhetorical expressions of emotional experiences to viewing them as imagined worlds that should appear real, natural, and individualized to readers who, paradoxically, are buying mass-produced printed books. Those illusions of reality hide their rhetorical and political nature as they create individualized emotional lives for characters that individual readers are supposed to feel sympathy for, though today as we read and analyze them, we should remember their underlying rhetorical and political functions. To follow these developments, I will look at a few passions—pity, compassion, melancholy—and in particular the development of a new literary emotion, the sublime, and a new genre, the novel. Recent scholarship has wrestled anew with the problem framed by Wroth: how does language mediate between inward, private experience and the outer, public world? Even as words create affective states and turn them into emotions that can be recognized and analyzed, they fail to adequately communicate the interior experience to others (for a useful overview of the implications of affect theory to such questions, see Seigworth and Gregg 2010). In thinking through these problems, recent literary critics have built upon Norbert Elias’ claims about how the new rules and standards for regulating the body, developed during the later Middle Ages by the European upper classes, led to actual changes in affective states (Elias [1939] 2012; Paster 2015; see also Stone 1965; Stone 1979). We can see that influence in the work on the humours and the body in scholars like Gail Kern Paster (1993; 2004) and Michael Schoenfeldt (1999) and in important collections like Reading the Early Modern Passions, edited by Paster, Katherine

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Rowe, and Mary Floyd-Wilson (2004), and Politics and the Passions 1500–1850, edited by Victoria Kahn, Neil Saccamano, and Daniela Coli (2006). Some of these studies show how the embodied self was confronted by external disciplinary forces of the sort posited by Foucault, while others have brought psychoanalytical theory back into literary criticism. Kahn in particular has shaped the conversation by exploring the ethics and politics of communicating interior experience, building off Jürgen Habermas’s view of the rise of modernity as the incomplete triumph of a public sphere of reason (Habermas [1962] 1989; but see Landes 1988 for an alternative version of a female public sphere). Informed by Albert Hirschman’s account of the passions in early capitalist thought, critics working in this area have complicated Habermas’ model of communicative reason and action by showing the place of passions, bodies, and rhetoric in the origins of modernity (Hirschman 1977; Habermas 1987: 294–326; Kahn 1990; Kahn 1994; Kahn 2004b; Staines 2004; Staines 2009). Early modern literature engages these questions directly by using language not only to represent private, interior emotions but to move audiences to feel them. Looming over seventeenth-century readers were Plato’s challenges to poetry and rhetoric in general and pathos in particular (Delehanty 2013: 1–24). In 1600, the dominant answer to such criticisms remained Aristotle, starting with his Rhetoric since much of Renaissance literary criticism, like the medieval before it, was rhetorical criticism (Aristotle 1991; Aristotle 1984; Eden 1986; Eden 1997; Cockcroft 2003; Garver 1994; Shugar 1988). Increasingly, as a result of the efforts of sixteenth-century Italian humanists, critics turned also to Aristotle’s Poetics, which they interpreted through Horace’s Ars poetica, with his insistence that poetry be dulce et utile (sweet and useful) and instruct while delighting (Javitch 1999). Renaissance critics are less consistent than eclectic in their use of those authorities, as in Philip Sidney’s fusion of Aristotle’s and Horace’s defenses of poetry: “Poesy therefore is an art of imitation, for so Aristotle termeth it in this word mimesis—that is to say, a representing, counterfeiting, or figuring forth—to speak metaphorically, a speaking picture—with this end, to teach and delight” (Sidney [1595] 2002: 217). Poetry, which for Sidney includes prose fiction, is mimetic but also persuasive. To persuade is to move, a position found in rhetoricians like Cicero and Quintilian and their Christian heirs. Indeed, to move passionately (Latin movere) had long been the primary goal of Christian rhetoric (Shugar 1988: 211). For Sidney, poets are distinguished by their ability not only to teach but to move, which makes them superior to the philosophers: “But to be moved to do that which we know, or to be moved with desire to know: hoc opus, hic labor est” (226). The special power of poetry comes from its ability to move the passions and thereby the mind towards truth and virtue, to ravish the heart with song and pull the reader towards the good (cf., James 1997: 208–24). Neoclassical literary critics like Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux (1636–1711) have long been known for developing elaborate rules for writing, contrasted with the relative emotive freedom of the later Romantics, but recent scholarship has reminded us that the neoclassical rules had an emotional purpose. The rules were seen as the best way to produce a mimetic vraisemblence that would enable the emotional response that could bring about ethical and moral growth in an audience (Delehanty 2013: 11–24; Lyons 1999). Boileau expressed those rules in his Art Poétique (1674), to which he appended a translation of Peri hypsous [On the Sublime], a first-century Greek rhetoric book, attributed to Longinus, that was largely unknown to European critics before the first print edition of 1554 and only widely read after the appearance of Boileau’s

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vernacular version. This discovery of the Longinan sublime marks an important transitional movement away from a poetics that, still grounded in rhetoric, concerns the best techniques of moving the passions of readers to an aesthetics that posits literature as a separate and distinctive realm of subjective human emotional experience (on the development of the sublime, see Monk 1935; Norbrook 1999; Sedley 2005; Delehanty 2013; Shaw 2006; Doran 2015). Boileau, in his Préface to his Traité du sublime, distinguishes between the “sublime style” and “the Sublime,” by which (he says) “Longinus means . . . the extraordinary and marvelous that strike during a speech and that make a work capture, ravish, transport. The sublime style always needs grand words, but the Sublime can be found in a single thought, in a single figure, in a single turn of phrase” (Boileau 1966: 338, my translation). The effect comes in a flash of wonder and amazement, and Longinus claims it goes beyond persuasion: “For the effect of genius is not to persuade the audience but rather to transport them out of themselves . . . [A] well-timed flash of sublimity shatters everything like a bolt of lightning and reveals the full power of the speaker at a single stroke” (Longinus 1995: 163). This lightning image is captured in the title page to a 1636 Latin translation (see Figure 6.1). Mercury, god of eloquence, soars through the heavens, with the shining sun and bolts of lightning representing the heights and power of the sublime, “tonitrua Mentes Humanas motura” (“thunderclaps are about to move human minds,” my translation). In A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757, 1759), Edmund Burke (1729–97) surpasses Boileau by making feeling the primary judge of those ideas. Instead of assessing beauty by traditional rules or standards like proportion or identifying the sublime in the greatness of the verse, the subject matter, or the poet’s genius, Burke argues that the reader’s emotional responses provide the grounds for judgment. Beauty is to be judged by the viewer’s emotional response to the object of desire, while the sublime, identified with the experience of horror and terror, is rooted in the passions of “pain and danger” (Burke [1759] 2015: 40). For Burke, the terror of the sublime causes us to face death and human limits and thereby recognize the limits of reason (White 1994: 28–31). Burke, one of the century’s great orators, would use the sublime and beautiful to powerful effect, as in his sympathetic portrait of the suffering Queen Marie Antoinette in Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), and, as Stephen White (1994: 84) argues, the sublime is very much at the heart of Burke’s politics, particularly Burke’s concern to define an “authentic sublime” as “an experience that vivifies our sense of finitude, whereas the false sublime deadens it, inserting in its place a human infinitude.” Nonetheless, literature would increasingly be treated as its own category of experience separate from politics. For instance, in his essay “Of Tragedy,” first published in the same year as Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry, David Hume (1711–76) argues that a certain distance is necessary for the “unaccountable pleasure, which the spectators of a well-written tragedy receive from sorrow, terror, anxiety, and other passions, that are in themselves disagreeable and uneasy” ([1777] 1987: 216). As Neil Saccamano (2006: 194–5) shows, Hume then praises Clarendon (1609–74) for omitting the execution of King Charles from his history of the English Civil War, which he wrote immediately after the event, since his audience was too deeply involved in it to feel anything but pain, whereas later generations “would regard [it] as the most pathetic and most interesting, and, by consequence, the most agreeable” (Hume [1777] 1987: 224). His own History of England (1754–61) contains a famously moving account of the king’s trial and execution, but by then a century had passed. The political implications of feeling

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FIGURE 6.1: Title page to Longinus, Dionysii Longini Rhetoris Praestantissimi Liber de grandi loquentia sive Sublimi dicendi genere Latine redditus (Oxford, 1636), Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

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sympathy for a king are left unexamined as Hume presents those emotions as natural responses to a great tragedy. A sublime terror can only give pleasure when the reader’s responses are disinterested and distant from the passions of politics and religion and other sources of pain and danger, “at certain distances, and with certain modifications,” as Burke describes ([1759] 2015: 34). Whereas Burke gives an empirical account of sublime experiences, Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) in his Critique of Judgment (1790) uses the feeling of the sublime to point beyond the senses to the realm of the ideal. As Philip Shaw (2006: 88) explains, “Sublimity for Kant is the feeling that arises whenever we, as subjects, become aware of the transcendental dimensions of experience.” This sublime is a completely subjective experience, “contained not in any thing of nature, but only in our mind” (Kant [1793] 1987: I.ii.§28.264: 123). The feeling of the sublime is the “negative pleasure” of experiencing “unboundedness”—in contrast to the beautiful, which is the experience of bounded forms (I.ii.§23.245: 98). That apprehension of the limits of the mind in comparison to nature leads Kant to generate a paradox: “Sublime is what even to be able to think proves that the mind has a power surpassing any standard of sense” (I.ii.§27.250: 106; Kant’s italics). The sublime shows that reason can transcend the senses and the unthinking natural world. If Burke’s sublime points to the limits of reason, Kant’s reestablishes reason’s superiority over senses and imagination (Sedley 2005: 153). Robert Doran (2015: 287) demonstrates that Kant marks the final stage in the development of the sublime as “a secular version of religious transcendence.” Such transcendence establishes literature as a distinct emotional and subjective experience. Literature is no longer justified as a teacher of moral lessons but as an ecstatic spiritual event, with the poet as the priest of sublimity. But while Kant would place the sublime outside rhetoric, I argue for a return to focusing on the language that gives readers access to the sublime. Words, and the rhetorical arranging of them, are what make it possible to discover emotions and communicate them to others. In doing so, writers also make their readers confront the challenges of knowing and speaking our feelings. Poetry’s struggle to find the words capable of expressing and sharing passions would generate one of the primary principles of eighteenth-century literature and philosophy— sympathy.

SUBLIME, PITIFUL, AND CONTAGIOUS PASSIONS IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY Traditional faculty psychology was suspicious of the role of the irrational in cognition, rendering rhetoric and poetry problematic for both the ancient and early modern worlds. Using reason and intellect, the mind could solve problems and judge ideas, while the body passively suffered emotions, which threatened to overwhelm those higher faculties unless properly managed (James 1997). Imagination was not the creative force of genius celebrated by the Romantics but the faculty mediating between the senses and the soul, between the body and the intellect; through imagination, sense experiences were given shape as images that allowed the mind to remember and compare them (Lyons 2005). Rhetoricians such as Quintilian, though, took a somewhat different position, conceiving of imagination as the rhetorical technique of using words to make absent things vividly present before the eyes of an audience, those vivid images or visions (visiones) generating emotions in others (Lyons 2005: 22–31). During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the feeling of the sublime would provide a way of experiencing

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and sharing truths offered by the imagination’s mediations between the body’s senses and the soul’s intellect. In his Discourses on the Heroic Poem (1594), Torquato Tasso (1544–95) holds that wonder is the effect provoked by epic poetry as it works to delight and instruct readers in virtue, “the wonder that almost stuns us” (Tasso [1594] 1973: 16). Indeed, many Italian critics, building on Aristotle’s Poetics and Rhetoric and the newly discovered Peri hypsous, emphasize wonder and the marvelous as necessary attributes of all poetry, effects created by metaphor and the ingenious use of language (Rebhorn 1995: 29–34). The poet as wonder-worker or prophet was an ancient tradition (for example see Sidney [1595] 2002: 214), but it can be seen most dramatically in the religious poetry of the period, particularly in writings coming out of the conflicts that divided European Christians from the Reformation through the Thirty Years’ War. For example, in Les Tragiques (1616), the Huguenot poet Théodore-Agrippa d’Aubigné (1552–1630) represents the chaos and terror of the French Wars of Religion in an epic that mixes genres, modes, and styles: inspired dream vision, ecclesiastical and political history, martyrology, lyric encomium, apocalyptic prophecy, and angry denunciation of tyranny. The engaged, impassioned, sublime style of his narrative voice implicitly rebukes the controlled beauty of the Pléïade poets like Pierre de Ronsard (1524–85), whose poetry serves the established order by rarely representing or even acknowledging the on-going struggle between orthodox authority and reform. In Book IV, Les Feux [The Fires], d’Aubigné tells of the sufferings of various Protestant martyrs like the Englishwoman Anne Askew: Le juge se dépite, et lui-même retend La corde à double noeud; il met à part sa robe, L’inquisiteur le suit; la passion dérobe La pitié de leurs yeux; ils viennent remonter La géhenne, tourmentés en voulant tourmenter; Ils dissipent les os, les tendon et les veines, Mais ils ne touchent point à l’âme par les geines. —d’Aubigné 1995: 194, ll. 172–8 The judge is vexed, and he tightens the rope In a double knot; he takes off his robe, The inquisitor follows him; passion steals The pity from their eyes; they once again Wind up the rack, tortured by the desire To torture; they destroy bones, tendons, veins, But they do not touch her soul with the groans. —My translation D’Aubigné brings the reader into the torture chamber to witness the violent passions of tyrants, the sublime effect created both by their fury and by the small realistic details like them “tighten[ing] the rope / In a double knot.” Vexed by the martyr’s refusal to compromise her faith, the interrogators fall into a rage, “passion steals / The pity from their eyes.” La pitié is a Christian value, related etymologically to pietas, piety. Pitilessly and impiously, these agents of the Catholic Church wind up the rack, called in French “la géhenne,” Gehenna, Hell. They are themselves in the hell they are creating for the martyr, “tourmentés en voulant tourmenter,” tortured by the desire to torture—torture centered around a will (voulant) that has lost control to passion. D’Aubigné’s verse indignantly

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condemns tyranny, represented as the passion of anger holding dominion over pity and justice (on the anger of tyrants, see Braden 1985; Bushnell 1990). But the martyr’s soul is separate from the pain of her moans, the soul transcending the body’s pain. By Hume’s Enlightenment standards of taste, d’Aubigné’s poetry cannot be considered sublime to the people involved in the religious wars of the seventeenth century since it can produce no aesthetic pleasure for them, only pain and anger; only later readers untouched by the threat of war and torture can feel that. However, by the standards of rhetoric and poetics, d’Aubigné’s poetry does achieve sublimity as he shocks his readers with feelings of divine justice and pity. John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667, 1674) was likewise born out of a religious civil war. An official apologist for the regicidal republican government of the English Commonwealth whose life was very much in danger at the Restoration of the monarchy, Milton (1608– 74) could no longer write directly about politics, but the political, religious, and military conflicts of his lifetime remained the subtext generating his sublime epic. Milton’s friend and colleague Andrew Marvell (1621–78) famously describes his sublimity: “At once delight and horror on us seize, / Thou sing’st with so much gravity and ease; / And above human flight dost soar aloft / With plume so strong, so equal, and so soft. / The bird named from that Paradise you sing / So never flags, but always keeps on wing” (Marvell [1674] 2003: 183, ll. 35–40). Significantly, this celebration of the poem’s lofty sublime style springs from an anxiety over how and whether Milton could write the sublime truth: “the argument / Held me a while misdoubting his intent, / That he would ruin (for I saw him strong) / The sacred truths to fable and old song” (182–3, ll. 5–8). As David Sedley (2005) shows, the sublime begins with skepticism about the human ability to know the highest truths and then offers alternative ways of experiencing them, combining aspiration and humility. The title page to the 1636 translation of Peri hypsous gives one visualization of the ambition and danger of the sublime. To the left of eloquent Mercury, a bird soars towards the sun, “In Sublime feror” (“I am carried into the high heavens”), while to the right, Phaeton crashes to earth under the tag, “Animos aequabit Olimpo” (“He will raise their souls to the heights of Olympus,” my translations, see Figure 6.1). The sublime inspires flight, but it is dangerous, reaching towards heaven but potentially leading to ruin. Marvell says he first feared that Milton might have “perplexed” the truth (l. 15), but then credits Milton with the true sublime: “Where couldst thou words of such a compass find? / Whence furnish such a vast expense of mind? / Just heaven thee like Tiresias to requite / Rewards with prophecy thy loss of sight” (183–4, ll. 41–4). Genius appears in sublime words and sublime prophetic vision, vast words and vast mind that point to another source for truth outside the human, just as God rewards the blind poet with special insight. Milton himself invokes this image of the sublime flight in his first invocation of his muse, whom he audaciously identifies with God’s Holy Spirit: “I thence / Invoke thy aid to my advent’rous Song, / That with no middle flight intends to soar / Above th’Aonian Mount” (Milton [1674] 1957: 1.12–15). His flight encompasses both the high sublime style of his poetry and the transcendent vision that will take him, and his readers, over Mount Helicon, home of the Muses. Even as he reaches for the heights of sublime and passionate rhetoric, however, Milton calls readers to be suspicious of such flights like those of the great orator Satan: The Tempter, but with show of Zeal and Love To Man, and indignation at his wrong, New part puts on, and as to passion mov’d,

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Fluctuates disturb’d, yet comely, and in act Rais’d, as of some great matter to begin. —9.665–9 Satan’s show of indignation follows the advice of ancient rhetoricians about forming a persuasive ethos. As Aristotle (1991: 154) observes in the Rhetoric, “necessarily those are more pitiable who contribute to the effect by gestures and cries and display of feelings and generally in their acting [hypokrisis].” His use of the vexed word that is the root of the modern word “hypocrisy” is a reminder of both the necessity and suspicion of acting and rhetoric in the European tradition. Cicero, Quintilian, and Longinus all insisted that the good orator was also a good man—but Satan is a powerful orator made of lies, acting out a part he does not believe. To emphasize the political implications, Milton offers an epic simile comparing Satan to “some Orator renown’d / In Athens or free Rome, where Eloquence / Flourish’d, since mute” (9.670–2). The surviving manuscript of Peri hypsous ends with an account of how the silencing of democratic and republican institutions under the Roman Empire led not just to a loss of political freedom but to a decline in eloquence and genius, something that worries Milton too (Longinus 1995: 305). Satan’s particular power is in producing sublime experiences that are not the divine truth but ruinous parodies of them, beginning with his performance of ethos: “So standing, moving, or to highth upgrown / The Tempter all impassion’d thus began” (9.677–8). The temptation of Eve replays the sublime speeches Satan gave at the outbreak of the war in heaven, which move the passions of unwary readers. To understand such ambivalence towards the passions and their representations, it is worth considering Erich Auerbach’s history of the concepts denoted by the words pathos (Greek), passio (Latin), passion (English and French), and Leidenschaft (German). Auerbach charts a movement from a general sense of “feeling” or “sentiment” to a specific connotation of intense, stormy emotion (Auerbach [1941] 2001; Elsky 2001). Renaissance Europe inherited a word with conflicting and contradictory meanings. In their roots, the words convey a sense of passivity, of things done to the body and mind, while reason was the active force (for a further complication of that model, see James 1997). For Aristotle, pathos was more or less neutral, while for the Stoics, passio was a state of turbulence and loss of control that the wise man avoided. Medieval Christians carried that ambivalence with them, yet the late medieval fascination with the human sufferings of Christ increasingly associated passion with not just Christ’s death but with ecstatic meditations upon it. God the Father is impassive, though he can be moved by prayer, while the human Son suffers like all humans and can feel pity for them. Writers like the Spanish mystic and theologian St. Teresa of Ávila (1515–82) build Baroque spiritual practices and elaborate, extravagant rhetoric and poetry while exploring the paradoxical passions of the Godhead and the human. Teresa’s popular and frequently printed and translated accounts of her mystical experiences and her manuals on meditation and prayer inspired a wide range of readers. Common men and women read her as a guide to deepen their prayer practices, while writers like the English poet Richard Crashaw (c. 1613–1649) emulated the force of her voice and imagination. All were inspired by, if often troubled by, her accounts of full-bodied, passionate raptures: A cherub “seemed to pierce my heart several times so that it penetrated to my entrails . . . It is not bodily pain but spiritual, though the body has a share in it—indeed, a great share” (Teresa [1588] 1960: 275). The body suffers to its very bowels the experience of divine love, a spiritual experience that is suffered as pain and joy throughout the whole body. That emotional experience, a passion at the boundary

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of body and soul, pleasure and pain, agape and eros, whose extremes point to a transcendent knowledge, would gain the name “sublime” during the next century. Although such extremes of emotion and style profoundly shape and even define the Catholic Baroque, Protestant poets also tested the limits of language, feeling, and experience. This mystical passion, which is suffered in both the physical world and the spiritual, produces the modern senses of the word, where one can say that one “feels a passion” in the sense of an intense love and desire. It is an inward experience but also one that can reach outward, whether socially or transcendently. Pity and compassion were among the most contested of passions because those intense feelings blur the distinctions between private and public, individual and communal. Although Renaissance moralists admired the practical advice of Stoics like Seneca, they had to salvage mercy and compassion, attacked by him in De clementia, in order to fit their idea of an incarnate God who feels compassion for his people. As French Catholic preacher Jean-François Senault (1599–1672) proclaims near the end of his Use of Passions (1641; English trans. 1649: 508), “[W]ho dares blame a Passion, to which we ow our Innocence? . . . and shall not we adore a Vertue, which Jesus Christ hath pleased to consecrate in his own person?” In the form of Christ, God suffers pity in the flesh, bodily. Pity, compassion, and the passions in general have the sanction of God and can, if used properly, bring one to virtue. In feeling pity, the body is stirred up and excited, a physical experience expressed in the metonymy used by, among others, the French Jesuit Nicolas Caussin (1583–1651) in his account of the passions in La Cour Sainte [The Holy Court] (1637–38): “the bowels of compassion,” “bowels of mercy,” or often just “the bowels” (Caussin 1650: I.i.1; I.iii.90; IV.98; cf., Biblia sacra 1642: Luke 1:78, Phil. 1:8, Phil. 2:1, 1 John 3:17; and the Douay-Rheims translation, Holy Bible 1914). The expression “bowels of compassion” encapsulates an intense experience, the direct witnessing of an event that moves the entire body and soul of a spectator. The poet and Anglican priest John Donne (1573–1631), for instance, invokes its power at the conclusion to his final sermon, Death’s Duel (1632), which he wrote and preached aloud before the king at Whitehall Palace in the weeks before he died. Imagine, as his contemporary Izaak Walton ([1675] 1966: 75) describes it, “when to the amazement of some beholders, he appeared in the Pulpit, many of them thought he presented himself not to preach mortification by a living voice: but mortality by a decayed body and a dying face . . . [they] saw his tears, and heard his faint and hollow voice.” Theatrically displaying a body ravaged by cancer, he performs a piteous scene that evokes the compassion of God: There now hangs that sacred body upon the cross, rebaptized in his own tears and sweat, and embalmed in his own blood alive. There are those bowels of compassion, which are so conspicuous, so manifested, as that you may see them through his wounds . . . There we leave you in that blessed dependency, to hang upon him that hangs upon the cross, there bathe in his tears, there suck at his wounds, and lie down in peace in his grave, till he vouchsafe you a resurrection, and an ascension into that kingdom which he hath purchased for you with the inestimable price of his incorruptible blood. Amen. —Donne [1632] 1990: 416–17 In these final words to his sermon, Donne points to a crucifix that represents the passions of The Passion, Christ’s suffering and death, putting them right before his audience’s eyes

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and thereby reinforcing the passions set out by his rhetoric. He wants the congregation to look intently upon the bowels of compassion conspicuously spilling out through the wounds in Christ’s side. The body is real and present, just as the suffering body of Donne himself was present in the pulpit. The sermon is a mimetic crucifixion, ending with a pun on “dependency” so that we are not merely dependent upon the Cross for salvation but literally, as in the Latin, “hanging there” upon Christ’s body hanging on the cross. The imagined experience moves the passions of the audience to feel and know compassion. The sermon, of course, was most moving to the spectators who watched Donne’s pale, emaciated body deliver it. He was truly feeling the pains of dying (unlike Milton’s hypocritical Satan), and his body’s presence made his argument all the more immediate and moving (on the bowels and knowledge, see Hillman 1997). As a written text, the sermon loses that part of the effect, though the printer adds a portrait of Donne’s dead body to supplement the words, a portrait for which, Walton says, Donne posed while wearing his own death shroud (see Figure 6.2). Paired with that image, the written descriptions of God’s bowels put visions in the readers’ minds so that they imagine touching that body and feeling his compassion, the mind and body moving ever closer to a God who is (for Donne) physically real to both the soul and the senses. This experience of compassion was communal. In the oratorical performance of the sermon and later in its printed form, members of the audience were moved together by reason, passion, and their imaginative identification with the suffering body of Christ. Senault (1649: 508) describes mercy as “a sanctified Contagion, which makes us sensible of our Neighbors sufferings; we ayd him to comfort our selves: and we help him at his need, to free our selves from the Grief we feel.” The sermon spreads the contagion of compassion throughout the congregation and, when printed, throughout the reading public (on modern theories of affect contagion and Donne’s sermon, see King 2016). This contagious compassion was the bond that held men and women together, and any questions about the nature and effects of compassion thus hit at their conceptions of the nature of political order. As Sara Ahmed argues in her study of the emotions in contemporary political rhetoric, the object of the emotion, not the emotion itself, circulates when such contagious feelings spread through a group. If “emotions can move through the movement or circulation of objects” (Ahmed 2015: 10), we can think of the bowels circulating about the body of the church, the rhetorical image circulating and generating affective responses. In Ahmed’s modification of the contagion model of affect (2015: 9–11), the contagion does not necessarily spread the same way to every person touched by an object; individual bodies may resist and feel other affects than the intended pity. That tortured body hanging on the cross might provoke not just pity but fear, horror, and even disgust. This contact can also be exclusionary even as it creates a community. Donne the apostate Catholic himself engaged in polemical warfare for the Protestant church during the European religious civil war, while conflicts against Turks and Muslims set them up as the hated opponents to the Christian community of feeling. Those who feel differently about the bowels are excluded from the sharing of pity and compassion. When supporting his revolution against the king, Milton would worry about the contagious power of pity to create political communities at odds with reason (that is, his view of God’s reason), famously condemning the image of pity in the frontispiece to Eikon Basilike. The Pourtraicture of His Sacred Majestie in his Solitudes and Sufferings (1649), which purported to be the meditations and self-defense of the recently executed King Charles. The engraving presents the kneeling king, hand on his heart in the pose of melancholy, asking for pity, the grief apparent on his face as he puts down his royal crown

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FIGURE 6.2: Frontispiece to John Donne, Deaths Dvell, or, A Consolation to the Soule, against the dying Life, and liuing Death of the Body (London, 1632), Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

and reaches for Christ’s crown of thorns (see Figure 6.3). Readers of the “Royal Image” (Eikon Basilike) are asked to feel pity for the martyr as God’s sublime light shines down upon him. The book became one of the great bestsellers of the century, its contagious piteous images creating a royalist nation around the king’s martyred body and his moving words of compassion for his people. Such pity brings out the power, and danger, of

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FIGURE 6.3: Frontispiece to Eikon Basilike. The Pourtraicture of His Sacred Majestie in his Solitudes and Sufferings. Whereunto are annexed His Praiers and Apophthegms ([London], 1649), Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

literature in an age of mass literacy and popular politics, whether in the riots of European religious civil wars or in the experiments in republican and revolutionary governance in England, the Netherlands, France, and elsewhere during these two centuries. With the explosion in the number of printed pamphlets on controversial and current events that came at the start of the Civil War and the collapse of royal censorship, which

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Milton celebrated in Areopagitica (1644) for its ability to bring the world closer to the truth, rational inquiry was mixed with and often overwhelmed by the most violent appeals to the emotions. Attacking Charles in Eikonoklastes (1649, 1650), Milton charges that such appeals manipulate the emotions of “an inconstant, irrational, and Image-doting rabble; that like a credulous and hapless herd, begott’n to servility, and inchanted with these popular institutes of Tyranny, subscrib’d with a new device of the Kings Picture at his praiers, hold out both thir eares with such delight and ravishment to be stigmatiz’d and board through in witness of thir own voluntary and beloved baseness” (Milton [1650] 1962: 601). His reference to the stigmata, the miraculous appearance of Christ’s wounds on a saint rejected as Catholic superstition by most Protestant believers, recalls the power of a sermon like Donne’s to create the image of the crucifixion and make an audience feel it and be moved to join to it. The pleasure of feeling pity for an unworthy man, a tyrant and hypocrite, enchants and ravishes the rabble with a false sublime just as Milton’s Satan will. Such a passion threatens the ideal republic he envisions. Yet, despite his fears about the ability of pathos to overpower the logos he identifies as God, Milton’s religious and poetic sensibilities could not completely reject pity, compassion, or passion. Much of Paradise Lost concerns working out the place of the passions in human ethics and politics. As Michael Schoenfeldt (2004) argues, Milton “locates passion, with all its disturbing and delicious pleasures, at the center of male and female experience” (45). Although the passions do lead Adam and Eve astray—Eve eats of the fruit out of love of knowledge, freedom, and Adam, and Adam eats out of love for her—none of those passions are, in themselves, evil. Adam’s Paradise is a place of passion: “transported I behold, / Transported touch; here passion first I felt, / Commotion strange, in all enjoyments else / Superior and unmov’d, here only weak / Against the charm of Beauty’s powerful glance” (Milton [1674] 1957: 8.529–33). The sublime wonder of Paradise comes from being “transported . . . transported” by senses and passions, moved by beauty and the “commotion strange” of passion, which here connotes the modern sense of suffering intense feelings of desire. Raphael does warn Adam against excessive passion: “[T]ake heed lest Passion sway / Thy Judgment to do aught, which else free Will / Would not admit” (8.635–7). The problem stems not from the emotions in general or even from the particular passion of desire but from allowing passion to gain excessive “sway” over the will so that it is rendered unfree. Even before the fall, being human means learning about and through the pleasures and pains of the passions. Likewise, humans are saved by the freely offered mercy of the Son, who feels pity for humanity: “in his face / Divine compassion visibly appear’d, / Love without end . . .” (3.140–2). The Father is logos and reason, speaking the law, but the Son embodies compassion, a word that appears once more near the end of the epic as Adam hears about death’s impact on his descendants: Sight so deform what heart of Rock could long Dry-ey’d behold? Adam could not, but wept, Though not of Woman born; compassion quell’d His best of Man, and gave him up to tears A space, till firmer thoughts restrain’d excess, And scarce recovering words his plaint renew’d. —11.494–9 In feeling compassion, Adam resembles the Son, who has interceded out of compassion for humanity, an act represented twice, in Book 3 and at the opening of Book 11. Adam has

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the compassion of a woman, though he is “not of Woman born.” The firm gender division of Adam and Eve, male and female, blurs in the passions. Compassion provokes tears, but after that emotional release, Adam reasserts moderate control over the passions and launches back into his “plaint,” a lamentation for human loss. Passion gives birth to poetry. The final images of the epic mix sublimity with pathos and sympathy: They looking back, all th’ Eastern side beheld Of Paradise, so late thir happy seat, Wav’d over by that flaming Brand, the Gate With dreadful Faces throng’d and fiery Arms: Some natural tears they dropp’d, but wip’d them soon; The World was all before them, where to choose Thir place of rest, and Providence thir guide: They hand in hand with wand’ring steps and slow, Through Eden took thir solitary way. —12.641–9 Milton ends by evoking the romance trope of wandering, and wondering, which will lead Adam and Eve to something new and different, a domestic love that generates a new politics and even a new literary genre. Romance had, as a genre, been largely associated with the passions of royalism, stories of love that forge love for the monarch (Kahn 2002; Kahn 2004a; Staines 2009). That was one reason why an enraged and frustrated Milton had attacked Charles’s Eikon Basilike two decades earlier: that piteous romance, he argued, seduces unwary readers to love the king and monarchy. Here the romance establishes a private and domestic republic of sympathy and dialogue, not a monarchy. Milton is setting out in the direction of the modern novel, the genre of sympathy. The early novel La Princesse de Clèves (1678) by Madame de Lafayette (1634–93) is a royalist romance, yet its account of destructive private passions resists the tendency of romance to retreat from history, politics, and the public. In a story that begins like a light romance of the pleasures and pains of love, Mary Queen of Scots, Reine Dauphine of France, appears as a foil to the title character, the unmarried Mlle de Chartres and future princess. Mary, “perfection, both in mind and in body,” represents the beauty and vitality of the court of her father-in-law King Henri II , yet she is also a vain and frivolous gossip (Lafayette [1678] 1992: 24). At Henri’s court, “Love was always allied to politics and politics to love. No one was untroubled or unmoved: each considered how to advance, to flatter, to serve or to harm; boredom and idleness were unknown, since everyone was engaged in intrigue or the pursuit of pleasure” (34). But Mary creates for her followers a fantasy world removed from the political intrigues of the mature women of the court, the king’s wife, Catherine de Medici, and the king’s mistress, Diane de Poitiers, two women who use love and desire to manipulate politics. “The younger women, in search of frivolity and love, paid court to the Reine Dauphine” (34). Mary is the patron of intrigues that consist solely of “frivolity and love” (“la joie et la galanterie”) (Lafayette [1678] 1990: 278). Mary’s silly, thoughtless intrigues take place with the reader’s full knowledge of the tragic ending to her history, that Henri will die in a jousting accident, that his death will create a political power vacuum in which Catholic and Protestant factional conflicts will explode into civil war, that Mary’s young husband will die after just a year on the throne, that Mary’s attempts to manage the religious and political passions of Scotland will fail, and that she will be overthrown, forced into exile, and eventually executed for plotting against Elizabeth. When in a melancholy mood the Reine Dauphine expresses her doubts

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that her happiness will last, Mlle de Chartres replies “that these sad forebodings were so ill-founded that [Mary] would not feel them for long, and that she had no doubt the Queen’s good fortune would be as real as it appeared” (Lafayette 1992: 38). The reader recognizes the irony, but the naïve Mlle de Chartres, unschooled in the ways of love, politics, and history, has only her innocent faith in superficial appearances. Neither character can know that their loves will fail, nor that their pleasant world is about to suffer its own tragic fall and disintegrate into civil war. Perhaps they should. The entire plot revolves around the tragic consequences of placing inward passions above duty and communal feeling. The Prince of Clèves sees the beautiful girl and is “so moved by her beauty and modest demeanour . . . that one might also say he conceived an extraordinary passion and regard for her from that very moment” (31). The prince wins her in marriage, but since she cannot return his love, he remains tormented by his “violent and uneasy passion” (41). The princess finally falls in love, but with another man. Even though she never commits the physical act of adultery, she feels obligated to tell her husband the truth of her emotions: “I beg you a thousand times to forgive me, if my feelings displease you, but at least I shall never displease you by my actions . . . Guide me, have pity on me, and love me still, if you can” (113–4). Her husband replies, “Have pity on me yourself ” (114). Neither has control over their own passions, yet each asks the other to feel pity for them. That sentimental pity, however, is not a unifying compassion or fellow-feeling (see Ibbett 2018: 144–58). The princess’s tragedy comes to its climax just as the French national tragedy strikes with Henri’s sudden death. She retreats in solitude to contemplate a painting of her lover, to worship it like an icon “with the intensity of meditation that only passionate love can induce” (148). Unbeknownst to her, her lover is watching her, feeling his own delight that “cannot be described” (148). These idolatrous passions—parodies of the sublime raptures found in Teresa of Àvila, or Milton, or even the portrait of King Charles—isolate each in their own imagined world. Convinced by misapprehended appearances that his wife has then betrayed him, her husband is gripped with passions of jealousy and grief that sicken him in body. With his death, the princess is left consumed with guilt and retreats to a convent. Their inwardness is morbid and solipsistic, and their failure to join together in compassion, just as their own nation breaks into orgies of killing, results from their failure to train their emotions in sympathy. Lafayette’s first readers engaged in spirited arguments over her characters’ emotional responses and moral choices and over the realism (vraisemblance) of her representations of them. In the next century, the writers of the novel would take as their mission not only the realistic representations of their characters’ emotions and minds but the training of their readers’ emotions and sympathies.

MELANCHOLY SYMPATHIES: THE GENIAL AND MORBID PASSIONS OF POETS AND NOVELISTS The romance genre’s cultivation of compassion prepared the way for the novel in the next century as readers turned to the new form to experience the feelings of others. While earlier philosophers like Plato would have found emotional intimacy with fictional creatures to be dangerous—an objection that many early novelists implicitly recognized by calling their fictions “true histories”—the explorations of emotion and sentiment in eighteenth-century philosophers like Hume and Adam Smith (1723–90) legitimized the sentiments of the developing novel (see Mullan 1988). Smith grounded his Theory of Moral Sentiments (first published in 1759) on sympathy or “fellow-feeling” and thus on the imagination since

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“Though our brother is upon the rack, . . . our senses will never inform us of what he suffers. They never did, and never can, carry us beyond our person, and it is by the imagination only that we can form any conception of what are his sensations” (Smith [1790] 1984: 9). Pity and compassion for the body suffering torture on the rack—think here of d’Aubigné’s description of Askew’s torment—can only be achieved through the imagination so that our responses to “those heroes of tragedy or romance” become the models for moral sympathy (Smith [1790] 1984: 10). Sentiment is social, which implies that even the private experience of reading is sociable in that it trains the reader to participate in larger communities of feeling. The Scottish philosophers developed their ethics and then aesthetics out of an individual’s imagination of the inner feelings of others. For instance, after the disappointing initial reception of his Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40), Hume spent much of the rest of his career writing popular versions of his philosophical inquiries, including collections of essays that advocate for a sociable public sphere of arts and letters, of men and women gathered together in polite conversation. Literature works, he writes in the essay “Of Eloquence,” by appealing to the passions of readers: “The principles of every passion, and of every sentiment, is [sic] in every man; and when touched properly, they rise to life, and warm the heart” (Hume [1777] 1987: 107). Nonetheless, even as literature became understood as the shared experience of feelings, the fear that passion could overwhelm and mislead readers remained a concern. This anxiety was brought out not just by pity but by melancholy. Melancholy was the favorite passion of poets, scholars, and writers, the focus of texts ranging from John Donne’s various self-presentations as (in turn) a melancholic lover, erotic poet, railing skeptic, defender of suicide, and serious Christian to the creation by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832) of the sensitive young rebel Werther. Melancholy was both charismatic and morbid, a personality trait that produced poetic sensibilities while also leading those minds into despair and self-destruction. Its contagious nature made sympathy for it both a pleasure and a danger. Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy is the period’s great obsessive exploration of melancholy and its causes and cures, published in five ever-expanding editions between 1621 and 1638 (see Figure 6.4). Only death would end his investigations, with his final thoughts and revisions appearing in print posthumously in 1651. Burton (1577–1640) opens with a satiric letter to the reader written in the voice of Democritus Junior, his alter ego, who explains, “I write of melancholy, by being busy to avoid melancholy” (Burton [1651] 2001: 20). A melancholic disposition inclines one to write, with active writing being the cure for the illness. Democritus Junior’s railings at human folly and weakness are followed by encyclopedic coverage of the medical literature, detailing melancholy’s many causes and cures and all its various kinds. Early modern investigations into the melancholy humour are notable for their skepticism, as they inevitably raise questions and doubts about the body and its emotions. Beginning with the incommensurability of Galenic and Aristotelian accounts of the humours, as Drew Daniel (2013) has explored, Burton and others must question their conflicting, confused traditions in light of experiences real and imagined, like the humours they believe they feel in their bodies and their (e)motions. Melancholy is a quality of character rooted in the body itself, and for the seventeenth century, a melancholy character would likely be a mixture of the genial melancholy of the Neoplatonic scholars and the morbid melancholy of the Galenic physicians (Trevor 2004). Melancholy writers chart their attempts to understand that balance, and that imbalance, which shape their experiences of the world. The melancholic imagination digs ever inward, its endless searches revealing the morbidity at the heart of the scholarly imperative to know oneself. Melancholy writers

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FIGURE 6.4: Title page to Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy (London, 1638), Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

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take Hamlet’s claim all too seriously as a psychological and poetic challenge: “I have that within which passes show” (Shakespeare [1604] 1997: 1.2.85). Laurence Sterne’s novel Tristram Shandy (1760–7) is the great parodic monument to that quest to show the feelings inside. The narrator basically asks: Why am I melancholy? How am I melancholy? And how do I write down and communicate these feelings to you? The novel resists narrative explanations even as it provides them, beginning literally ab ovo in a parodic refutation of Horace’s advice about starting in medias res and rambling amiably for many chapters before even getting to the narrator’s birth. Along the way, Tristram offers several possible explanations for his melancholy like his father being interrupted at the moment of procreation by an ill-timed, irrelevant question, which unbalanced his humours; being accidentally christened “Tristram”—“Melancholy dissyllable of sound!” (Sterne [1760–7] 1965: 1.19.42)—instead of the magical “Trismegistus”; or, when urinating out a window as a child, having the sash fall down and circumcise him. All explanations are inadequate. Emotion resists representation in words, a point made visual as he expresses grief for the death of the parson Yorick, whose epitaph is stolen, like the character’s name, from Hamlet: —not a passenger goes by without stopping to cast a look upon it,——and sighing as he walks on, Alas, poor YORICK ! The next page is printed all in black (1.12.24–6; see Figure 6.5). That character’s name and the familiar line from Shakespeare evoke Hamlet’s own attempts to understand his

FIGURE 6.5: The death of Yorick from Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (London, 1760–7, vol. 1), Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

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melancholy, and, while they begin to move the reader to sympathy, the words fail, needing the void of blackness to express the melancholy grief. Just as there is no end to grief, no way to express its meaning, there is no possible end to such an investigation. Just as Burton’s Anatomy grew and grew, the project ending only because the author died, so Sterne’s novel grows volume by volume without making any narrative progress, nine volumes published in five installments over seven years that end with readers being told the entire and hopelessly incomplete story is just about “a COCK and a BULL” (9.33.496). Indeed, the only possible closure to such a melancholy narrative is death. Yorick, now Sterne’s alter ego, reappears as the narrator of his Sentimental Journey through France and Italy (1768). The novel parodies popular travel books while also expressing a half-serious, half-jocular embrace of the conventions of the sentimental novel: “Tis going, I own, like the Knight of the Woeful Countenance [from Don Quixote], in quest of melancholy adventures—but I know not how it is, but I am never so perfectly conscious of the existence of a soul within me, as when I am entangled in them” (Sterne [1768] 1984: 113). Indeed, for Yorick, feeling “such indescribable emotions within me” becomes the empirical proof that “I am positive I have a soul” (114). I feel, therefore I am. In this way, Sterne, more usually associated with Lockean empiricism, is like Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–78), for whom “Self-knowledge is based on feeling” (Starobinski 1988: 180). The entire melancholic journey is a search for love but also a flight from death—for the author too, since Sterne himself was dying of consumption. The narrative breaks off in a darkened bedroom, in the middle of an unspeakable act: So that when I stretch’d out my hand, I caught hold of the Fille de Chambre’s END OF VOL . II . —Sterne [1768] 1984: 125 It is likely that Sterne intended to complete two more volumes, though he died before he was able to do so (Sterne [1768] 1984: 237n.). As it stands now, the novel ends with his hand in the place Yorick has been both desiring and fearing throughout his journeys. There in the darkened room, in the Fille de Chambre’s END , her unnamable body part, melancholy meets the sublime and ridiculous. Melancholy here is the feeling of loss for an object that is sought—love, the womb, the end, death—but cannot be named. The empty black page. Goethe’s Die Leiden des Jungen Werthers (1774, 1787) likewise ends the only way its narrative can, with Werther’s suicide. Werther embodies the German Sturm und Drang movement, which celebrated extremes of emotions against the Enlightenment rule of reason, and in many ways, such a campaign belongs to melancholy and its endless quest to know and speak the dark passions inside. Die Leiden—the root of Leidenschaft, passion or ardor—can be translated as “suffering” or “sorrows,” and that word puts Werther in the tradition of those who suffer martyrdom for their feelings. Early in the narrative, Werther writes his friend, You ask should you send me my books?—For heaven’s sake, my dear friend, do no such thing! I have no wish to be directed, encouraged, fired up, any more. My heart is in quite enough ferment of itself. I need lulling, and I have had that in abundance from my Homer. How often he has helped me calm the upheaval of my blood, for nothing you have ever encountered is quite so uneven and unsteady as this heart of mine. But I don’t need to tell you that, since you, my dear friend, have so often had the burden of watching me shift from sorrow to extravagance and from sweet melancholy

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to harmful passion [von süßer Melancholie zur verderblichen Leidenschaft]. But I tend my heart now like a sick child; grant its every wish. Keep that to yourself—there are people who would begrudge it me. —Goethe [1787] 2012: 7–8; Goethe [1787] 2004: 129 In reading this account of reading—which is itself presented as a letter written to another that we are invited to spy upon—we see and participate in the sentimental reading practices fostered by the modern novel. Reading affects the passions, just like a drug. The right poem, like Homer’s, is capable of calming and restoring order and balance, while the wrong books will just fire them up. “Sweet melancholy” (“süßer Melancholie’) is both a great pleasure and a potential harm, leading to dangerous passions of suffering and sorrow (“verderblichen Leidenschaft”). A decade earlier in Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime (1764), Kant had praised the melancholic temperament for its sensitivity to the aesthetic and moral: “He whose feelings tend towards the melancholic . . . has above all a feeling for the sublime. Even beauty, for which he also has a sentiment, may not merely charm him, but must rather move him by at the same time inspiring him with admiration.” And yet his melancholic sentiments pose the danger of leading him to the “blackest dejection . . . if they were to be increased above a certain degree or to take a false direction through some causes” (Kant [1764] 2011: §2:220: 27). The remainder of Werther’s story charts the inevitable corruption of his pleasant and pleasurable melancholy into a morbid disease. The qualities that make him the prototype for the Romantic poet—his sensitivity to nature, to the sublime and beautiful, and to poetry; his imagination; his independence; his rejection of social decorum; his sympathy for the feelings of others; his deep love; his sweet melancholy—make it impossible for him to moderate his passions and turn away from death. His passion destroys him. But what of the reader who sympathizes?

CHARACTER, SYMPATHY, AND THE RISE OF THE NOVEL Cervantes (1547–1616) begins his story of Don Quixote (1605, 1614), the first great modern character, with an account of the origins of his madness: In short, he so buried himself in his books that he spent the nights reading from twilight till daybreak and the days from dawn till dark; and so from little sleep and much reading, his brain dried up and he lost his wits. He filled his mind with all that he read in [those chivalric romances], with enchantments, quarrels, battles, challenges, wounds, wooings, loves, torments and other impossible nonsense; and so deeply did he steep his imagination in the belief that all the fanciful stuff he read was true, that to his mind no history in the world was more authentic. —Cervantes [1614] 1950: 32 Readers of Burton’s Anatomy would recognize the disastrous progress of the cold, dry humour of melancholy as sleeplessness and excessive study burn the humours and dry up the brain. The genial melancholy of the scholar becomes the morbid melancholy of the madman. Don Quixote’s character is created out of both humours and texts, a body possessed by melancholy and by the words of fantastic books. Don Quixote is a unique creation, and yet always a creature of the characters written on the pages of others. The English word “character” only starts to get the meaning of “personality” around 1600 and the sense of “a person in a story” by the middle of the century. The primary

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meaning still referred to a stamp or distinguishing mark, or to the letters of the alphabet, or to one’s handwriting (OED: “character, n.”). One’s “character” is one’s signature, one’s handwriting, unique and yet expressive of a type, and that mark impresses its form upon the mind of a reader much as a pen or a printing type leaves a mark upon paper. The methods of representing those marks of personality would undergo a remarkable change over the course of this period. A character in Edmund Spenser’s allegorical romance The Faerie Queene (1590, 1596) functions both as a person experiencing a plot and as an allegory for ideas and experiences. In the Cave of Despair, Redcrosse, the Knight of Holiness, enters a space that represents a theological state and problem—despair, the loss of hope in God’s grace—and there he encounters projections of his own psyche and emotions. Readers can visualize the psychological experience, as when the rooms of a castle represent the faculties of the soul, and by contemplating the allegory learn how to avoid or overcome moral dangers. By contrast, in the modern novel, a reader inhabits other characters and their minds and bodies, learning by sympathetic experience. The personal letters that make up an epistolary novel like Richardson’s Clarissa (1747–8) create the illusion of a real interior self living in a real social world rather than, as in Spenser’s allegory, showing abstract qualities of a self projected upon a fictional world. The reader experiences a novel in part by feeling sympathetic identification with the passions—the emotions and sufferings—of characters as they express them in their own words, or, more accurately, in what a writer presents as their authentic words. The individualized, realistic characters of the novel still served to give readers instructions in ethos even as they were read very differently from the allegories of romance. Readers were taught a new system of manners and politeness, with middle-class women in particular learning to achieve characters of self-restraint and self-control, learning to regulate their own passions so as to distinguish them from both the working and noble classes (see Davidson 2004; Davidson 2009; Armstrong 1987). As Ian Watt has shown, it is the combination of formal realism and psychological realism—essentially, its representation of emotional lives in a realistic recreation of the social and physical world—that makes the novel the genre of modernity (Watt 1957; see also Armstrong 1987). The new middle-class reading public fell in love with characters from novels like Richardson’s Pamela and Clarissa, Rousseau’s Julie (1761), and Frances Burney’s Evelina (1778). The readers who shed tears when reading Julie’s letters forged deep sympathetic and sentimental connections to characters, which is perhaps difficult to imagine today. Overwhelming sympathy with a heroine was the source of a novel’s pleasure, though it remained, for many, its danger, famously parodied by Henry Fielding in Shamela (1742), which charges that the readers of Pamela are feeling sympathy for a fraud. The civilizing of the bourgeois passions through the sentimental novel paradoxically ends with Rousseau’s reaction against politeness, sociability, and the novel itself. In the Renaissance classroom, as Lynn Enterline has shown, boys translated and imitated classical models, inhabiting (for instance) the characters and emotions of Ovid’s creations and learning through their words how to express and experience affective states (Enterline 2012; see also Enterline 2000). By contrast, in Émile, or On Education (1762), Rousseau presents a child raised in nature and outside human community, his education limited as long as possible to direct sensations of the natural world. Only as an adolescent does his tutor allow him to experience sympathy and read novels with their dangerous pleasures. Rousseau ([1762] 2010: 331) famously begins his account of Émile’s reading by declaring, “I hate books.” Books, especially sentimental novels, can disrupt the careful training of the boy’s sensibilité, his direct emotional response to the world. The first book

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he is allowed to read will thus be a novel about solitude and things, Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719). Rousseau reads it as a novel about a lone man and his experiences of the physical, sensory world, isolated from all human contact and the contagious dangers of sympathy. Sympathy and the passions of others must be introduced to the child carefully. Rousseau fears pity for particular persons. “[W]e must have pity for our species still more than for our neighbor,” he observes, and claims that by keeping Émile from experiencing particular passions too soon, he can inculcate feelings of love for humanity in general rather than uncontrollable passions for a single, and possibly unworthy, person (410). Rousseau’s fears of the corrupting effects of sympathy upon an ill-educated mind respond to the dominance of the new reading practices fostered by novels like his own phenomenally successful Julie. The reader, in the seclusion of her private room (her closet or cabinet), identifies emotionally with a person created in words on a page. It is an intimate imaginative experience, even invasive, yet one that is paradoxically shared and thus public. That intimacy can be quite disturbing. Goethe’s account of the death of Werther does not spare the reader the gruesome physical descriptions of the aftermath: “He had shot himself through the head above the right eye, blowing his brains out. They opened a vein in his arm, the blood flowed, he was still drawing breath . . . There was still a terrible rattling in his lungs, now weaker, now stronger. They awaited his end” (Goethe [1787] 2012: 111). The formal realism of that scene can hardly contribute to glamorizing Werther’s suicide; nonetheless, since his letters were presented to readers without the moralizing guidance of an intrusive narrator or editor, the traditional assumption that fiction justifies itself by its usefulness in training a reader’s character led many critics to condemn the work for teaching immoral acts, even suicide (on the controversy, see Duncan 2005: 7–28). Werther gave its sentimental readers the purest experience of the novel: sympathy for the direct and (supposedly) unmediated expressions of the sufferings and passions of a character. Men wanted to be him and dressed and acted like him; women wanted to love and save him. Some may even have imitated his model by committing suicide. The character embodied sentiment and sensibility, yet his example raised all those fears about the power of literary sympathy, making him (like Quixote before him) one of the defining characters of modernity.

CONCLUSION: RHETORIC AND SENSIBILITY When Mary Wroth addresses her heart in Sonnet 36, she begins from the position of an inward emotional core that is hidden from the world. Even as the sonnet expresses her feelings, it does so from the position of a self that resists spilling its secrets out to the world. It is difficult to imagine a Werther, a Rousseau, or a William Wordsworth (1770– 1850), writing such a poem. For them, poetry should express the authentic emotions of an individual. As Wordsworth writes in his manifesto on Romantic poetics, the “Preface to Lyrical Ballads” (1802): “For all good poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: but though this be true, Poems to which any value can be attached, were never produced on any variety of subjects but by a man, who being possessed of more than usual organic sensibility, had also thought long and deeply” (Wordsworth [1802] 1990: 598). Poems begin with spontaneously overflowing emotions, and the first part of this account appears to minimize language as the mediator of emotional experience. The poet’s sensibility rather than his rhetorical skill make him a poet. While neoclassical poetics had developed rules for representing and moving emotions, the Romantic poet emphasizes

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the flow of emotions from his special “organic sensibility.” As in Rousseau’s sensibilité, the inner senses and the outer world collapse together in a perfect artistic and moral vision. Wordsworth nonetheless goes on to insist that poems of value come on subjects about which a poet has “thought long and deeply. For our continued influxes of feeling are modified and directed by our thoughts” (598). Wordsworth’s sense that poetry “takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity” (611) should serve as a counterbalancing reminder of the mediating role of reflection and thought, which consist of language, and of the artistic remembering and arranging of memories, feelings, and words. Even for the poet of sensibility, “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings” comes after much serious thought, and it can only be communicated to others through rhetorical means. It is worthwhile, therefore, to return to Wroth’s anxiety over the problems of making the inner self visible through language, problems that are psychological, social, linguistic, and philosophical, as well as ones experienced quite differently for a woman whose everyday life was circumscribed by patriarchal rules. In a Jane Austen (1775–1817) novel, Wroth would be Sense and Sensibility’s Elinor Dashwood to Wordsworth’s Marianne, the one feeling deeply what she can never express openly in society, the other holding true emotion and true poetry to be only what is openly, directly, spontaneously, “naturally” expressed. The artifice of Wroth’s rhetorical conceits reminds us to locate the self and its passions in language. In the aesthetics that comes out of Longinus and leads into Kant and beyond, we see less emphasis on the formal and rhetorical qualities of a literary text and more on qualities outside it, like its expressive effects or the creative genius behind it. The poetic sensibility becomes primary, with poetry and art separated from the world. Nonetheless, since language is social and political, it is important to push back against the claims of aesthetic disinterestedness. Sympathy, pity, and compassion are mediated by words and point to the ways that literature is not just a private subjective experience of feeling but one with public consequence.

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CHAPTER SEVEN

In Private The Individual and the Domestic Community LAURA ALSTON AND KAREN HARVEY

The domestic setting has been a key locus for the historical study of both the experiential and imagined life of the emotions in this period. In what ways, and why, is the subject of this chapter. The idea that the domestic environment has been the seat of a person’s emotional identity and a place where the individual is formed and nurtured is a longstanding one, built largely on the association between the domestic and intimacy. Domestic space has at its heart a nexus of overlapping but distinct relations—the family and the household—that are not only held to have a particular emotional resonance, but also to be founded (in some cases, in some places and at certain times) solely on affect. Indeed, these concepts are mutually constitutive because the home has often been defined precisely by its emotional intensity. Arguably, the home, as it came to be defined during this period, conjured a distinctive emotional landscape. In this chapter we will explore the interplay between emotions and the domestic setting, examining some of the wider changes that underpinned this relationship. We will consider how historians have balanced a focus on individuals on the one hand with familialism on the other, considering their approach to specific emotions such as love and anger, the interplay between individuals’ emotions and broader discourses, the wide range of affective relationships within the domestic environment and the role that affective domestic relations played in the wider public sphere. First, however, we will examine how the history of domestic life, and the family in particular, has been transformed by historiographical developments in cultural history and in approaches to the study of emotions more broadly.

APPROACHES Historians of the family were interested in emotions long before the “history of emotions” developed as an identifiable field. By 1980, a well-developed “Sentiments Approach,” driven by an interest in ordinary individuals’ affective experiences of family relationships, had emerged in response to a demographic approach that established large-scale patterns in family size and composition using parish or census-like records (Anderson 1980: 39–64). Works such as those by Lawrence Stone (1979, on England), Phillipe Ariès (1972), Edward Shorter (1976), and Jean-Louis Flandrin (1979) (on France) used manuscripts, printed works, and objects to reconstruct the social and cultural patterns shaping individual lives. All were interested in power, autonomy, affection, and love, and the interconnections 137

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between these. The general changes they envisaged in families were illustrated by Randolph Trumbach’s comments on the aristocratic family: “In the generation between 1690 and 1720, there occurred the first signs of the decline of patriarchy and the appearance of domesticity” (1978: 289). Domesticity indicated a shift in the tenor of domestic relationships, away from discipline and towards mutual support and affection. Though these works examined a range of household relationships, the approach to love in marriage was particularly central and is indicative of these historians’ general approach to emotions. Stone, for example, saw individual English marriages in the sixteenth century as exemplary of a much broader phenomenon, “a society with little love” (1979: 81). Romantic love became more fashionable and more widely practiced from the middle of the eighteenth century and, after some time, stoked by the romantic novel, this became a legitimate motive for marriage from around 1780 (190–1). In the brief declarations of love in spouses’ letters—“my dearest dear,” “my dear dear”—as well as a culture of marital romanticism, Stone saw a new companionate marriage take shape as a declining emphasis on deference and obedience made way for more equal relationships between husbands and wives (239). Stone’s three family types—the open lineage family (1450–1630), the restricted patriarchal nuclear family (1550–1700), and the closed domesticated nuclear family (1640–1800)—varied in affection, companionship, and expectations of deference, and were determined largely by the affective nature of the conjugal relationship. Stone’s work was part of a group of studies on the early modern European family that identified a growing emotionality as a principle driver of transformation in the structure and experience of family life. Flandrin’s study of the family within early modern France identified similar changes at similar times. Taking the moralist writer Blanchard’s book of 1713 as his example, he showed that whereas emotions or sentiments relating to deference and respect related to all people in Blanchard’s household, those concerning love and affection related to the family, particularly the husband and wife, and excluded relationships between masters and servants (1979: 146–56). Slowly, Flandrin argued, the Roman Catholic Church changed its attitude to love in marriage and by the second half of the eighteenth century, elites were claiming spouses’ “right to love” (169–73). Stone and Flandrin concurred that early modern Europe experienced a series of changes: a growing autonomy of the individual (individualism) became the prerequisite for the intensification of the affective relationships within the family (emotionalism) at the expense of other, wider relationships (domestic privacy). These three key themes— individualism, emotionalism, and domestic privacy—underpin much of the work that has followed. Together, such works established a chronology of change for the internal nature of affect in the early modern European family that remains extremely important in the historiography of this topic. Anderson identified a fourth approach to the family, “psychohistory.” Believing this approach was characterized by “so much anachronistic judgement and blatant disregard for many of the basic principles of historical scholarship,” he refused to give it any space in his volume (1980: 15). Applying modern psychology and psychoanalysis to the past appeared to Anderson wholly anachronistic. Yet the cultural history of emotions of the individual and the domestic have their roots in the scholarly space opened up—and the criticisms generated—by these psychological and social histories of past family relationships. Lyndal Roper, for example, has urged historians to study “subjectivity,” or “the way an individual mentally and emotionally organizes experience,” by examining the distinctive elements of the language an individual chose to describe their somatic and emotional experiences (2010b: 312). Roper is critical of the use of discourse theory precisely as it

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fails to account for psychology and emotions, though her close focus on language is itself the product of the cultural turn. Before discussing how historians’ approaches to emotions in the domestic have developed, we should note the general transformations in cultural history and the history of emotions that have also impacted on this work. Cultural history foregrounds the close reading of texts (written, visual, material sources or practices) to decode or reconstruct stated and unstated meanings in those texts. It emphasizes that texts are “representations” that themselves shape experiences. In the case of love, for example, a cultural historical approach would lead not to the question “did or how much did people love?” but rather “what were the available discourses that shaped the experiences of love?” In an important collection on private life, Orest Ranum attended to the richness of European early moderns’ intimate lives by examining a range of different forms of representations, including places, “relic-objects” and self-portraits in paintings and ego-documents (1989: 169–73). Ranum showed the varieties of ways of understanding and expressing love and friendship and emphasized the “diffusion and spread of intimate imagines” (210). Representations of emotions are no longer seen as the projection of ideals or the outcome of practice but as agents or resources shaping the expression and experience of emotion. Attention to the full range of representations available at any one time has allowed historians to complicate the generalized narratives that discuss widespread shifts from one single emotional landscape to another. A maturing field of emotions history has provided scholars of the early modern domestic environment with a number of important methodological tools. Two general features of this field are important. First is a concern with how individuals and groups relate to or interact with discourses, studied through the combination of “micro” or individual affective experiences and “macro” approaches that seek to reconstruct broader shaping discourses. Taking the lead from Barbara Rosenwein’s idea of “emotional communities,” historians focus on small or discrete groups that share specific understandings of emotional values, goals, vocabularies, and practices. Benno Gammerl has developed this approach, suggesting that we should think of communities as “styles” that co-exist, compete, dominate, or are subordinate, complement and conflict (2012: 161–75). Individuals in families and the household will thus have a range of emotional styles at their disposal. Many of the historiographical works cited in this chapter, including essays in Susan Broomhall’s edited works, recent studies of intimacy in colonialism, Linda Pollock’s work on elite anger, and Fay Bound’s examinations of emotion in letters have been explicitly shaped by these methods. A second and related feature of the history of emotions has been to approach emotions not as passive feelings but as rational appraisals that are actively deployed by individuals within relationships. This allows historians to explore how individuals and groups within the domestic environment have used emotions in everyday relationships as part of “goalrelated” practices, shifting the focus from what discourse reflects to what discourse can do in any given social situation. William Reddy’s work on the emotional cultures of revolutionary France argued that individual and small-scale relational and goal-related emotional practices or “emotives” were used by individuals to navigate dominant “emotional regimes” in society (2001: 55–129).1 This provides a model for examining the interaction between the micro emotional experiences that directly related to an individual’s own requirements and the broader context of a dominant emotional culture. Martha Tomhave Blauvelt’s The Work of the Heart: Young Women and Emotion 1780–1830 (2007), for example, examines how women engaged in emotional labour, self-consciously choosing emotional strategies such as repressing anger and subduing affection in domestic

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and courtship situations, in order to successfully navigate the sometimes contradictory expectations of society. The impact of cultural history and the history of emotions have thus combined to produce a more sophisticated approach to the ways in which individuals used and experienced emotions within a cultural context. The manner of using these sources is invariably interdisciplinary, employing the insights of social constructionists and psycholinguists with a focus on the historically and situationally specific meanings of emotion terms in order to understand their uses in context (see Dixon 2003; Wierzbicka 2010; Majid 2012a; Majid 2012b; Mesquita 2010; Boiger and Mesquita 2012). This work continues to address the broad themes with which earlier historians of the family engaged, notably the relationships between affect, power, representation and practice, yet with a highly nuanced approach to the relationship between emotional discourse or “emotives” and individual practice or experience. As we shall see, historians underline how concepts of “private” and “individual” were constructed through public discourses and community processes and they demonstrate how important the domestic community was both to discourses of emotions and people’s affective lives. In so doing, they underscore the centrality of the domestic environment to a full understanding of the emotions in society during the Baroque and the Enlightenment.

MEANINGS Before considering some key themes in work on the domestic and the individual, it is important to attend to the meanings of terms such as “domestic,” “family,” “household” and “home” during the early modern period. The application and changing meaning of these itself suggest ways in which emotional lives were transformed. For historians, the “domestic” implies a physical space with a specific purpose, usually the physical location of the household. Yet just as family and household meant different things, so “domestic” does not map perfectly onto either of these terms. Perhaps closest to “household,” “domestic” nevertheless offers a more flexible category which might include family and household but also a range of other groups or types of relationship (for her uses of “household,” see Broomhall 2008: 3). “Domestic,” as one of the organizing terms for this chapter, is useful then because it does not connote an inevitable set of affective relationships or a particular emotional community but instead brings our attention to a set of physical spaces. For much of the period, the term “domestic” was used in this way. “Household” similarly opens up historians’ analysis in ways that develop the older “sentiments” approach to the history of family. Several historians have, for example, exposed how early modern households were structures built upon relations of management and labour between those related by blood, marriage and occupation, rather than on exclusively affective relations. David Sabean’s examination of German understandings of the family from the eighteenth century emphasizes the household economy and authority of the household head (1990: 88–123). Naomi Tadmor has shown that in eighteenth-century England, the group sharing domestic space was understood as a “household-family,” again grouped under the authority of household head (1996: 110–40; see also Tadmor 2001). These studies successfully examined a range of household relations from the starting point of co-residence, rather than their (assumed) affective basis, demonstrating how these interpersonal relationships were patterned by factors such as inheritance practices or domestic management. One important question for historians of this period then becomes, when is the domestic used as an affective category?

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FIGURE 7.1: Arthur Devis, The John Bacon Family, c. 1742–3, oil on canvas, 76.2 × 131.1 cm, Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, Paul Mellon Collection (B1981.25.274).

Certainly one of the most important changes to the meaning and nature of the domestic environment in this period was its increasingly strong characterization as “home,” particularly in British culture. This new home was a safe and comfortable refuge, defined in large part by its distinctive emotional function or tenor (see Harvey 2009: 520–40). Home, through a “cult of domesticity,” perhaps became the ideal emotional community by the late eighteenth century. In common with other “spaces for feeling,” the space of the domestic was both physical and conceptual (Broomhall 2008: 5–8). Domestic space can encompass physical sites, textual readings, visual and material representations, and real and imagined relationships. Accepting that links between the concepts of privacy, the individual, and the domestic are historical, it was nevertheless during the early modern period that these three concepts became linked to one another. How and why these changes took place remain at the heart of work on the emotions in the family. As Keith Wrightson identified, the processes of nuclearization, individualism, and emotionalism were closely linked (1998: 1–22). The concept of “privacy” also became increasingly legible and meaningful during the eighteenth century. Orest Ranum, for example, refers to “the space of privacy” as “the imagination of self and intimate relations” (1989: 207). There was a deep-seated connection between privacy and personhood (Vickery 2008). Patricia Meyer Spacks (2003) has found a category of psychological privacy in the writing of eighteenth-century English men and women. The domestic environment as an ostensibly “private” place—at least where privacy was an important ideal—became the seat of the individual. The concept of home and privacy could be a source of tension for some. This was particularly the case for women, whose writings reveal the effort involved in managing their powerfully felt but culturally unacceptable “negative” emotions (see Blauvelt 2007). For Charlotte Orlebar, writing her personal pocket book diary in the year of her tenth pregnancy, 1794, her personal feelings about home were sometimes in tension with wider shared practices and gendered expectations. Her home was a place of comfort and repose,

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due to her ill-health in pregnancy, but also a place of confinement and marital separation. These tensions are captured in her description of herself as a cat which was left at home, in one entry remarking that, “Mr Orlebar went to Northampton, Pussy as usual at home tho very comfortable” (entry for 3 September, Orlebar 1794; on gendered concepts of home, see Stabile 2004; Vickery 2010). The use of the “tho” and “as usual” emphasized the resignation she felt at being confined at home. Yet whilst Charlotte Orlebar’s relationship with her husband was strained because of his freedom of movement, it mirrored her parents’ and friends’ marriages. Charlotte’s individual feelings of dissatisfaction were sacrificed in favour of communal practices. Even though they practiced wide-ranging sociability, Charlotte and the other women around her metaphorically embodied the domestic and it was their husbands who were repeatedly described as having “returned” home from the outside world (entry for January 6–7, Orlebar 1794). (Richard Orlebar is described as “returning” home sixteen times over the year from various long stays away.) In important ways—both real and imaginary—the domestic was closely connected to public places. The house itself was a site of work and sociability, whilst the family was represented publicly and carried important social and political resonances. Indeed, historians have shown that the private domestic realm became more rather than less connected to the rest of the world during the eighteenth century (Harvey 2012). In the case of the domestic, argues Michael McKeon (2005), “privacy” was ultimately absorbed into a discourse of “domesticity” in which both private and public were conflated. With regards to the individual, too, a person’s affective life was inextricably bound to those of others in the house (family, kin, servants, and other workers). In domestic spaces, personal identity was built upon “a family self ” as much as an individual private self (Harvey 2012). As we discuss below, this balance between privacy and publicity is an enduring theme of histories of the emotions that focus on the domestic and the individual. The notion of the individual is similarly multi-faceted. If there is one place where we might expect the authentic emotions of the past to reside it is surely with the individual. The idea of home as a refuge or an emotionally sustaining place or concept is predicated on the presence of individuals with emotions that require proper satisfaction. Yet discourses interacted with individuals’ personal lives in complex ways. Even the most personal of emotions, such as the darkest grief, was shaped by available language, dominant discourses and the social monitoring of expression (Brady 2008; Archambeau 2013). A person’s emotions always have a social element. Furthermore, because “the relationship between discourse and emotion is dialectical” (Adams 2008: 112), rather than one-way, historians do not regard individuals as enacting wider ideals. Instead, they see the relationship between “public rites and private emotions or between community and household [as] productively unstable” (Brady 2008: 199). Rather than asking how people’s lives reflected discourse or not, the domestic should be seen as a space where social expectation and individual emotional experiences were negotiated, allowing us to “reach towards an understanding of early modern subjectivity which does not privilege individualism or confine human expression to the rigidities of ritualized reactions” (Brady 2008: 199). Individual case studies of feelings communicated in private writing can permit explorations into the experiences of the physical space of the domestic and of concepts such as privacy, real and imagined relationships and metaphorical perceptions of the home. The home in these accounts was used as a device for self-reflection by the late eighteenth century, especially by women, which allowed them to communicate the tension between the home as an idealized space of pleasure and comfort and also of confinement.

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FIGURE 7.2: Thomas Rowlandson, The Love Letter, c. 1790, watercolour, 27.9 × 19.2 cm, Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, Paul Mellon Collection (B1975.3.104).

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The increasing emotional investment in the domestic as a “home” helped produce the very kind of subjectivity that enabled powerful affective experiences. Indeed, this could be one area where emotional practices, spurred by a desire for personal satisfaction, may have driven larger historical change. The domestic was also significant to the process of identity formation because it was an important place for emotional learning. Indeed, the domestic was a primary emotional “habitus”: a site for a particular culturally-sanctioned emotional repertoire of language and performance in which subjective identity was shaped and refashioned from earliest infancy onwards (Scheer 2012; see also Bourdieu 1977). This is perhaps why contemporaries invariably began their autobiographies with a discussion of their parental home (Harvey 2012). Michael Roper notes that it is precisely at the individual’s engagement with or mediation of both the social, familial and cultural constructs where the historian will find affective experience and subjectivity, rather than hegemonic discourse or “ideological formations” (2005: quote at 65; see also Roper 2010b). As Susan Broomhall has argued, historians must establish “the social worlds of emotion in both particular households and broader contexts” alongside “individual responses and shaping of self ” in order to observe how the individual interacted with the social and in so doing developed emotions (2008: 12–13).

DEPLOYED DISCOURSE Let us now consider how these approaches, concepts, and historiographical innovations have been applied to the early modern domestic. Instead of seeking to delineate or reconstruct discourse as cultural representations, historians’ ambitions are now to chart how individuals, households, and families negotiated or adapted wider cultural ideas about emotional behavior. Katie Barclay (2011) explores ideas of love and patriarchy in marriage through the letters of aristocratic Scottish families between 1650 and 1850, focusing on how these ideas were adapted at the same time that love became increasingly important to—indeed implicated in—a nevertheless consistently patriarchal institution of marriage. Intimacy was an affective discourse and practice that opened up a space to negotiate power within marriage, as “couples used love in multiple ways to reduce male authority, enforce obedience, manipulate each other, and as a tool in negotiations” (202; see also 203, 125–47). Barclay’s account balances those general narratives of considerable change and engages directly with Lawrence Stone and others, arguing that new notions of love and the intimacy of the marital relationship created what she describes as a “democratic potential to marriage” (32). Joanne Bailey also builds upon earlier work such as that by Stone to further explore the cultural evolution of the emotional value and nature of parenting. Bailey examines the cultural and social connotations, values and expectations of parental practices and relationships in the latter half of the eighteenth century and early nineteenth century. Her study (2012) uses the letters of two generations of four different families and charts how they did or did not correspond to a mixture of other, more public sources. Bailey argues that these sources point to a growing emphasis on love within parenting, and especially so for fathers (2007: 209–32). The emergence of a discourse of “sensibility” in the second half of the eighteenth century is particularly significant to the domestic. Sensibility was a major cultural emotional style which – in its role in creating a new style of affect – is often credited with making the domestic into a “home” and the context for feeling behaviour.2 Some historians have been skeptical about the reach of sensibility and its significance to the way that people experienced and expressed emotions. Yet there is little doubt that by the end of the period, the emotional tenor

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of many homes had been affected by this “different system of emotional management” based on true and expressive feeling (Pollock 2004: 588). Sensibility played a crucial role in idealizing the roles that men and women had in the home. The ideals of sensibility were especially promulgated through print culture and presented perceptions of specific emotional behaviour that were connected to the domestic. The home was conceived of as a place of “private virtue” and the “generator of social bond” against the anxieties and perceived vices of “pursuit of pleasure abroad” (Barker-Benfield 1992: 259–60). The ideology was particularly attached to women, who Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–97) argued were “acculturated to an exaggerated identification with ‘sensibility,”’ in order to justify their connection to softer emotions and the private virtues of domesticity (quoted in Barker-Benfield 1992: 1). Barker-Benfield explores how the changes to ideas about feelings in the home were accompanied by material changes in the level of comfort in the home, taste, manners, fashion, and consumerism. Sensibility was also used in common discourses as a civilizing weapon against perceived male barbarity in more public space and it led to new understandings of women’s emotional capacity, manifest most clearly in discussions of motherhood. In Enlightenment France, a public discourse on feminine virtue linked the affective features of loving motherhood with ideas of selfhood and agency in women (Walker 2010). This discourse on maternity granted women’s supposedly emotional sensibilities with high status, fortifying demands for women’s education and becoming embedded within ideas of social justice. Some historians are clear that the new emphasis on sensibility and feelings within some households and families had an impact on individuals’ experience of the family. Bailey’s study of parenting shows not just that the ideal model of parenthood became increasingly companionate, virtuous, tender, sympathetic as well as controlling, but that this was used consciously by individuals in their letter writing. “Sensibility and domesticity,” Bailey writes, “were added to tactics intended to defend oneself in troubled time. Sentiment acted as glue in the face of centrifugal forces perceived to be at work upon society. Domesticity, a concept rooted in family relationships and homely comforts was redolent of security and stability. Both functioned at the familial and individual level, as well as the societal and ideological” (Bailey 2012: 246–7). In its emphasis on change at the end of the eighteenth century, the chronology sketched out by Bailey echoes that established by Lawrence Stone and others, though this chronology—and the approach to discourse, love and affection on which it is partly based—has been challenged in the work of other historians working on love, care and affection in an earlier period. Hannah Newton’s work on the emotional experiences of both parents and children in times of childhood illness in early modern England underlines recognizable emotions of anguish, fear, dread, and guilt felt at these times (2012: 121–57). Newton uses the writings of parents and children to access, if not unmediated emotions, then traces of the feelings as experienced (123). Implicit in this study is the domestic space or the household in which these emotional relationships and illnesses took place, though Newton also explores the range of early modern residential spaces in which a child could reside and receive care, such as schools or wet nurse’s abodes. She demonstrates that tremendous care and deep love was shown towards children when they were sick, demonstrating that parents did not always withhold affection for fear of softening them before the later eighteenth century (163). Indeed, many historians cast doubt on the distinctive role of sensibility in generating newly expressed and newly felt forms of love and affection, tracing a much longer history of affection. Mutual attraction and affection were always considered essential during the

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FIGURE 7.3: Philibert Louis Debucourt, Le Compliment ou La Matinée du jour de l’an (The Compliment or New Year’s Morning), 1787, etching and wash, National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C., Widener Collection (1942.9.2253).

process of courtship in the sixteenth century, for example, despite that institution being integrated into and therefore to some extent designed for the needs of the wider community. O’Hara argues that courtship practices were always structured by custom and ritual, and that any distinction between love and autonomy on the one hand and parental and community control on the other is overly simplistic (2000: 237 and passim). An

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insistence on the indivisibility of love and affection on the one hand and power and discipline on the other is another principal finding. Fletcher has used early modern English letters to stress that even strictly patriarchal marriages were often characterized by affection, happiness and consideration for spouses’ “emotional needs” (1995: 185; see also 173–91). Fletcher revises the rather schematic approach of Stone and others to the English family, arguing that more companionate marriages in the eighteenth century were emphatically not less patriarchal but instead governed by “a new secular ideology of subordination” (395). According to Fletcher, the key to understanding the tenor of affective experiences in the family is to acknowledge both that there is “an essential continuity about human emotion” and that “how it is expressed varies from one historical context to another” (395).

POWER AND AGENCY One of the continuities that historians of the early modern domestic environment identify is the complex interaction of emotions and power, given that the early modern household was a highly stratified institution governed by patriarchy. This is what Susan Broomhall has referred to as “emotional power dynamics” (2008: 5). The personal documents used by historians to access individual emotions were themselves tools of emotional

FIGURE 7.4: Johan Joseph Zoffany, David Garrick and Mary Bradshaw in David Garrick’s The Farmer’s Return, c. 1762, oil on canvas, 101.6 × 127 cm, Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, Paul Mellon Collection (B1981.25.731).

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management in which the authors could reflect upon their emotions and develop their own personal identity or perform multiple selves (Baggerman and Dekker 2008: 252–68; Baggerman 2014: 106–120). The apparently most personal love letters have been analysed with a view to the strategic ways in which individuals drew from societally acceptable forms and meanings of love as they sustained self-identities and relationships. Fay Bound undertakes a close analysis of the language of love letters between Thomas Mascall and Ursula Watson in 1742. Mascall took Ursula to court for breaking what he saw as a binding contract of their intention to marry; Bound examines the way Ursula viewed herself during the legal proceedings (2002; see also Nussbaum 1989; Coleman, Lewis and Kowalik 2000). Bound resists treating the sources in which she locates the affectionate language of domesticity as “unproblematic mediators of inner experience” (3). Instead, she advocates focusing on the formal language and the formal properties of the letters themselves, as well as their economic, material and political significance, all of which affected the reading of and social meanings of love-letters (3). The letters thus become “fictional constructs” and “textual spaces” that themselves shaped cultural discourses on love and in which the author constructed their selfhood (4). The focus on individuals’ conscious and rational use of emotions as strategies is as clear in work on anger as it is in work on love. Lawrence Stone found letters and diaries from the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries to be “cool, even unfriendly,” and that the level of “casual inter-personal physical and verbal violence” in legal records “shows clearly that at all levels men and women were extremely short-tempered” (1979: 77). Yet more recent studies have rejected this progressive narrative of growing restraint. Responding to arguments about changes in the eighteenth-century Western family, Kenneth Lockridge showed how “increasingly sentimentalized family relationships” created frustration and rage on the part of men struggling to live up to continuing demands for them to exercise power in their houses (1992: 90). The commonplace books he explores burst with the “disguised emotion” of fear, hatred and rage towards women (76). Linda A. Pollock’s treatment of anger amongst elites in early modern England also focuses on familial relationships. Rather than exploring representations of emotions or the ways in which early modern people suppressed the unacceptable emotion of anger, Pollock examines the use of emotions in daily life by reconstructing the conventions governing their expression in the private writing of actual elite families. Anger without bounds and without clear cause was inappropriate. Yet the letters of the elite show men and women cultivating moderate anger purposefully and quite legitimately, despite women’s anger being presented by some as a defect of character (Pollock 2004: 579). Pollock’s study is a good example of how historians regard past emotions as dynamic features of family relationships: they are “tactics,” aroused, moderated, and deployed consciously and according to changing norms (585). One of the clearest ways in which we can observe early modern individuals exercising kinds of agency in their emotional lives is through their negotiation and transformation of the affective discourses available to them for their own needs. In another of her essays, Katie Barclay explores the lives of women who were ostensibly marginal to a dominant affective culture in which the household was presented as a stable and secure “home.” Barclay explores the emotional toll such culture took on women who lived as mistresses and whose experiences of power, space, selfhood, and sociability were therefore dislocated from normative practices (2015b: 99) She highlights how marginal women figuratively built households in their letters which served to reinforce their intimate relationships and defended them against economic vulnerability, casting their lovers in the role of provider

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(101). The home was a principal site of identity construction, built upon the “weaving together of family, community, social status and household into personal identity” (100). The letters themselves served as women’s refuge from rejection, constant transition, community surveillance and their lack of privacy, respectability and affective ties. In using the letters to imagine their own constructions of caring, intimate, and respectable communities, these women rejected the idealized routes to status and gained agency by manipulating dominant emotional styles of behaviour. A similar attempt to examine women’s negotiation of individual emotional repertoires, households and dominant social proscriptions on acceptable behaviour is Joanne McEwan’s study of early-eighteenth-century Scottish infanticide narratives. McEwan examines how in cases of suspected infanticide that came before the Kirk (Scottish church), both individuals and their families resisted the expectations around appropriate affective behaviour and instead responded to events in varied ways. Acting on their assumed particular knowledge about the body, some women performed formal roles of surveillance and testifying in infanticide proceedings on behalf of the Kirk. Yet some women chose instead to utilize their authority to protect certain female friends and relations (McEwan 2015:19). Moreover, in the face of expectations that they should be horrified or ashamed by a female family member’s behaviour, families sometimes testified in favour of the women and provided them with physical and emotional refuge (21–6). The household was therefore the “key affective space” shaping the experiences of these women and serving as the actual and rhetorical focus for these cases (28). Though the discourse of home was becoming increasingly significant, historians have been careful not to naturalize affection in the domestic environment but instead to use this concept to accommodate a range of different types and tenors of relationship (Broomhall 2008: 6). Some relationships clearly gave rise to powerful negative emotions for individuals. An analysis of the language used by Mary Toft (c. 1701–63), the woman who took part in a monstrous birth hoax in 1726, suggests that women who crowded around her bed were a major cause of her emotional distress. Her repeated descriptions of physical pain and of being “very uneasie,” alongside discussions of how the older and more experienced women controlled the situation, connect her discomfort to her powerlessness. Using Roper’s model for examining subjectivity, we can observe in Toft’s choice of words, her emplotment of events and her sinister descriptions of some of the women involved, her fears at the hands of this community of authoritative female figures of family, kin and neighbours gathered in her home (Harvey 2015: 31–51; on the relationship amongst women at the lying-in, see Gowing 2003; Pollock 1997: 286–306). Caroline Sherman examines the similarly complicated relationships reconstructed in the letters between the seventeenth-century French scholar Theodore Godefroy (1580– 1649), his son Denys, and Theodore’s amanuensis Nicholas Doulcer in their household (2008: 153–69). Episodes of anger, depression, and grief on the part of the father and son were mediated and thus shaped by the amanuenses of both men. Theodore was unable to complain to or berate Denys (1615–81), whilst Denys could not show any anger towards his father. At the same time, different rules applied to the emotional expressions of the amanuenses as they experienced both long term resentment and deep fidelity (165). In this particular household where familial and working relationships intersected, the individual had to balance strict learning and obedience with personal feelings. Situated in the wider context of other scholarly households, moreover, Sherman focusses on the particular “language of fidelity” used between father and son and by extension the amanuensis, and demonstrates the depth of feeling of father and son. Whilst this was the period when

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relations between children and parents were apparently transforming from authoritarian to affectionate, the Godefroy case might suggest a revision of Stone’s claim that still by the late eighteenth century, “maternal rather than paternal affection” was most visible (Sherman 2008: 153; Stone 1979: 287). In the case of family businesses, there are other dimensions to relationships found in the domestic environment to consider. Insisting on the value of the study of emotions and the family to business history, Robin Holt and Andrew Popp’s study of the Wedgwoods identifies three dominant “sensibilities or emotionologies” that shaped relations in the Wedgwood family at a moment of business succession (2013: 892–909). It was these feeling rules which situated the family, their religious values and household environment as being the driver of the business itself. These rules concerned the family as more than a “transmission of dynastic ambition,” but instead a place for individual freedom: the embedding of the individual within deeply affective familial relationships and finally Unitarian dissent that allowed for “practical experiment, self-determination and voluntarism” (Holt and Popp 2013: 905; for more on the research into emotion management and “emotional labour” in different environments, see Hochschild 1983). In widening the focus to different sorts of relationships, the history of emotions in the domestic environment has contributed to an analysis of a larger range of affective experiences than just the familial and the contingent cultural expectations of these experiences. Work on servants in particular reveals a broad range of sentiments: for example, mistresses in Stockholm cared for their servants but the strongest emotion in the sources was suspicion (Lamberg 2008). Indeed, order in households was established “emotively” as relationships of power amongst non-kin were managed through the rhetorical use of emotive language (Mann 2008). Power and affect were neither mutually exclusive nor always in tension but sometimes worked closely together for all members of the domestic environment as much as for the married couple. The feelings expected on the part of masters and servants were, Sarah Maza has argued, subject to change during the early modern period. Seventeenth- and early-eighteenthcentury handbooks for masters counselled that they had a moral responsibility for their servants that—if fulfilled—would be met with genuine loyalty and gratitude on the part of the servant. The relationship was one that was spoken of in terms of love, though servants held a principle concern with financial remuneration (Maza 1983: 58–106). After the early eighteenth century, it was rare to find a reference to masters’ love for their servants, as notions of servants’ contractual and personal autonomy took hold (263). Genuine affection and love continued to emerge out of the intimacy between masters and servants, though. Carolyn Steedman’s study of the relationship between the clergyman John Murgatroyd and his servant Phoebe Beatson shows the care and feeling it was possible for a master to show for his servant. Phoebe, a servant of John’s house in the West Riding of Yorkshire, near Huddersfield, since a little girl, bore her illegitimate child in John’s house when the father of the child refused to marry her, and lived there with her little girl until the child was four years old. Steedman ponders whether John loved Phoebe, and decides to settle for claiming that “Her master showed her great charity, care and forethought in regard to her” (2007: 191). The feelings that John had for the baby, Eliza, were crucial, Steedman argues, in allowing the relationship between the servant and her master to accommodate her staying in the house (192). It is clear that the domestic environment, to an even greater extent than the “family,” was not a coherent emotional community or “a single emotion culture” (Broomhall 2008: 14). Privacy and intimacy, for example, were experienced differently by those in

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the domestic environment, whether father, servant, child or apprentice (Vickery 2008: passim). Indeed, this is one way in which more recent studies have developed earlier work that spoke about types of families in single forms as determined by the conjugal relationship. The domestic environment was a setting for strongly affective non-conjugal bonds. Girls in early modern French foster households experienced an affection that militated somewhat their status as transient figures being prepared for marriage (Adams 2008: 103–18). Nicole Pohl considers the creation of “utopian households” in the works of Sarah Scott and Sarah Fielding in the context of the authors’ own domestic lives (2008: 219). Pohl demonstrates how Fielding and Scott manipulated dominant ideas in which men alone took the virtues of affection and sociability into public life, politics and economy, and instead imagined how women could harness these virtues (221). They imaginatively took women out of the private conjugal and familial relationships often fixated on in wider discourses and instead showed them building extended communities through female friendship. In so doing, they created new ideas of what a household could look like. These women’s imagined and actual households were based on the values of benevolence and friendship. Pohl shows that a focus on emotion—sensibility in this case—rather than consanguinity and conjugality revises our understanding of what family and household meant for early modern people (230). Friendship, rather than property, biology or reproduction, characterized these domestic spaces. Whilst the domestic has therefore been the locus for specific emotional practices, concepts, culture and affective relationships, it should not be reified as accommodating a natural or particular emotional community centred on the biological or conjugal family.

PUBLIC AND PRIVATE, LOCAL AND STATE This point is underlined when we begin to explore the public, rather than private, dimensions of the domestic environment. By examining affective expressions, practices of emotions and affective performances in real and imagined domestic spaces, historians show how individual and public cultural influences converged in domestic space (Broomhall 2015a: 1–11). At the same time, expressions, practices and performances communicated both privately and publicly. Broomhall’s study of individuals’ emotional “performances” during renovations to the home of the elite Atholl family in mideighteenth century Scotland illustrates how such expressions communicated ideas about domestic dynasty, hierarchy, networks, lineage, and politics across a range of spaces (2015b). Ostensibly “private” domestic experiences were made public. The rituals and behavior that marked mourning in early modern English households functioned as signifiers to the wider community as the domestic functioned as a site for work and visitation. The household shaped the expression of emotions, emotions which were simultaneously subject to moral and social monitoring (Brady 2008). In this way the household in mourning demonstrates how the domestic environment was a site for public communal activity and meaning making. At times the public expression of domestic activity served to discipline behaviour. Katrina O’Loughlin (2015) examines satires on aristocratic female sexuality in which public, private, emotional, material, and visual language overlapped in ways which exemplified understandings of “new social communities and standards of behaviour” across society and shifted “social and political power.” The private scandals of Lady Elizabeth Craven (among other aristocratic women) in the second half of the eighteenth century were privately ridiculed and publicly caricatured across Europe. Caricatures,

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Loughlin suggests were “complex artifacts” aimed at both the private networks of elites who gossiped amongst themselves and the wider public who would criticize them, creating “a continuous negotiation of codes of polite behaviour, gender and cultural norms” (131). The women were lampooned in images of overtly sexualized domesticity as a result of the emergence of middling-sort values which upheld “familial virtue and companionate marriage”; derisive laughter at the aristocracy in turn re-shaped the boundaries of public and private, rendering private affairs public knowledge (114–18). There is a consensus that by the nineteenth century, households had become less porous to external management from the community, creating emotional landscapes that were separate and distinct from other areas of practice (Broomhall 2008: 29; see also Hunt 1992). Nevertheless throughout the early modern period, the domestic intersected both rhetorically and practically with both private and public (McKeon 2005: passim; Harvey 2012: 24–63). This was particularly evident in constructions of motherhood. In early modern Italy, familial and political cultures were closely linked. Caroline Castiglione argues that the consolidation of a discourse of affectionate mothers acting in the best interest of the family was utilized by women publicly in order to enter political decisionmaking about the family, notably with regards to custody disputes and marriage alliances (2005; see also Castiglione 2015). The power of women to intervene in these matters relied upon a developing popular understanding of maternal affection, feelings grounded in their knowledge of children and the domestic. Changes to the political culture in Italy over the seventeenth and early eighteenth century were directly connected to familial practices and women were actively involved in forging political, social and familial alliances (Castiglione 2005: 693). Indeed, ideals of male honor and strict codes of male behavior proscribed the usurpation of a mother’s position, forcing them to negotiate with women or to take extreme measures such as kidnapping.3 Throughout the early modern period mothers had a “measure of power” to “define roles for themselves” and reform “the practices of the societies in which they lived” (Miller 2000: quote at 3; see also Miller and Yavneh 2000: 293–318). Women had the ability to influence education, politics and work through their identification as mothers. Catholic Marian ideology, for example, was used to counter Protestant limitations on women’s roles in governance (Dolan 1999: 116; see also Miller and Yavneh 2000: 239–318). The regulation of such roles—in strictures concerning “hysteria,” sexual desire, or violence towards children— reflect the cultural significance of motherhood (Miller 2000: 5). Such policing of “intimate” relationships in private spaces became tools for the subjugation of people and in fact shaped the public frameworks of the imperialist state (see Ballantyne and Burton 2009; for more on how the concern with intimacy shaped Empire, colonial encounters and subjective experiences, see Stoler 2006). Marriage was situated within wider exchanges of commodities, governance and labour in that it aligned bodily intimacy and desire with property rights and the control of mobility, lineage and social networks. The emotions inherent in such ties were thus implicated in imperial domination; desire, violence, “anxious mobilities,” “intimacy and intimidation” extended into and underpinned “globalized fields of coercion” (Ballantyne and Burton 2009: 9). Public and private converged in such intimate spaces, where the strategies of colonialism were enforced, in relational, political, legislative, economic, and violent ways and where individual subjects could experience or rebel against such policing. Daniel Haines (2009) identifies the subjectivity and agency of indigenous women within the accounts of whalers in New Zealand who used cross-racial marriages to anchor their industry overseas. The women involved possessed multi-faceted identities which often undermined “fixed

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ideas of race and cultural difference,” becoming mediators between local and newcomer and perhaps using their pivotal role in shaping industry to their own advantage (Haines 2009: 63). “Private” and intimate though they may have been, such relationships could also be the place where the imperialist project was challenged. Formal public politics, the state, nation and empire were patterned by affective discourse and practices in the domestic environment.

CONCLUSION This emphasis on the domestic as both private and public is an important corrective to older historiographical arguments for the increasing privatization and individualism of a more affectionate and loving home. As Broomhall has remarked, if literary evidence suggests a shift towards more affection and love, the realities of experience point to something different. Emotions were still regulated very clearly by state, society and community in the household (2008: 28). This is one way in which a history of emotions approach to the domestic has developed an older history of the family. Furthermore, it is evident that the interaction of practice and discourse was a complicated process, that individuals used emotions rationally as strategies and that there was a range of types of relationship located in the domestic environment. As Joanne Bailey has noted, “different generations might encounter different cultural, social, or economic expectations at familial, local, or national level. No one model of parental practices or family values reigned supreme, because new and older views co-existed” (Bailey 2012: 247). The history of emotions has shifted scholarship away from teleological and modernizing narratives and from wide-scale general studies and now combines the different scales of individual practice and wider discourse. Nevertheless, taking the domestic as a locus for emotional experiences in the past does allow us to observe some important processes of relevance to the history of emotions more broadly. Furthermore, the domestic can be seen as the site where the individual, the private, and the experiential met with the communal, the public, and discursive. The domestic environment became a principal locus for imagining the emotions of the individual, the family, and society.

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CHAPTER EIGHT

In Public Collectivities and Polities BRIAN COWAN

Norbert Elias and Jürgen Habermas provided two of the most influential theories of the relationship between changing lifestyles and the emergence of new emotional and behavioural practices in the early modern era. Elias’s major work, On the Process of Civilisation, was first published in Switzerland in 1939, whereas Habermas’s famous thesis was published as The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society in West Germany in 1962. Together, these works linked the two most important themes of early modern political and social history to changing emotional experiences. For Elias, modern state formation explained how people gradually internalized the various forms of emotional restraint and self-disciplining that came to be understood as civility in the early modern era; he called this the “civilizing process.” Instead of the state, Habermas concentrated on the emergence of modern civil society, a category of social experience that he thought developed from a structural transformation of understandings and experiences of the public sphere. We might call this a process of civil society formation, for Habermas’s “bourgeois public sphere” was predicated upon the emergence of sociable places that were considered to be separate from the state as well as from the intimate world of the household. While Elias and Habermas established the templates behind some of the most important thinking about the emotional consequences of state formation and civil society formation, the works of both have been subjected to substantial criticism in the intervening decades. Few historians today would consider themselves to be unreconstructed acolytes of either theorist. Elias’s reliance upon a Freudian psychology of basic and universal human “drives” appears unconvincing in the light of early twenty-first century psychology (Rosenwein 2002). Similarly, Habermas’s use of Marxist categories of historical analysis and especially a Marxist form of historical periodization in which a feudal society dominated by the aristocracy was ultimately challenged and replaced by a modern capitalist one ruled by the bourgeoisie has been almost entirely rejected even by his most enthusiastic followers (Goodman 1992). It is nevertheless telling that many historians continue to return to these two major social theorists for inspiration when trying to understand how social changes were related to early modern emotional experience. Some might argue that Elias and Habermas present irreconcilable perspectives on the state and civil society. Elias focused his attention on princely courts as the original centres

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for the social and emotional changes that enabled the rise of the modern state, whereas Habermas saw the court as part of an increasingly outmoded “representative public sphere” that was due to be superseded by the more modern bourgeois public sphere. While this stark opposition between state and civil society helped to animate the original works of theorists such as Elias and Habermas, more recent historical studies have tended to blur the lines of distinction (Blanning 2001). Reflexivity is the order of the day. Early modern state formation and the emergence of a distinctly separate civil society are now more commonly understood to be mutually constitutive processes. Both processes were shaped by changing emotional regimes as much as they also helped to shape the emergence of those new emotional experiences, although here too the seminal arguments of Elias and Habermas have been revised and refined in ways that often run counter to their original theses. For both Elias and Habermas, modernization was enabled by the restraint of emotional expression. Reason triumphed over passion in the Eliasian court, just as Habermas imagined an emergent “public sphere of rationalcritical debate in the world of letters” over the course of the long eighteenth century (Habermas [1962] 1989: 51; compare Elias [1939] 2012: 439–56). These theories postulated a triumph of rationality over emotion in the making of both the modern state and modern civil society, whereas recent work in the history of emotions tends to reject any strict dichotomy between reason and passion. Elias and Habermas nevertheless remain key sources of inspiration for understanding the relationship between the social and political transformations of the early modern era and the changing emotional experiences of the people who experienced those transformations. Both identified the key role played by the concept of civility in early modern culture, and both recognized that the practice of civility had affective consequences. Contemporary historians may not agree with either Elias’s or Habermas’s claims that civility consisted primarily in the repression of emotions, but they are interested in exploring the ways in which understandings of civility shaped the ways in which many early modern people understood and expressed their emotions. Eighteenth-century historians have long recognized that the explicitly emotional culture of sensibility of their era had a profound impact on the political and social order (Barker-Benfield 1992; Brewer 2009; Eustace 2008; Knott 2009; Hunt 2007; Rosenfeld 2009). It is time that early modern historians study the emotional conditioning demanded by the neo-humanist culture of civility equally seriously in their studies of state formation and the making of civil societies. Rather than understanding civility as the repression of emotion, it is possible to think of it as a new form of emotional expression. Civility and sentiment are often thought to be incompatible styles of emotional experience, and they were indeed products of very different cultural traditions, but it is more helpful to understand them as parallel processes of emotion formation rather than as cultures inexorably opposed to one another. Of course, civility and sentiment were far from hegemonic in the ways in which they shaped early modern emotions. They were just two of many forms of emotional conditioning. Any complete account of early modern emotions in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries would need to account for other, sometimes countervailing or contradictory influences. Incivility and indifference also played a part, and any account of early modern emotions must account for resistance to the uneven and incomplete progress of the civilizing and sentimental influences emphasized in Eliasian and Habermasian accounts. The print-enabled media revolution of the early modern era allowed for an unprecedented efflorescence of new genres of public discussion of emotional experiences. Not all of them

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were obviously civil or sentimental. Satiric insults and cruel forms of personal insult or ridicule known as “libels” circulated in manuscript and increasingly in print as well; pornography and erotic literature created a readership interested in new forms of sexual and affective expression that often ran counter to conventional standards of propriety; new narrative forms of self-expression and self-explanation emerged in both fictional novels as well as dubiously confessional autobiographies or “true relations” that could encourage readers’ scepticism as much as their sympathy (McRae 2004; Marshall 2013; Dickie 2011; Hunt 1996; Dolan 2013). The subjective experience of feeling itself was transformed during this period by the introduction of new psychotropic substances such as caffeinated hot drinks (coffee, tea, and chocolate), as well as other mind-altering drugs supplied by the medical marketplace (Cowan 2005). The expanding world of goods offered to consumers afforded many new opportunities for affective ties not only amongst individuals but between people and their possessions (Brewer and Porter 1994). Finally, much work remains to be done on the emotional experiences of subordinate individuals, especially those of women, in a deeply patriarchal social order (Wood 2006; Gowing 2003). Not all of these new emotional experiences are easily understood in terms of civility and sentiment, but these two key concepts remain influential in the history of early modern emotions, not least because they figure prominently in accounts inspired by the works of Elias and Habermas.

CIVILIZED EMOTIONS Both Elias and Habermas thought that the concept of civility was key to the formation of the modern state and the bourgeois public sphere. Elias explicitly posited civility as the driving force behind the making of the modern state, whereas Habermas understood it to be part of the egalitarian social glue that made the public sphere a largely pacific and rational space for critical debate on matters of common interest. In both cases, civility is mainly imagined to be a pattern of behaviour that is largely devoid of emotion. Elias’s civilizing process was a system of ever increasing self-control over supposedly anti-social emotions. Civilization was therefore a process of emotional restraint, and was presented as a means of suppression rather than emotional expression. For Habermas, the rationalcritical debate found in the bourgeois public sphere was ideally unspoiled by irrational emotions. The progress of civility in the early modern era therefore went hand in hand with the rationalization of state and society in both accounts.1 The key sociological insight in Elias’s On the Process of Civilization and its companion work, The Court Society (1969), was the attempt to link psychological changes within individuals to larger processes of social transformation. The former he called “psychogenesis” which he defined as “the whole field of individual psychological energies, the structure and form of both the more drive-directed and the more conscious self-steering functions.” The latter he called “sociogenesis” and it involved the long-term analysis “not only of a single state society but of the social field formed by a specific group of interdependent societies, and of the sequential order in which it changes” (Elias [1939] 2012: 453). Here Elias tackled the classic sociological dilemma of how to reconcile an understanding of individual agency with the social structures that shape and constrain individual actions. He found this reconciliation through looking at long-term social changes (sociogenesis) that resulted from the cumulative effect of slowly changing psychological adaptations (psychogenesis) by individuals to their particular social situations. Once set in motion, the process of sociogenesis is perpetuated through the continuous re-enactment of psychogenesis in the

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lives of individuals, as children are taught to conform to the new manners and mores of their society (128). Elias identified the princely courts of late medieval and early modern Europe as the chief sources of social change. In his account, a culture of courtly civility gradually emerged as courtiers were encouraged to internalize feelings of embarrassment and shame as a means of restraining their more aggressive and anti-social urges. Elias placed particular emphasis upon the influence of humanist writers such as Desiderius Erasmus (1466– 1532), whose conduct manual De civilitate morum puerilium (On Good Manners for Boys, 1530) was immensely popular in courtly and elite societies throughout Europe. De civilitate saw over a dozen editions in its first year of publication and was quickly translated into European vernaculars such as English (1532), German (1536), French, and Czech (1537) (Rummel 1990: 101). The success of Erasmus’s work seems to have popularized the use of the term “civility” and its cognates (civilitas, civilité, civiltà) within European discourse for centuries after the publication of De civilitate (Burke 1995: 18). In Elias’s view ([1939] 2012: 79), Erasmus’s treatise “met a social need” and “recorded the models of behaviour for which the time was ripe, and which society—or more exactly, the upper class first of all—demanded.” In other words, he saw a functional fit between Erasmus’s humanist concept of civility and the needs of an elite society for an articulate guide to good manners. Erasmus thus exemplified a new kind of courtier—the court intellectual who was both connected to, but also sufficiently distinct from, elite society to be able to criticize the social order with confidence that his advice would be taken seriously (Elias [1939] 2012: 81–6; compare Grafton and Jardine 1990). The emergence of this new social type—the critical observer and social commentator on mores and manners—was key to Elias’s conception of a civilizing process, as it marked the moment when a reflexive feedback loop became built into the ways in which personalities were formed and behaviours were modified. Intellectual proponents of civility set in motion a process whereby courtiers began to watch one another and monitor their own behaviour with the recognition that their own manners were being observed and possibly criticized as well. For Elias, the civilizing process accompanied the rise of the absolutist state. Civilization enabled state formation. Many critics see Elias’s portrayal of absolutism as unsophisticated, with its overemphasis on the ability of monarchs to tame and pacify their courtier subjects and its assumption that the French court of Versailles was the overarching model for all other European court societies; these criticisms are important to keep in mind (Gordon 1994: Le Roy Ladurie 2001; Duindam 1994; Duindam 2003). But it is equally important not to exaggerate these aspects of Elias’s theory of civilizing processes. State formation through civilization was above all a social process in which the modern state emerged as the product of a collusion of interests and affiliations that linked subjects to their sovereign. Although Elias tends to speak of the “taming” of the nobility by their sovereign, this is not a necessary feature of his theory of the civilizing process. Despite his argument that court society provided fertile ground for civilization to flourish, it is possible to imagine other social situations that could create an equally propitious ground for the reformation of manners along similar lines. One of Elias’s more ardent contemporary disciples, Stephen Mennell (2007), has even argued recently for the existence of a civilizing process within the thoroughly republican political culture of the United States. Recent studies of the early modern culture of civility have noted that it was far from confined to the milieu of court societies. Civic institutions and even informal forms of sociability such as clubs or drinking societies also insisted upon civil conduct

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amongst their members. Humanist civility discourse inspired a new genre of “drink literature” (Trinkliteratur) in German and English (Richards 2014; O’Callaghan 2007: 62–3). When understood more capaciously then, Elias’s account of state formation can be reconciled with the more recent tendency amongst early modern historians to understand state making in the age of absolutism as a cooperative project between royals and their subjects rather than an exercise in domination of the latter by the former (Beik 2005). With regard to the history of emotions, Elias has been particularly criticized for adhering to what now appears to be a largely unconvincing “hydraulic” understanding of emotions. In this basically Freudian conception, most emotions are understood as inherently primitive psychological drives that are effectively anti-social due to their often aggressive and brutal nature and are therefore often repressed in order to maintain the social order. For Elias, the civilizing process was in many ways best understood as a socialized repression of these anti-social emotions. Civilization resulted from the “muting of drives” and “affect-control” (Elias [1939] 2012: 439–56). The major exceptions to this understanding of emotions as anti-social are emotions such as shame, repugnance, and fear; these were considered inherently repressive feelings that helped and enhanced the civilizing process of affect control by muting or stifling more anti-social passions (457–63). Elias attempted to demonstrate how these feelings were harnessed by courtiers in order to demonstrate their self-control and civility as a means of pleasing their prince and to fit in with a now civilized court society. This hydraulic conception of emotional expression—whereby feelings are understood as drives that must either be expressed or repressed—fit well with the precepts of early twentieth century psychology, and especially the Freudian psychology with which Elias was familiar and sympathetic. Although such views largely fail to convince today, they were based on a long tradition of psychological thought. Understanding passion and reason to be dichotomous and in opposition to one another—a view which became particularly prominent in the early modern period—permits a kind of hydraulic sense of emotions as unruly feelings that should be restrained by rationality (see Figure 8.1). There was therefore a certain concurrence between Elias’s hydraulic view of the emotions and at least one prominent early modern means of understanding them as well. Psychologists and historians of emotions now tend to see and emphasize the correspondences, rather than the differences, between reason and emotion. Emotions can be understood as an integral part of the ways in which humans (and other living creatures) navigate their way through a complex and sometimes hostile world. Emotions cooperate with reason to help beings survive; unlike the Freudian penchant for viewing certain emotions as the products of potentially anti-social or destructive drives, such as the libido or the “death drive,” they are posited as yet another means by which humans have evolved to better adapt to their social and ecological environments. The concepts of “emotional intelligence” and “emotional labour” are but a few newer fields of psychological and sociological inquiry that have emerged out of this tendency to see the rational aspects of emotional experiences, although it remains to be seen whether these concepts may be usefully historicized.2 Historians of emotions therefore have an important dual task: they must understand contemporary psychological theories of emotions while at the same time appreciating the complexities of past conceptualizations of emotion before the word took on its modern psychological significance. The word “emotion” was only beginning to take on its modern reference to strong inward feelings or intense states of mind in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and it did not really figure as a category of psychological analysis

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FIGURE 8.1: Frontispiece, Jean-François Senault, The Use of Passions. Written in French by J.F. Senault. And put into English by Henry Earl of Monmouth, (London, 1649), McGill University, Osler Library (shelfmark S4742uE 1649).

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until the nineteenth century (Dixon 2003; compare Rosenwein 2016). There was nevertheless a sophisticated discourse on the states of mind that would later be called “emotions” in the centuries that preceded the emergence of modern psychology. The early modern vocabulary of emotional experience can best be grasped by taking a close look at what contemporaries called the “passions.”

CIVILITY AND THE PASSIONS Elias’s work on the history of emotions can be seen as the culmination of several centuries of philosophical study of the relationship between the passions and the social order. This body of work sought to use reason as a means of taming unruly emotions, and the literature it engendered was at least as extensive as the literature on civility in the early modern period. More than 8,000 works published in and around the seventeenth century mentioned the passions, and the topic engaged the attention of most of the philosophical writers of the era (see, for example, Schmitter 2013; Johns 1998: 380–443; James 2000; James 1997; Levi 1964). René Descartes, in the preface to his treatise on The Passions of the Soul, reckoned that the title alone “may perhaps invite more people to read it” than any of his other philosophical writings ([1649] 1989: 17). Elias did not engage systematically with this philosophical tradition in his works on the civilizing process— perhaps because he took their arguments for granted and hence considered them to be uncontroversial and irrelevant to his argument for the emergence of a civilizing process— but it is important to keep in mind that the early modern discourse on the passions emerged in tandem with the discourse on civility. There were significant correspondences between the discourses of civility and those relating to the passions. Both were fundamentally posed as problems of governance, and both offered solutions through recommending techniques of self-control and mastery over unruly feelings and behaviours (see Figure 8.2). As such, both discourses participated in the efflorescence of advice literature that continued to pour from the presses in the aftermath of the printing revolution (Bell 1999; Bryson 1998). Both discourses were also aimed primarily at an elite and male readership, as people from the lower social orders and women were commonly perceived to be incapable of achieving the self-governance enjoined by these counselors for civil conduct and the proper regulation of the passions (Bryson 1998: 38–9). Although there were civility manuals for women, and non-elites also had their own codes and cultures of civility, thinking along these lines only emphasized the gulf that existed between the normative ideal of the elite gentleman in control of his passions and the more unruly existence of women and non-elite men.3 Writers on the passions often saw their work as coincident with the goals of the authors of civility manuals. The English Catholic priest Thomas Wright (c. 1561–1623), one of the originators of the English tradition of discourse on the passions, thought that not only the mortified Christian had need to know well his passions, because, by brideling them he wines a great quietnesse of minde, and enableth himselfe better to the service of God, but also the civil gentleman, and prudent polititian, by penetrating the nature and qualities of his affections, by restraining their inordinate motions, winneth a gratious cariage of himselfe, and rendereth his conversation most gratefull to men: for I have my selfe seen some, gentlemen by birth, yet so appassionate in affections, that their company was to most men intolerable. —Wright 1604: sig. B3r–v

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FIGURE 8.2: “Affectus Comprime / Repress the Passions!” in Peter Iselberg, Emblemata Politica in aula magna Curiæ Noribergensis depicta, ([Nuremberg], 1617), emblem no. 27, British Library, London (636.g.22(2.)). © The British Library Board.

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Such a statement would not have been out of place in any of the civility manuals studied by Elias and his successors. The main difference between civility manuals and discourses on the passions is that the former concentrated on offering advice on how to manage one’s outward behaviour in the presence of others, whereas works on the passions were naturally focused on the inward psychological states of individuals (see Figures 8.3 and 8.4). Civility discourse was relatively unconcerned as to whether the civilized, polite behaviours it enjoined were sincere expressions of goodwill towards others or not; it simply required that the rules of good manners be obeyed. Philosophers of the passions, on the other hand, were keen to explain how self-understanding led to the good governance of one’s emotions; if this state of inward tranquility could be achieved, they suggested, then the good behaviours characteristic of a civilized gentleman would naturally result. Critics of civility focused on this discrepancy between inward motives and outward behaviours. The aristocratic French moralist, François de La Rochefoucauld’s (1613–80) influential collection of Réflections ou Sentences et Maximes Morales (1678) offered a world-wise and often cynical view of human nature as enslaved to its passions. “We have no more control over the duration of our passions than over the duration of our lives,”

FIGURE 8.3: Bernard Picart, engravings of the facial expressions of “desire” and “hope” for: Conférence de monsieur le Brun, premier peintre du roi . . . sur l’expression générale et particulière, (Amsterdam: J.L. De Lorme, Paris, E. Picart, 1698), plates 14 and 15, McGill University, Osler Library (shelfmark L454 c 1698).

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FIGURE 8.4: Bernard Picart, engravings of the facial expressions of “anger mixed with fear” and “anger mixed with rage” for: Conférence de monsieur le Brun, premier peintre du roi . . . sur l’expression générale et particulière, (Amsterdam: J.L. De Lorme, Paris, E. Picart, 1698), plates 33 and 34, McGill University, Osler Library (shelfmark L454 c 1698).

he declared. The passions, rather than reason, Rochefoucauld claimed, were the great drivers behind human behaviour. This is why he declared that “great and brilliant deeds that dazzle the onlooker are depicted by strategists as the result of great plans, whereas they are usually the result of temperament and passion” (Rochefoucauld [1678] 2007: 4–5). Rochefoucauld’s English contemporary and fellow aristocratic moralist, George Savile, Marquis of Halifax (1633–95), was more sanguine about the ability of observers to recognize the motivating passions of their peers. “When a passion is strong,” he affirmed, “it breaks out into botches, and is seen in every look or motion. It is no more a passion, if it can be concealed” (Savile 1989: 208). Halifax’s confidence that passions could not be concealed may be related to his relatively optimistic views on civility as well. He thought “it is no small mark of this latter age being more civilized, that the brutal animosityes between several nations are very much lessened even with the vulgar,” and “with the better sort [they are] quite extinguisht” (Savile 1989: 71). Halifax’s positive views on the progress of civility and the ability of both individuals and societies to restrain human passions, and even harness them for good causes, were

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possibly more common in English, rather than continental, moral thinking in the seventeenth century until they would be developed into a more systematic and sophisticated philosophical system by the third earl of Shaftesbury (1671–1713) in his Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times (1711). In the eighteenth century, Shaftesbury’s Characteristics would prove to be enormously influential both in his native Britain and in continental Europe, as his philosophy proved to fit well with, and to justify, an emergent enlightenment culture of politeness (Klein 1994). The rise of the discourse, along with a set of articulate behavioural codes, of politeness in the later seventeenth and eighteenth centuries can be understood as the culmination of several centuries of post-Erasmian civility discourse and the civilization of aristocratic manners encouraged by it. As the practice of politeness spread, it quickly expanded well beyond the aristocracy and became a key aspect of middling social mores as well as amongst elites (Klein 2002; Brewer 1997). Not everyone agreed with this optimistic take on the progress of politeness however. Perhaps the most telling critique of the moral hypocrisy that could lurk behind the outward appearance of civility was the Anglo-Dutch provocateur, Bernard Mandeville (1670–1733), whose notorious work The Fable of the Bees, or, Private Vices, Publick Benefits (1714) mobilized insights derived from the French Augustinian tradition of moral thinking that sought to elucidate the positive consequences of human passions on worldly living (Levi 1964). Contrary to the advice proffered by the proponents of civility, Mandeville declared: Good manners have nothing to do with Virtue or Religion; instead of extinguishing, they rather inflame the Passions. The Man of Sense and Education never exults more in his Pride than when he hides it with the greatest dexterity, and in feasting on the Applause which he is sure all good Judges will pay to his Behaviour; he enjoys a Pleasure altogether unknown to the Short-Sighted, surly Alderman, that shews his Haughtiness glaringly in his Face, pulls off his Hat to no Body, and hardly deigns to speak to an Inferior. —Mandeville [1714] 1970: 112 Mandeville took a rather well developed tradition of mainly courtly discontent with the predominance of civility discourse amongst the aristocracy and applied it to society at large. Even if good manners and civil behaviour were the means to get ahead, he suggested, the mere performance of these actions bore little relation to one’s inward state. Civility could not tame the passions; it could only hide them. Other contemporaries worried about this. In the Spectator (1711–12; 1714), Richard Steele worried “that the most polite age is in danger of being the most vicious”; for him, cultural politeness meant very little if it were not accompanied by virtuous morals (Bond 1965: 1: 30). For Mandeville, however, this contradiction between inward motives and outward actions did not matter in the social aggregate: “private vices” could become “public benefits,” as his title suggested (Hirshman 1977; Goldsmith 1985; Hundert 1994). Elias’s original account of the civilizing process was far too simple; it neglected the discontents and objections to “civilization” that accompanied the post-Erasmian efflorescence of civility manuals, and he therefore failed to engage with what was a longstanding and complex moral debate about the relations between reason and the passions that emerged in the wake of the humanist crusade for a civilization of aristocratic manners. It is particularly unfortunate that Elias failed to engage with the more complex aspects of early modern discourses on the passions, for this might have prompted him to rethink his

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understanding of emotional experience. Had he taken on board the more worldly views of moralists such as de La Rochefoucauld or Mandeville, Elias might have developed a more sophisticated view of the relationship between emotion and cognition. Rather than seeing them as necessarily opposed to one another, and thinking of human reason as a simple means of restraining or repressing animalistic emotions, Elias could have developed a more nuanced historical sociology of emotion formation. Is it time then for historians of early modern emotions to reject the Eliasian civilization paradigm? Many historians have so argued (Bryson 1998; Carroll 2006; Rosenwein 2016). Nevertheless, there may remain something of value to the notion of a civilizing process. Elias’s work usefully focuses on the ways in which emotional experiences shaped, and were shaped by, state formation. Modern states relied upon subjects who could be relied upon to demonstrate loyalty to their sovereign and who could subordinate their self-interests to the collective interest of the state. Recent work on early modern state formation has devoted substantial attention to the ways in which the processes of elite formation and state making went hand in hand.4 And the making of elite culture took place through the inculcation of ideals of civility, loyalty, and responsibility amongst the propertied and monied elites who were the chief agents of the state’s authority. Elias’s emphasis on the role of civility in the making of early modern emotional experiences is worth considering further, albeit not as part of an inexorable teleological process, and certainly not as the result of individual “psychogenetic” repression of constant and impulsive drives. Rather than thinking about the civilizing process in terms of emotional repression, we might imagine the civilizing process as a form of emotional reformation. Civility itself may not be an emotion, but the practice of civility requires complex forms of emotional management and this can effect social and political changes. In the early modern Japanese context, Eiko Ikegami argues that “civility . . . has an aspect of reducing emotional transaction cost by supplying external criteria of evaluating the transaction partners’ trustworthiness.” Hence, she adds, “civility and social trust are closely related in constructing a temporary psychological cocoon for social interactions” (Ikegami 2005: 29). The relationships between emotional experiences, the development of codes of civility and behaviour management, and the making of modern (or at least incipiently modern) states remain important elements of study for early modern historians. There is one key aspect of the Eliasian argument that fails to persuade today. Elias’s focus on the court as the prime generator of social change through emotional repression allowed him to ignore other, equally important places for the formation of new social norms. His attempt to link the civilizing process with state formation meant that he neglected to study any of the spaces outside of the emergent state in which emotional reformation might be encouraged and experienced. Yet civility was promoted and experienced in many other social milieux other than just the princely courts. The etymological root of the Latin word civilis as a referent to citizens rather than courtiers indicates that civility was a concept that was never limited to just a courtly context. In particular, it had an important urban content.5 For this reason, we turn now to the history of early modern civil society formation.

SENTIMENTAL SOCIETIES Early modern cities were incubators of social and emotional reformation. The later seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in particular saw an urban renaissance that encouraged many new forms of sociability accompanied by new styles of emotional

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expression and experience (Houston 2015; Borsay 1991). In recent decades, these changing patterns of urban sociability have fallen under the rubric of Habermas’s influential thesis regarding the structural transformation of the bourgeois public sphere. Although originally formulated in the early 1960s, the public sphere thesis really began to garner serious attention from early modern historians (as opposed to social theorists) in the later 1980s and 1990s. It is now so influential that several textbooks and works of synthetic overview use it to structure a coherent narrative regarding the social and political transformations of the later seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (Blanning 2001; Melton 2001). Unlike Elias, Habermas saw the crux of early modern social change not in the court societies of the absolutist monarchs but rather in the urban world of the bourgeoisie. London, Paris, and Amsterdam, rather than Vienna and Versailles, incubated modernity by hosting the development of new spaces for socialization that encouraged equality and rational discussion. Habermas identified three such spaces in particular: the coffeehouse, the salon, and dining clubs (Tischgesellschaften). In contrast with Elias’s court-centered historical sociology, Habermas offered a different vision: The “town” was the life center of civil society not only economically; in culturalpolitical contrast to the court, it designated especially an early public sphere in the world of letters . . . The heirs of the humanistic aristocratic society, in their encounter with the bourgeois intellectuals (through sociable discussions that quickly developed into public criticism), built a bridge between the remains of a collapsing form of publicity (the courtly one) and the precursor of a new one: the bourgeois public sphere. —Habermas [1962] 1989: 30 Rather than the harbinger of modern civilization, as Elias had it, Habermas saw court society as a decadent, increasingly outmoded social milieu when compared to the transformative vigour of the urban public sphere. Although subsequent research has illuminated the social world of the coffeehouses, salons, and dining clubs that Habermas located as the heart of the bourgeois public sphere, it is rarely noted that all three of these social spaces were devoted primarily to eating, drinking, and entertainment (Cowan 2005; Lilti 2015; Hertz 1988; Cowan 2013). Habermas paid little attention to this commonality, as his vision of the public sphere was one in which the “sociable discussion that quickly developed into public criticism” predominated. Yet it is a factor worth keeping in mind, for it reminds us that the new institutions of public sociability were not only venues for high-minded discussion and criticism, but also for the exercise of appetite (see Figure 8.5). As such, they were also key spaces in the reformation of emotional expression in the early modern era. Habermas was not entirely unaware of the emotional consequences of the rise of a bourgeois public, even if he did not phrase his understanding in terms of a history of emotions. The essence of the bourgeois public sphere was the emergence of a distinction between the state and civil society; if the state was a cold, tradition-bound and impersonal institution almost devoid of emotion, the same was not true for civil society. It is true that Habermas put great emphasis on the “critical-rational” aspects of the bourgeois public sphere: the term “public reasoning” (öffentliches Räsonnement) recurs throughout his discussion. But Habermas also insists that the bourgeois public sphere was firmly located in the “private realm” (Privatbereich) of civil society and that realm included not just public gathering spaces such as coffeehouses and salons, but also the intimate domain (Intimsphäre) of the conjugal family (Kleinfamilie) (Habermas [1962] 1989: 30–1).

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FIGURE 8.5: “The coffeehous mob,” frontispiece to Edward Ward, The Fourth Part of Vulgus Britannicus: or the British Hudibras, (London, 1710), British Museum, London (1880,0807.301). © The Trustees of the British Museum.

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The link posited between familial intimacy and the critical rationality of the public sphere in the world of letters is crucial for Habermas’s argument. The ideals of civic equality and pursuit of a common purpose that took hold in the supposedly rational and unemotional literary and political public spheres could only be forged in the emotionally warm and friendly environment of the family sphere. The “patriarchal conjugal family” was “the scene of a psychological emancipation that corresponded to the politicaleconomic one” (46). It is in this milieu where a sentimental connection between people could be forged, and it was this sense of sympathy with the plight of others that encouraged the politics of equality and respect for democratic principles to emerge as significant forces for social and political change. In Habermas’s largely Marxist historical sociology, the bourgeoisie managed to accomplish this change in family sentiment first, but the political ideals it encouraged were then unleashed throughout the rest of the social order. The model provided by the bourgeois family became a potent new political ideal, and it was an emotionally charged one. The family seemed to be established voluntarily and by free individuals and to be maintained without coercion; it seemed to rest on the lasting community of love on the part of the two spouses; it seemed to permit that non-instrumental development of all faculties that marks the cultivated personality. The three elements of voluntariness, community of love, and cultivation were conjoined in a concept of the humanity that was supposed to inhere in humankind as such and truly to constitute its absoluteness: the emancipation (still resonating with talk of “pure” or “common” humanity) of an inner realm, following its own laws, from extrinsic purposes of any sort. —Habermas [1962] 1989: 46–7 These insights have been developed at greater length in more recent work on the politics of sensibility. Scholars such as G. J. Barker-Benfield (1992), Markman Ellis (1996), and Lynn Hunt (2007) have noted the connection between the development of a “culture of sensibility” in the eighteenth century and the rise of a new humanitarian, and ostensibly more egalitarian political culture. This was manifested in campaigns for the abolition of slavery, for the end to barbaric practices such as torture or cruelty to animals, for the reformation of relations between the sexes, and ultimately the articulation of universal codes of human rights at the end of the eighteenth century. The virtual quality of the bourgeois public sphere also helps explain the emotional richness of this new way of experiencing and imagining the social order. Although rooted in real spaces of sociability, the public sphere was also, and perhaps even more importantly, “a metaphorical place of assembly constituted principally by publication and its readership” (McKeon 2005: 75). The growing market for print and the growth of literacy, especially in the cities where people could gather together in cafés or salons to discuss topics of common interest, enabled the public sphere to take on an imaginary as well as a powerful normative component. The imaginary power of bourgeois publicity was perhaps nowhere more powerfully expressed than in the rise of sentimentality, or overt emotional expressiveness, as a key feature of literary expression (Todd 1986; Mullan 1988). Habermas seemed to view the culture of sensibility that accompanied the rise of the bourgeois public sphere with some uneasiness. Samuel Richardson’s best-selling novel Pamela (1740) arguably established the template for the trans-European cult of sensibility, and it definitely demonstrated that there was a strong market for literature that catered to this taste for emotionally rich

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sentimental narratives of this ilk; Habermas dismissed it as “mediocre” ([1962] 1989: 43). This assessment of Richardson’s talents is not generally shared by those historians who have placed sensibility at the heart of their understanding of the cultural changes that accompanied the rise of the public sphere. William Reddy offers perhaps the most interesting reformulation of the role played by sentimentality in Habermas’s public sphere. Reddy sees both the sociable institutions of public sphere—especially Masonic lodges and salons—as well as the development of new ideals for affectionate marriage and friendship in the private sphere as part of what he calls the “emotional refuges” of old regime France (Reddy 2001: 154). He defines an emotional refuge as “a relationship, ritual, or organization (whether informal or formal) that provides safe release from prevailing emotional norms and allows relaxation of emotional effort, with or without an ideological justification, which may shore up or threaten the existing emotional regime” (Reddy 2001: 129). For Reddy, the emotional refuges of eighteenth-century France were precisely the spaces, imaginary and experiential, at arm’s length from the court society at Versailles and the institutions of state power. It is often noted that Reddy’s old regime emotional refuges are remarkably congruent with Habermas’s bourgeois public sphere: Barbara Rosenwein observes that Reddy’s concept of emotional refuges effectively turns “Habermas’s notion of the bourgeois public sphere . . . into a realm of emotional experimentation,” (Rosenwein 2006: 19 n.75) and Reddy himself acknowledges this correspondence (Reddy 2001: 146). Reddy’s understanding of the institutions and ideals of the bourgeois public sphere as emotional refuges fits well with Habermas’s own argument, but it shares a sense that old regime court societies were emotionally stifling places. Here Reddy finds a sort of correspondence between Elias and Habermas: the incipient early modern state was founded on the repression of emotions and this can be witnessed through looking closely at the demands made of courtiers by their princes. The only difference between the two perspectives is that Elias saw this as a relatively positive development; it moved society one step further towards the civilization of manners and the establishment of peace within the boundaries of the modern state. Habermas, by contrast, viewed the emotionally stagnant world of the old regime state as a sign of its ossification when compared with the exciting new social world offered by the emotionally rich bourgeois public sphere. The old world of “representative publicness” was one in which subjects remained passive, whereas the bourgeois public sphere encouraged the active participation of every citizen. Reddy’s perspective is more Habermasian than Eliasian in this respect. He presents the rise of sentimentalism as a product of the creation of new forms of emotional refuges from the stifling effects of the empty ceremonies and self-submission required of courtiers. “In the context of the absolutist state . . . sentimentalism delivered a clear, liberatory political message,” he concludes. Furthermore, “the sentimentalist ideal of simple sincerity and egalitarian empathy offered one of the most important standards by which the monarchy was judged and found wanting in the years before the Revolution” (Reddy 2001: 325). Reddy presents sentimentalism as a cultural product of the eighteenthcentury public sphere, and a potentially revolutionary one at that. He pays less attention to the role of civility. Reddy refers briefly to the rise of civility in post-Renaissance Europe and even recognizes that codes of civility were not just repressive, but could also provide “an uplifting standard.” When civility was “infused with nonchalance, elaborate court ceremonial and etiquette and the elaborate tasks imposed by high office or diplomatic missions became a liberated way of life, a moral ideal” (Reddy

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2001: 324). Here Reddy seems to suggest that civility could offer a form of “emotional refuge” much in the same way that sentimentalism did in the eighteenth century. It is a suggestion that would fit well with Ikegami’s notion of civility as a means of reducing emotional transaction costs. Unfortunately, this insight is not developed further, perhaps because it fits uneasily with Reddy’s attempt to compose a narrative of French history in which the strictures of court society and the absolutist state were challenged by the new opportunities for free expression offered by the public sphere. This is a missed opportunity, for it is possible to view eighteenth-century sentimentality as a phenomenon related to the early modern culture of civility rather than opposed to it. The key point of connection here is the culture of politeness. As Lawrence Klein (1994: 14) points out, “the study of politeness helps delineate both the continuity and the break between the courtly world explored by Norbert Elias and the public sphere described by Jürgen Habermas.” The concept of politesse or politeness emerged with particular force in the later seventeenth century in French and English elite culture as a refinement of Erasmian notions of civility. The ethos of politeness, along with related concepts of gentility (honnêteté in French) and urbanity, gradually took on a sense of greater refinement than mere civility (Chartier 1987; France 1992: 57–8). One reason why politeness seemed to be superior to civility was that it appeared to offer greater emotional freedom and a means of practicing polished manners that did not require deception or the repression of feelings. To the contrary, a truly polite person was fully in touch with his or her best, most benevolent and refined, emotions. Such notions were first articulated in France by moralists such as Jean de La Bruyère (1645–96), whose Caractères (1688) presented a moral critique of court society as insufficiently polite due to the hypocrisy of manners found there. La Bruyère’s criticism of feigned sincerity extended to politeness as well as civility: he famously declared that “politeness does not always inspire generosity, justice, complaisance and gratitude; it gives a man the appearances of those virtues, and makes him seem that without, which he ought to be within” (La Bruyère 1723: 2:94). But La Bruyère’s style of character writing would prove to be deeply influential in the eighteenth century, not least amongst periodical essayists such as Joseph Addison and Richard Steele, whose Tatler and Spectator papers would present an urbane form of polite manners that could not be contrived because they came from the heart as well as the head (Squibbs 2014: Klein 1995). This “Spectatorial” tradition of periodical essay writing would be imitated in France, the Netherlands, Italy, and the Germanic lands of central Europe (Pallares-Burke 2007). When combined with the more erudite, but equally widespread, influence of Shaftesbury’s Characteristics, the English tradition of moral philosophy in which an ethos of politeness was central would prove to be enormously influential throughout eighteenth-century Europe. This ethos was explicitly urbane rather than courtly, and it sought to balance reason and passion for the purpose of social, cultural and intellectual improvement. The relationship between the culture of politeness promoted by writers such as Addison and Shaftesbury and the culture of sensibility that took hold in the mid-eighteenth century requires further investigation. The longstanding debate regarding the relationship between Anglican latitudinarianism and sensibility initiated by R. S. Crane in the 1930s was ultimately unproductive, particularly since both terms of analysis remain contested themselves (Crane 1934; compare De Bruyn 1981). In any case, Crane’s Anglo-centric argument neglects the international aspect to the culture of sensibility and therefore remains incomplete. * * *

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The emotional culture of politeness therefore offers perhaps the best means of reassessing the relationship between civility and sentiment in the early modern age. The ideals of politeness emerged as a challenge to the models of courtly civility that predominated elite culture in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and they were better suited for the increasingly complex forms of sociability that emerged in the later seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Politeness provided an emotional code fit for an emergent bourgeois public sphere. The culture of politeness was far from hegemonic, and like the culture of civility, it too provoked discontents, criticisms and limitations, but it also allowed for a greater range of emotional expression, and it placed greater emphasis on sincerity and transparency (Dickie 2011; Davison 2014; Gatrell 2006). As such, it helped lay the groundwork for the even more emotionally rich culture of sensibility of the later eighteenth century. A new emotional history of politeness will therefore be crucial for illuminating both the correspondences and the ruptures between the culture of civility described by Elias and the new forms of sociability that comprised Habermas’s bourgeois public sphere.

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Laura Alston is a PhD student at the University of Sheffield. She received her MA in Eighteenth Century Studies from the University and has training in the disciplines of English and History. Laura’s research focuses on eighteenth-century women with a particular emphasis on their “negative” emotions. Her work undertakes detailed analyses of the language used by women to produce micro-studies of individuals and small communities. Laura also works as a public historian in South Yorkshire and Derbyshire, including as a lead researcher on a Heritage Lottery-funded project, Unravelling the Tinsley Court Rolls, in collaboration with the University of Sheffield and Wessex Archaeology, as well as a Community Covenant-funded project Sheffield Voices in WW1 for Sheffield Cathedral. Laura is currently working on a Heritage Lottery Fund project in collaboration with Kidology Arts CIC entitled The Derbyshire Stokers Project. Katie Barclay is a Senior Research Fellow in the Department of History and the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions, Europe 1100–1800, at The University of Adelaide. She is the author of Love, Intimacy and Power: Marriage and Patriarchy in Scotland, 1650–1850 (2011) and several articles on emotions, gender and family life. With Andrew Lynch and Giovanni Tarantino, she is editor of Emotions: History, Culture, Society. Her current research explores the intimate lives of early modern Scots. Lisa Beaven is a post-doctoral Research Fellow in the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions, Europe 1100–1800, at The University of Melbourne. She is an art historian of early modern Italy and a specialist in early modern collecting and patronage in Rome and has published on this topic in numerous articles and in anthologies such as Possessions of A Cardinal: Politics, Piety and Art, 1450–1700, with C. Richardson and M. Hollingsworth (2010). Her most recent research explores sensory and affective responses to art, and the relationship between landscape painting and environmental history. Her book, An Ardent Patron: Cardinal Camillo Massimo and his Artistic and Antiquarian Circle, was published in 2010. Tim Carter is the author of books on opera and musical theatre ranging from Claudio Monteverdi in the early seventeenth century through Mozart in the later eighteenth to American musicals of the 1930s and 40s, including, most recently, Understanding Italian Opera (2015), and Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Carousel (2017). He also edited the musical play Johnny Johnson (1936) by Kurt Weill and North Carolina playwright, Paul Green, for The Kurt Weill Edition (2012). Prior to moving to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2001, he taught in the United Kingdom at Royal Holloway, University of London. He has held fellowships at the Harvard Center for Italian Renaissance Studies in Florence, the Newberry Library in Chicago, and the National Humanities Centre, and is an honorary member of both the Society for SeventeenthCentury Music and the Royal Musical Association. 173

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Brian Cowan is an Associate Professor and Canada Research Chair in Early Modern British History at McGill University. He has been a visiting research fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study of Durham University and the Institute of Historical Research at the University of Texas-Austin. He is the author of The Social Life of Coffee: The Emergence of the British Coffeehouse (2005) and editor of The State Trial of Doctor Henry Sacheverell (2012). He is a member of the Multigraph Collective responsible for Interacting with Print: Elements of Reading in the Era of Print Saturation (2017) and co-editor, with Scott Sowerby, of The State Trials and the Politics of Justice in Later Stuart England (forthcoming). He is currently working on the age of enlightenment volume of The Cultural History of Fame for Bloomsbury Academic. Karen Harvey is Professor of Cultural History at the University of Birmingham. She has published widely on gender, sexuality, the body, material culture, and the domestic interior. Her books include Reading Sex in the Eighteenth Century: Bodies and Gender in English Erotic Culture (2004), The Little Republic: Masculinity and Domestic Authority in Eighteenth-Century Britain (2012) and History and Material Culture: A Student’s Guide to Approaching Alternative Sources (2017). Karen is currently completing a book about Mary Toft and her monstrous rabbit births. Peter Holbrook is Professor of Shakespeare and English Renaissance literature at the University of Queensland, Australia, where he directs the UQ Node of the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions, Europe 1100–1800. His publications include Shakespeare’s Individualism (2010), and English Renaissance Tragedy: Ideas of Freedom (2015). He is currently writing a book about the politics of nature in English literature. David Lemmings is Professor of History at The University of Adelaide and Leader of the “Change” Program in the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions, Europe 1100–1800. He has published extensively on the sociocultural history of law and the legal professions in eighteenth-century Britain. His latest books are Law and Government in England during the Long Eighteenth Century: From Consent to Command (hb 2011, pb 2015) (ed.); Crime, Courtrooms and the Public Sphere in Britain, 1700–1850 (2012) (ed., with Ann Brooks); Emotions and Social Change: Historical and Sociological Perspectives (Routledge, 2014); and (ed. with Heather Kerr and Robert Phiddian), Passions, Sympathy and Print Culture: Public Opinion and Emotional Authenticity in Eighteenth-Century Britain (2015). He has also edited Book 1 of Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England for Oxford University Press. Stephen Pender is Professor of English at the University of Windsor, Canada. He has published on the history of rhetoric, history of medicine, and intellectual history, and is at work on a book on medicine, moral philosophy, and rhetoric in early modern Europe. John D. Staines is Associate Professor of English at John Jay College, City University of New York. The author of The Tragic Histories of Mary Queen of Scots 1560–1690: Rhetoric, Passions, and Political Literature (2009), he has also published articles and essays on Shakespeare, Spenser, and Milton. He has forthcoming work on Aphra Behn and compassion for the racial other and on Shakespeare, Ovid and sublime rapture. His research on the emotions has focused on pity, compassion, and sympathy in the early modern public sphere and on responses to scenes of violence and torture in British

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literature. He is currently working on a project on terror and the sublime in Shakespeare and Milton. Giovanni Tarantino is a scholar of early modern intellectual history. He is a Research Fellow of the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions, Europe 1100–1800, at The University of Western Australia, a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, an Honorary Senior Research Fellow in the School of Historical and Philosophical Inquiry at the University of Queensland, and Co-Editor of the journals Cromohs; and Emotions: History, Culture, Society. Recent publications include: “ ‘Whether ’tis lawful for a man to beat his wife’: Casuistical Exercises in Late-Stuart and Early-Hanoverian England,” in Carlo Ginzburg (ed.), A Historical Approach to Casuistry: Norms and Exceptions in a Comparative Perspective (Bloomsbury, 2018); “Disaster, Emotions and Cultures: The Unexpected Wink of Shiba Kokan (1738–1818),” Rivista Storica Italiana 128 (2016); “ ‘The Mysteries of Popery Unveiled’: Affective Language in John Coustos’ and Anthony Gavín’s Accounts of the Inquisition,” in Susan Broomhall (ed.), Spaces for Feeling: Emotions and Sociabilities in Britain, 1650–1850 (Routledge, 2015); “Mapping Religion (and Emotions) in the Protestant Valleys of Piedmont,” ASDIWAL 9 (2014); Republicanism, Sinophilia and Historical Writing: Thomas Gordon (c. 1691–1750) and his history of England (Brepols, 2012). Claire Walker is Senior Lecturer in History at The University of Adelaide and an Associate Investigator in the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions, Europe 1100–1800. She has written extensively about exiled English convents in France and the southern Netherlands in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and is currently researching the family of Samuel and Susanna Wesley. She is the author of Gender and Politics in Early Modern Europe: English Convents in France and the Low Countries (2003) and co-editor (with Heather Kerr) of Fama and her Sisters: Gossip and Rumour in Early Modern Europe (2015).

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Chapter 2 1.

2. 3.

4. 5.

Given the centrality of religion to the history of Europe during the early modern period, religion figures prominently in collections of essays that focus on the interplay between emotion and other aspects of society in this era. For a comprehensive survey of existing literature, see Wiesner–Hanks 2015–6. Quoted in Firpo 2001: 239. On how natural disasters, in particular earthquakes and fires, were understood and represented in “the Age of Light,” and the ways in which individuals and communities responded to them emotionally, see Tarantino 2016. On the Calvinists, “blinder and incomparably more hardened than the Jews themselves,” see Concina 1754, I: 476. The practice of publicly discussing individual dilemmas communicated in anonymous form would soon take on the peculiar form, destined to last for centuries, of readers’ letters published in newspapers. It is significant that John Dunton, who was the first to encourage such experiments in participatory writing that involved readers as authors in the columns of The Athenian Mercury (1691–97), should have initially called his newspaper The Athenian Gazette: or, The Casuistical Mercury.

Chapter 3 1.

2. 3.

4.

Bonds 2014: 74–77; the broader discussion here (39–126) of “Essence and Effect: 1550– 1850” is an essential counterpart to the present essay, covering how theorists of the period engaged with a range of issues considered here in more practical terms. Anton Raaff was a singer and friend of the composer. Cited in Anderson 1985: 557–8. “Pulsa placet digitis mirè mihi lyra peritis, / Cantibus et miris me philomela rapit; / At mihi concentus numquam iucondior ullus, / Quam laudes docta qui canit arte meas” (“The lyre plucked with skilled fingers pleases me wondrously, / and the nightingale seizes me with wondrous songs; / but no concent is ever more delightful to me / than that which sings my praises with learned art”). “A bien considerer la douceur infinie / Des tons de la musique et leurs accords divers, / Ce n’est pas sans raison qu’on dict que l’harmonie / Du mouvement des cieux entretient l’univers” (“Considering well the infinite sweetness / of musical tones and their various consonances, / it is not without reason that one says that the harmony / of the movement of the heavens sustains the universe”).

Chapter 4 1.

All citations of Shakespeare are taken from The Riverside Shakespeare (1974), edited by G. Blakemore Evans. Quotations are given by act, scene, and line number.

177

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2.

Compare his statement that “Nor can a man any more live, whose Desires are at an end, than he, whose Senses and Imaginations are at a stand. Felicity is a continuall progresse of the desire, from one object to another; the attaining of the former, being still but the way to the later.” Hobbes’s endorsement of insatiable desire constitutes, of course, his violent repudiation of the teachings of “the Books of the old Morall Philosophers” ([1651] 1985: 160). 3. All quotations are taken from Everyman [1485] in Greenblatt 2006. 4. Quoted in Shakespeare 1974: 1847. 5. Brian Vickers provides a fine summary of neoclassical theatrical conventions in the Introduction to volume one of his Shakespeare: The Critical Heritage (1974: 6). On the Continental and classical origins of the conventions, see also p. 4. 6. Vickers (1974) observes that the neoclassic dramatists, in revising Shakespeare’s plays for the Restoration stage, sought “to remove metaphors and those instances of ‘figurative language’ which either seemed too bold for current critical theory or could create difficulties in comprehension” (6). Johnson’s dismissal of Shakespeare’s predilection for puns is the most famous example of the neoclassic impatience with the disorderliness of the Elizabethan poetics: “A quibble was to him the fatal Cleopatra for which he lost the world, and was content to lose it” ([1765] 1970: 213). 7. All citations of Aureng-Zebe are by act, scene, and line number from Dryden ([1675] 1994). This quotation is from the “Prologue,” lines 1–18. 8. Quotations are by act and scene number, followed by page number, from Congreve ([1700] 1985). This quotation is from II .i: 349; subsequent references are in the text. 9. All quotations are from Johnson ([1749] 1965), and are cited by act and scene number, followed by page number. This quotation from I.iii: 84. 10. Quotations are from Sheridan ([1777] 1997), and are by act and scene number, followed by page number. This quotation from II .iii: 406.

Chapter 5 1.

2. 3.

4.

5. 6.

Mina Gregori’s translation of Baglione (Metropolitan Museum of Art 1985: 236). The Italian reads: “un fanciullo, che da una lucerta, la quale usciva da fiori, e da frutti, era morso, e parea quella testa veramente stridere, & il tutto con diligenza era lavorato.” “[N]on solo sono disutili, ma attristano grandemente il sense umano, come ferine e fuori d’ogni ragione” (quoted in Boschloo 1974: 126). Cropper’s (1991: 199) translation of Marino. The Italian reads: “Che fai GUIDO ? che fai?/ La man, che forme angeliche dipinge/tratta or opre sanguine?/Non vedi tu, che mentre il sanguinoso/ stuol de’fanciulli ravivando vai/nova morte gli dài?/O ne la crudeltate anco pietoso/Fabro gentil, ben sai/ch’ancor Tragico caso è caro oggetto/e che spesso l’orror va col diletto.” Christopher Allen has strongly argued against Charles Le Brun as the natural heir to Nicolas Poussin, on the basis that Poussin’s painting is contemporary with Descartes, while the academic style practiced by Le Brun is “saturated with the influence of Descartes” (1998: 80). Nonetheless for Le Brun and many other members of the French Academy, Poussin represented an artistic ideal. This was in stark contrast to Descartes who was aware the same emotion could manifest itself differently on the face of different individuals. John O’Malley points out the majority of cardinals at Trent were from Italy and Spain, where iconoclasm was virtually unknown (2013: 32).

NOTES

7. 8.

9.

179

Alessandro Turchi (called Orbetto), Lamentation over the dead Christ, 1617, oil on slate, 42 × 53 cm, Galleria Borghese, Rome. The example highlighted by Stephanie Dickey (2010) is Rubens’s Andromeda, where her eyes brim with tears, which also trickle down her cheeks. See Peter Paul Rubens, Perseus Freeing Andromeda, 1638, 189 × 94 cm, Gemäldegalerie, Berlin. Frans Hals, Gypsy Girl, 1628–30, oil on wood, 58 × 52 cm, Musée du Louvre, Paris.

Chapter 7 1.

2.

3.

For more on the development and research into the cognitive aspects on emotion, especially those that relate to individuals’ goals, desires and appraisals in their relational contexts, see Kelter, Oatley and Jenkins 2006; Oatley 1992; Solomon 2003. Barker-Benfield: 1992; see also Markman Ellis 1996 on how the private, domestic, and affective values of the culture of sensibility had far reaching effects on public discourse; Pribram 2011 explores how the culture of sensibility played a role in the enlightenment conception of the individual. Historians have explored other connections between dynastic household ambitions and emotion over Europe over this period. See, for example, Bastress-Dukehart 2001. The article details that in early modern Swabia, noble households were the middle ground between politics, social structures, and familial bonds. The Zimmern family fashioned itself through the emotions bound up in long recollections of inheritance decisions, decisions that straddled the imperatives of private domestic relationships, and the social structures and cultural context of Swabia.

Chapter 8 1. 2.

3. 4. 5.

Here one finds the influence of Max Weber, and especially The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism ([1905] 2008), on the work of both Elias and Habermas. On the death drive, see Freud ([1920] 2003); Evans (2003); and Hochschild (1983). There was a complex pre-modern discourse on the relationship between cognition and emotion as well. See Pickavé and Shapiro eds. (2012). On writings directed at women see Mendelson (2000). On bourgeois, or middling sort, civility, see Barry (2000) and Withington (2005: esp. 213–24). On developments in England, see Braddick and Walter eds. (2001); Braddick (2000). For France, see Beik (2005); Dewald (1993). For a general survey, see Dewald (1996). A complete account of early modern emotions requires attention to the ways in which institutional and individual religious experiences shaped emotions as well. Key works include Karant-Nunn (2010); Mullaney (2015); and Roper (1994).

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206

INDEX

Italic numbers are used for illustrations. absolution, reserved cases of 46 Adair, James 26, 32 Advice to a Young Physician (Sorbière) 28 aesthetics 76–7, 108–9, 113 affective piety 100 affetti 86, 93, 95, 98, 110 Ahmed, Sara 122 Alberti, Leon Battista 86 Alfonso de’ Liguori 36 Almira, Königin von Castilien (Handel) 64–5 Anatomy of Melancholy (Burton) 30, 128, 129 Anderson, M. 138 anger 29, 97, 119, 148, 149, 164 Angiolini, Gasparo 65 animal spirits 18, 19–23, 96 anthropocentrism 2 Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (Kant) 33 anthropology in the Baroque 17 antique heritage of art 85 Apollo 102–3 Areopagitica (Milton) 124–5 Arianna (Monteverdi) 63 arias, opera 62–4 Aristotle 114, 120 Armenini, Gian Battista 98 Arnold, Thomas 23, 30, 32 Ars Poetica (Horace) 114 art market 85–6, 106 Art Poétique (Boileau) 114 art theory and expression 86 articulacy in drama 76, 81–2 Artusi, Giovanni Maria 57 As You Like It (Shakespeare) 73 Astrophil and Stella (Sidney) 112 atheism 40, 43, 45 attacks on the church 43, 45–8 Aubigné, Théodore-Agrippa d’ 118–19 audiences for music 54 Auditus/L’Ouye (Bosse) 55, 56 Auerbach, Erich 120

Augenmusik 59 Augustine of Hippo 55–6 Aureng-Zebe (Dryden) 76, 77–9 authenticity of emotions 7–8 Avison, Charles 69 Bacchus and Ariadne (Guercino) 103 Bach, C. P. E. 68 Bach, Johann Sebastian 59, 61–2, 68 Bacon, Francis 18, 19, 27 Baglione, Giovanni 87 Baglivi, Giorgio 28 Bailey, Joanne 144, 145, 153 ballets d’action 65 ballets de cour 65 Barberini, Francesco 103 Barclay, Katie 144, 148–9 Barker-Benfield, G. J. 145 Barlaeus, Caspar 30 Barnaby Rudge (Dickens) 44 Baroque style 9 Basan, Sebastiano 37 Battie, William 31–2 Baudet, Étienne 95 Baudius, Domenicus 90–1 Baumann, Gerd 49 Beales, Derek 48 Beatson, Phoebe 150 Beattie, James 66, 68 beautiful in music 68 beauty, in art 6, 102–3, 115, 117, 132 Bellori, Giovanni Pietro 93 Benedictine nuns 9 Bentham, Jeremy 2 Benzi, Bernardino 46 Bernard, Jean-Frédéric 49, 51 Biber, Heinrich 66 birth hoax of Mary Toft 149 Black, William 33 Blanchard, A. 138 blank verse 77 Blankaart, Steven 19–20 Blauvelt, Martha Tomhave 139

207

208

blindness of the irreligious 39 Bodley, Thomas 112–13 body and mind 17–23 Boerhaave, Herman 18 Boileau-Despréaux, Nicolas 114–15 Book of Prayer and Meditation (Luis de Granada) 101 Borromeo, Federico 103 Bosse, Abraham 55, 56 Bound, Fay 148 bourgeois public sphere 167, 169 bowels of compassion 121–2 Boy Bitten by a Lizard (Caravaggio) 87, 88 Boyle, Robert 27 Bradley, A, 75 brain and animal spirits 20, 21–2, 22, 96 as seat of emotion 93 Brooke, Humphrey 17 Broomhall, Susan 144, 147, 151, 153 Broughton, John 17–18 Brown, Thomas 2 Bruyère, Jean de la 171 Burke, Edmund 115 Burmeister, Joachim 57 Burton, John 23, 24 Burton, Robert 30, 128, 129 business and family 150 Butler, Joseph 2 Cabanis, P. J. G. 16 Calvinist emotions 38–9 Cambini, Andrea 1 capitalism and drama 71 Caractères (Bruyère) 171 Caravaggio 87–9, 88–9 Card Sharps (Caravaggio) 89 Cardi, Ludovico (Il Cigoli) 103, 104 caricatures 151–2 Carracci, Annibale 99–100, 100 Castiglione, Caroline 152 casuistry of Jesuits 45, 46, 47 of Protestants 47–8 catastrophic events 38 Catholic art 85 Catholic church, attacks on 43, 45–8 Catholicism, expansion of 36, 39 Caussin, Nicolas 121 Cavazzini, Patrizia 106 Cavendish, Margaret, Duchess of Newcastle-upon-Tyne 74–5

INDEX

Cérémonies et coutumes religieuses de tous les peuples du monde (Bernard and Picart) 49, 50, 51 Cervantes, Miguel de 132 Chambers, Ephraim 23 Chambre, Marin Cureau de la 20 character 17, 72–6, 132–3 Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times (Shaftesbury) 165 charismatic experiences 35, 36 charity 9–10, 10 Charleton, Walter 21 Cheyne, George 24–5 childhood 145, 149–50 chocolate, arguments against 46 Christmas Concerto (Corelli) 66, 68 Cigoli (Lodovico Cardi) 103, 104 civility and the passions 156–66 bourgeois public sphere 167, 169 courtly civility 158–9, 167, 170–1 philosophy and the mind 163–5 politeness 171 restraint of emotions 159, 161, 163 sentimentality 169–70 state formation and 166 civility manuals 161, 163 Clavier Übung (Bach, J. S.) 68 clergymen 39–43, 41–2 coffeehouses 167, 168 colonization, religious approaches to 51 community, concept of 10–11 See also domestic relationships; emotional communities compassion in art 88, 92, 100–1, 103 causes of 25 in literature 121–2, 125–6 Concerto Grosso in G minor (Corelli) 66, 68 Concina, Daniello 39, 46–7 Conférence sur l’expression générale et particulière (Le Brun) 96 Congreve, William 76, 79–81, 81 conscience and religion 45, 47 Considerazioni sulla pittura (Mancini) 103 constancy 20–1 contagious compassion 122–3 convents, art in 98 conversion, religious 35 Corelli, Arcangelo 66, 68 Coriolanus (Shakespeare) 75 cosmos, order of 73–4 Council of Trent (1545) 97

INDEX

Cour de Peinture par Principle avec une Balance des Peintres (Piles) 109 courtly civility 158–9, 167, 170–1 courtship 145–7 Crane, R. S. 171 Crashaw, Richard 120 Craven, Elizabeth 151 Credulity, Superstition and Fanaticism (Hogarth) 40 Critique of Judgment (Kant) 117 Cullen, William 15, 32–3 cultural history 139, 140 Cyclopaedia (Chambers) 23 dance measures 64–5 Daniel, Drew 128 Daquin, Louis-Claude 66 Das wohltemperierte Klavier (Bach, J. S.) 61–2 Davan, Kingsmill 25 De civilitate morum puerilium (On Good Manners for Boys) (Erasmus) 158 De clementia (Seneca) 121 De Clippel, K. 105–6 De Pictura (Battista) 86 Dead Christ (Fernández) 100–1, 101 Death’s Duel (Donne) 121–2, 123 deception in art 87, 89 decision-making processes 6 delight 92, 98, 114 Della storia del probabilismo e rigorismo (Concina) 46 Dempsey, Charles 91, 94–5 denominational feelings 38–9 Der vollkommene Capellmeister (Mattheson) 57, 68 Descartes, René 1, 3, 19, 63, 95–6, 161 desire in art 103, 108, 163 in drama 74, 78 in literature 112, 121, 125 in science 26, 29 despair 100, 100 devotional images 97–101, 99–101 Dickens, Charles 44, 103 Diderot, Denis 110 Die Leiden des Jungen Werthers (Goethe) 131–2, 133 Discorso intorno alle immagini sacre e profane (Paleotti) 39, 98 Discourse on the Passions (Chambre) 20 Discourses on the Heroic Poem (Tasso) 118

209

Dissertatio in casus reservatos Venetae Dioceseos (Benzi) 46 Dissertation on the Influence of the Passions upon Disorders of the Body, A (Falconer) 15 dissimulation by religious believers 43–4 diversity of religion 43–4 divine order 73–4 divine, sense of 35 Dixon, Thomas 2, 40 Doctor’s Visit (Steen) 108, 109 domestic relationships 140–2, 144–5, 147–53 Don Giovanni (Mozart) 60, 65 Don Juan, ou Le Festin de pierre (Gluck) 65, 68 Don Quixote (Cervantes) 132 Donne, John 3, 5, 71, 121–2, 123 Doolittle, Thomas 38 Doran, Robert 117 Doulcer, Nicholas 149 drama 71–84 character, developments in 72–6 Hobbesian selves 78–84 rationalism and the history of drama 76–8 Dryden, John 71, 76, 77–9 Dutch genre painting 106–8, 107, 109 earthquakes 38 Eastern travellers’ correspondence 42–3 ecumenicity of everyday life 43–4 education 133 Education of the Virgin (Rubens) 103, 105 Eikon Basilike 122–3, 124, 126 Eikonoklastes (Milton) 125 Ekman, Paul 96 Elias, Norbert 155–6, 157–9, 161, 165–6, 170 Eliot, T. S. 71 Émile (Rousseau) 48, 133 emotion, definitions and meanings of 1–5, 86, 159, 161 emotional communities 5–6, 139, 141 emotional cultures 5–11, 139 emotional management 7–8, 147 emotional refuges 170 emotional regimes 5–6 English Catholics 43–4 Enlightenment and religion 48–51 Enterline, Lynn 133 Enthusiasm Delineated (Hogarth) 40–2, 42 Entretiens (Félibien) 103, 105 Epistolae theologico-morales . . . (Concina) 46 equal temperament in music 61 Erasmus, Martin 158

210

erotic thrills from music 54–5 Espion Turc (Marana) 42 Essay of Health and Long Life, An (Cheyne) 24–5 Essay on Musical Expression (Avison) 69 essay writing 171 Essays (Montaigne) 1 estrangement, device in art 42 ethnicity in the Baroque 17 Eucharist, devotion to 36 eupatheia (moderate passions) 17 Everyman 72–3, 74 expressions in art 86–8, 88–9, 96, 97, 106, 107, 108, 163–4 eyebrows 96, 97 Fable of the Bees, or, Private Vices, Publick Benefits (Mandeville) 165 facial expressions 86, 87, 88–9, 96, 97, 106, 107, 108, 163–4 Faerie Queene (Spenser) 133 Falconer, William 15, 28, 32 family life 137–8, 140, 145, 148–53 fear and pain in paintings 87, 88–90, 89–93, 96 and piety 36–8 scientific understanding 25 feelings, religious, definition of 35 Félibien, André 103, 105–6 Fernández, Gregorio 100–1, 101 Fielding, Henry 133 Fielding, Sarah 151 Filial Piety (Greuze) 110, 110 Flandrin, Jean-Louis 138 Fletcher, A. 147 Florio, John 1 Floyd-Wilson, Mary 17 Fontenelle, Bernard Le Bovier de 53, 65 Forkel, Johann Nicolaus 69 Fortune Teller (Caravaggio) 87 Four Seasons (Vivaldi) 66, 67 Franits, W. 108 Frank, Robert 21 Freedberg, D. 101 French painting 108–10, 110 friendship 28, 151 fright, expression of 96, 97 frustration 148 furor paintings 91 Gage, Francis 92 Galenic medicine 16–17, 26, 33, 93

INDEX

Galilei, Vincenzo 56–7 Gammerl, Benno 139 Garnet, Henry 47 Garrick, David 8, 8, 147 Gaub, Jerome 29–30 gender division of passions 126 genre painting 106–8, 107, 109 Gentileschi, Artemisia 106 Georgievksa-Shine, Aneta 90, 92 Gilio da Fabriano, Giovanni Andrea 103 Giulio Cesare in Egitto (Handel) 64 Gloria, the, compositions of 58–9 Gluck, Christoph Willibald von 62, 65, 68 Godefroy, Denys 149 Godefroy, Theodore 149 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 128, 131–2, 133 Goldberg Variations (Bach, J. S.) 68 Goldie, Peter 35 Gordon Riots (1780) 44, 45 Gregori, Mina 87 Gregory, John 28 Greuze, Jean-Baptiste 110, 110 grief 98–101, 99 ground-bass patterns 59–60 Grove, Henry 23 Guarini, Battista 54–5, 57 Guercino 103 Guise, Charles de 97 Gypsy Girl (Hals) 108 Habermas, Jürgen 114, 155–6, 157, 167, 169, 170 Haines, Daniel 152–3 Haller, Albrecht von 18 Hals, Frans 106, 107, 108 Hamlet (Shakespeare) 74, 75, 130 Handel, George Frideric 63–5 Hanslick, Eduard 68 Harvey, William 33, 93 Haydn, Joseph 60 Haydocke, Richard 86–7, 91 Hayward, Samuel 47 hearing of music 54–5, 57–62, 65–6, 68–9 heart, as seat of passions 18, 111 Henrietta Maria, Queen of England 103 heretics 36–7, 39 Hippocrates’s Treatise on the Preservation of Health 25 Hirschman, Albert O. 16 Histoire Générale des Vaudois (Léger) 36 Historically Informed Performance of music 53, 61

INDEX

history of emotions 138–9, 140 History of England (Hume) 115, 117 Hobbes, Thomas 3, 74, 83 Hofmann, Frederick 17 Hogarth, William 40–2, 41–2 Holt, Robin 150 holy affections 35 home, concept of 141–2, 144 Horace 114 horror, expression of 96, 97 horror pictures 89–93, 89–90 household, definition of 140 Huarte, Juan 24 Hultquist, Aleksondra 3 humanity, changes in 72 Hume, David 2, 27, 115, 117, 128 humour in art 106, 108 humours in medicine 16, 18, 20, 24, 128 Hunt, Lynn 49, 51 Huret, Grégoire 92 Huygens, Constantijn 30 Hygiasticon (Lessius) 24 hygiene manuals 24–6 iconoclasm 103 Idea del tempio della pittura (Lomazzo) 86–7 Ignatius of Loyola 98 Ikegami, Eiko 166 Il trionfo del Tempo e del Disinganno (Handel) 64 illiterate people and art 98 imagination 15, 28, 30–2, 33, 117–18, 128 individualism 138, 142 infanticide 149 Inquisition 37 insanity 30 Institutiones pathologiae medicinalis (Gaub) 29–30 instrumental music 65–6, 68–9 intellectual passions 19 interior experience 113–14 Irene (Johnson) 76, 81–3 irrational thought 117 Israelites Gathering the Manna (Poussin) 94–5, 94 James, Susan 26 Jesuits, attacks on 45–7 Jesuits, opinions on music 57–8 Jewish beliefs 38 Jews, stereotypes of 39, 40, 42 Johnson, Samuel 76, 81–3

211

Jones, Pamela 103 Josephus 1 Junius, Franciscus 92 Kahn, Victoria 114 Kant, Immanuel 16, 33, 117, 132 Karant-Nunn, Susan C. 39 keys and modes in music 60–2 King Lear (Shakespeare) 73, 76 Kircher, Athanasius 68 Klein, Lawrence 171 Krysmanski, Bernd 40 La Chambre, Marin Cureau de 96 La Cour Sainte (Caussin) 121 La Princesse de Clèves (Lafayette) 126–7 La Salle, Jean-Baptiste de 108 Lafayette, Madame de 126–7 Lambert, Anne-Thérèse 48 lamentation 59–60, 62–4 Lamentation (Turchi) 98, 99 Lamento della ninfa (Monteverdi) 60 Landscape with Man Killed by a Snake (Poussin/Baudet) 95, 95 language of drama 72 lascivious images 97, 103 lasciviousness 108 Last Judgment (Michelangelo) 103 laughter 83 laxity of Christianity 46–7 Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme (Molière) 65 Le Brun, Charles 94, 96 Le champion des dames (Le Franc) 38 Le Franc, Martin 38 Le Peinture Spirituelle (Richeôme) 98 Le quattro stagioni (Vivaldi) 66, 67 Lectures on the Duties and Qualifications of a Physician (Gregory) 28 Léger, Jean 36 legibility of art 98 Leonardo da Vinci 86, 87 Les Caractères des Passions (La Chambre) 96 Les Feux (Aubigné) 118 Les Passions de l’Âme (Descartes) 1, 63 Les Tragiques (Aubigné) 118–19 Lessius, Leonard 24 Lettres édifiantes et curieuses (Lockman) 49, 51 Leviathan (Hobbes) 3, 74 Lisbon Earthquake 38 listening to music 54–5, 57–62, 65–6, 68–9 literature 111–35

212

character, sympathy and the rise of the novel 132–4 melancholy sympathies 127–32 passions of rhetoric, poetics, and aesthetics 111–17 rhetoric and sensibility 134–5 sublime, pitiful and contagious passions 117–27 literature, definition of 112–13 Lives of the Artists (Bellori) 93 Locke, John 24, 43 Lockman, John 49, 51 Lockridge, Kenneth 148 Lodge, Thomas 1 Lomazzo, Giovanni Paolo 86–7, 91 Longinus 92–3, 114–15, 116, 119–20 love and community relationships 9–11 of God 36, 120–1 in literature 111–12, 126–7 in marriage 138–9, 144, 145–7 of masters for servants 150 in relationships 148 scientific understanding 21 Luis de Granada 101 Lutheran emotions 38–9 Lyrical Ballads (Wordsworth) 133–4 madnesses 30–3 Malebranche, Nicolas 48 Malle Babbe (Hals) 108 Man Tricked by Gypsies (Caravaggio) 87–9 Mancini, Giulio 92, 103 Mandeville, Bernard 165 mania, treatment of 30, 32 Marana, Gian Paolo 42, 43 Maravall, J. 91 Maringhi, Francesco Maria 106 Marino, Giambattista 92 marriage to Christ 35–6 and exchange networks 152–3 love in 138–9, 144, 145–7 martyrdom 118–19 Marvell, Andrew 119 Mary, mother of Jesus 36 Mary Magdalene 103, 104 Mascall, Thomas 148 masque dances 65 Mass in B minor (Bach, J. S.) 59 Massacre of the Innocents (Reni) 92 massacre of the Waldensians 36–7

INDEX

masters and servants 150 Mattheson, Johann 57, 68 Mayerne, Theodore Turquet de 33 Maynwaring, Everard 93 Maza, Sarah 150 McEwan, Joanne 149 McKeon, Michael 142 medical and scientific understanding 15–33 madnesses 30–3 medicine of the mind 26–30 passions 17–23 passions in discourses of hygiene 23–6 Medical Cautions (Adair) 26 Medicina mentis (Tschirnhaus) 26 meditative tracts 98 melancholy 30, 32–3, 127–8, 129–30, 130–2 meletetics 27 Memorie Storiche sopra l’uso della cioccolata . . . (Concina) 46 Mennell, Stephen 158 mental reservation, doctrine of 47 Meslier, Jean 43, 45 Messiah, coming of 38 Metaphysique d’amour (Lambert) 48 Methodist preaching 40 Michelangelo 103 Midsummer Night’s Dream (Shakespeare) 76 Mikkeli, Heiki 24 Milton, John 71, 119, 122, 124–6 mimesis of drama 74 of music 65, 66 of poetry 114 misfortune, enjoyment of 88–9 missionaries 35, 47 mistresses 148–9 modes and keys in music 60–2 Molière 65 Monro, John 32 Montagu, J. 85 Montaigne, Michel de 1 Monteverdi, Claudio 57, 58–9, 60, 62–3 Morgan, Thomas 26 motherhood 152 mourning 59, 151 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus 54, 60, 62, 65 Much Ado About Nothing (Shakespeare) 80 Murgatroyd, John 150 music and dance 53–69 composition of 65–9 conventions 57–60 dance measures 64–5

INDEX

history of emotions 69 listening experiences 54–5 modes and keys 60–2 musical theory 55–7 vocabulary of emotions 62–4 music, form of 66 Musica poetica (Burmeister) 57 Musurgia universalis, sive Ars magna consoni et dissoni (Kircher) 68 Mystery sonatas (Biber) 66 Nance, Brian 33 natural disasters 38 natural order in drama 73 Naturalis historia (Pliny the Elder) 55 Newton, Hannah 145 Nicene Creed, compositions of 59 nightingales in music 55 non-natural things of the body 15–17, 26 novels 13, 112, 126, 127, 130–4 Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime (Kant) 132 Ochino, Bernardino 36 O’Hara, D. 146 O’Loughlin, Katrina 151 On the Sublime (Longinus) 92–3, 114–15, 116, 119–20 opera 62–4, 68 Orfeo (Monteverdi) 62 Orfeo ed Euridice (Gluck) 62 Orlebar, Charlotte 141–2 pain and fear, paintings of 87, 88–90, 89–93, 96 pain and the sublime 115 pain, theory of 93 Pains Afflicting Humane Bodies (Maynwaring) 93 paintings. See visual arts Paleotti, Gabriele 39, 92, 98 Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded (Richardson) 112, 169 Pamphilia to Amphilanthus (Wroth) 111 Paradise Lost (Milton) 119, 125–6 paradox of fiction 85 parenting 144, 145 Paris symphony (Mozart, no. 31) 54 Pascal, Blaise 45 Passion of Christ 3, 5, 98–101, 99–101, 120, 121–2 passions and artistic expression 86–9

213

civility and 156–66 definitions and meanings of 111, 120 in discourses of hygiene 23–6 and emotions 2–3 gender division of 126 in literature 120, 121–2, 125 medical and scientific understanding 17–23 of rhetoric, poetics, and aesthetics 111–17 sublime, pitiful and contagious passions 117–27 understanding of 15, 17–23 Passions of the Soul (Descartes) 95–6, 161 pathos 86, 120, 125, 126 Paxton, Peter 23 Penitent Magdalene (Cardi) 103, 104 Penitent Mary Magdalene (after Titian) 103, 105 Peri hypsous. See On the Sublime (Longinus) Perkins, William 47 personhood, changes in 72 Petrarca, Francesco 112 Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (Burke) 115 Philosophical Principles of Medicine (Morgan) 26 philosophy and the mind 26–30, 161, 163–5, 163–4 Philosophy of Love (Lambert) 48 Phrygian mode in music 60–1 Physical Dictionary, A (Blankaart) 19–20 physical health 24 physicians conduct of 15, 27–8, 29 status of 16–17 Piano Concerto no. 20 (Mozart) 60 Picart, Bernard 49, 50, 51, 163–4 Pietà (Carracci) 99–100, 100 Pike, Samuel 47 Piles, Roger de 109 pilgrimages 36 pity in literature 121, 122–3, 125 Plamper, Jan 39 Plato 57, 60, 114 Pliny the Elder 55 Poetics (Aristotle) 114 poetry and rhetoric 112, 114, 117, 120, 134 poetry, religious 118–21 Pohl, Nicole 151 politeness 13, 14, 133, 165, 171–2 political transformations and emotions 155–6, 157–8

214

Pollock, Linda A. 148 Popp, Andrew 150 Popple, William 43 Poussin, Nicolas 93–5, 94–5 preaching 39–43, 41–2 prejudice and violence 44 Premier livre de pièces de clavecin (Daquin) 66 preventative medicine 24 privacy, concept of 141–2 private life 137–53 approaches to 137–40 definitions of key terms 140–4 discourse of emotions 144–7 power and agency 147–51 public expression 151–3, 167, 169 Prodigal Son 106, 108 Prometheus 89–91 Prometheus Bound (Rubens) 89, 90–1, 90, 92 prose in drama 79–80, 83 Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (Weber) 39 Protestant guidance 47–8 Protestantism in Europe 36–7 Prussian sonatas (Bach, C. P. E.) 68 psychogenesis 157–8 psychohistory 138 psychology 17, 117, 157–9, 161 public display of the domestic 151–3 public life 155–72 civility and the passions 161–6 civilized emotions 157–61 sentimental societies 166–72 Purcell, John 24 Quod animi mores (Galen) 17 Raggio, Olga 91 Rambuss, Richard 36 Ranum, Orest 139, 141 Rather, L. J. 93 rationalism and the history of drama 76–8, 82–4 rationality 6, 156, 157, 159 reading, privatization of 112 realism in art 85, 86–7 in drama 78–80 in novels 133 Reddy, William M. 139, 170 Reflections on the Revolution in France (Burke) 115

INDEX

Réflections ou Sentences et Maximes Morales (Rochefoucauld) 163 Reflexions nouvelles sur les femmes (Lambert) 48 Reformed churches 38–9 regimens, texts on 24–6 religion and spirituality 35–51 churches under siege 45–8 clergymen 39–43 denominations 38–9 ecumenicity of everyday life 43–4 in the Enlightenment 48–51 fear and piety 36–8 feelings and senses towards 35–6 religious images 85, 97–101, 99–101 religious literature 118–21 Renaissance heritage of art 85 Reni, Guido 92, 102, 102, 103 Republic (Plato) 57, 60 Requiem (Mozart) 60 reserved cases of absolution 46 rhetoric of music 57, 58–9, 65–9 of poetry 112, 114, 117, 120, 134 Rhetoric (Aristotle) 114, 120 rhyming couplets 77–8 Ribera, Jusepe di 91 Richardson, Jonathan 88–9 Richardson, Samuel 112, 169–70 Richeôme, Luis 98 rigorism 45 Rime (Guarini) 54–5 Rinaldo (Handel) 63 riots 44, 45 Ripa, C. 86 Rochefoucauld, François de la 163–4 romances 126–7 romantic love 138 Ronsard, Pierre de 118 Roper, Lyndal 138 Roper, Michael 144 Rosary sonatas (Biber) 66 Rosenwein, Barbara 139, 170 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 48, 69, 131, 133 royalist romances 126–7 Rubens, Peter Paul 89, 90–1, 90, 92, 103, 105 Sabbatai Zevi 38 Sabean, David 140 Saccamano, Neil 115 Saint Sebastian (Reni) 102, 102, 103 Sandrart, Joachim von 91–2

INDEX

sarabandes 64–5 satire in drama 83 Savile, George, 1st Marquess of Halifax 164 Schleiermacher, Friedrich 35 Schoenfeldt, Michael 125 School for Scandal (Sheridan) 76, 83 schools 133 Schumann, Robert 62 scientific understanding. See medical and scientific understanding Scott, Sarah 151 sculptures 100–1, 101 Sebastian, saint 102–3, 102 secret worship 43–4 Sedley, David 119 self-control 6, 133, 157, 161, 162 self, sense of 73–4, 80, 83 Selva morale e spirituale (Monteverdi) 58–9 Senault, Jean-François 121, 122, 160 Seneca 121 Sennert, Daniel 16, 19 senses, hierarchy of 39 sensibility, culture of 6, 9, 144–5, 156–7, 169–72 sensitive appetite 18, 20–1 sensual and erotic images 101–6, 102, 104–5 sentiment, women and 48 Sentimental Journey through France and Italy (Sterne) 131 sentimental style of music 68 servants 150 Shaftesbury, Anthony Ashley Cooper, 3rd Earl of 165 Shakespeare, William 72, 73–6, 77, 80, 130 Shakespearean Tragedy (Bradley) 75 Shamela (Fielding) 133 Shapin, Steven 27 Shaw, Philip 117 Sheridan, Richard 76, 83 Sherman, Caroline 149 Shute, John 1 Sidney, Sir Philip 77, 112, 114 Sigerist, Henry 33 sight 39 signifiers in music 57–60 simplification of emotion in drama 71–2 sins and emotions 9 Sleeping Congregation (Hogarth) 40, 41 Slive, Seymour 106, 108 smiles 106, 108 Smith, Adam 2, 5, 127–8 Snyders, Frans 89

215

sobriety 24 sociability of music 55 Sociable Letters (Cavendish) 74–5 social transformations and emotions 155–6, 157–8 Some Thoughts Concerning Education (Locke) 24 Somonyng of Everyman 72–3, 74 Sorbière, Samuel 28 Sorrows of Young Werther (Goethe) 131–2, 133 soul 15, 17–23, 95–6 Southwell, Robert 47 Spacks, Patricia Meyer 141 Spear, Richard 103 Spenser, Edmund 133 spirits, animal 18, 19–23, 96 Spiritual Exercises (Loyola) 98 states, formation of 155–6, 157–9, 166 statues 100–1, 101 Steedman, Carolyn 150 Steele, Richard 165 Steen, Jan 108, 109 Sterne, Laurence 130–1, 130 Stone, Lawrence 138, 148 String Quartet in D minor (Mozart) 60 Strother, Edward 27, 30 Sturm und Drang 68, 131 stylus phantasticus 68 sublime concept of 6, 92–3 and literature 114–15, 117–20 sympathy 8, 28, 112, 113, 126, 127–8, 133–4 Symphony no. 26 (Haydn) 60 Symphony no. 40 in G minor (Mozart) 62 Tadmor, Naomi 140 Talvacchia, Bette 102–3 Taming of the Shrew (Shakespeare) 80 Tasso, Torquato 118 Taylor, Edward 35 teeth, baring of 108 temperament and health 16, 33 temperaments, of music 61–2 Teresa of Ávila 120 Teresa of Jesus Maria (Elizabeth Worsley) 3 terribilità (terribleness or awfulness) 91 terror 29, 95, 95 Testament (Meslier) 43 Theologia christiana dogmatico-moralis (Concina) 47 theologia mamillaris 46

216

Theory of Moral Sentiments (Smith) 2, 5, 127–8 Tilmouth, Christopher 19 Titans, paintings of 89–92, 90 Titian 103, 105 Toft, Mary 149 tolerance, religious 43–4, 48–9 Tracte containing the artes of curious painting (Lomazzo, trans. Haydocke) 86–7 tragedy, writing of 115 Traité de la Connoissance des Animaux (La Chambre) 96 Traité du sublime (Boileau) 115 Trattato della Pittura (Leonardo) 86 Trattato dell’arte de la pittura (Lomazzo) 86 travellers’ correspondence 42–3 Treatise of Human Nature (Hume) 2, 128 treatises on painting 86 Tristram Shandy (Sterne) 130–1, 130 Trumbach, Randolph 138 Trumble, Angus 108 Tschirnhaus, Ehrenfried Walther von 26 tuning systems in music 61–2 Turchi, Alessandro 98–9, 99 Two Very Notable Commentaries (Cambini) 1 Ueber die Theorie der Musik (Forkel) 69 Uffel, Lucas van 91–2 urban societies 166–7 Use of Passions (Senault) 121, 160 utopian households 151 Van Gent, Jacqueline 35 Vaudoise heresy 36–8 Versuch über die wahre Art das Clavier zu spielen (Bach, C. P. E.) 68 vices and emotions 9 violence and prejudice 44 Virgin Mary 36 visual arts 85–110 Bellori, Poussin and Le Brun 93–6 devotional images 97–101 Dutch genre painting 106–8 French painting 108–10 horror pictures 89–93 passions and artistic expression 86–9 sensual and erotic images 101–6

INDEX

vitalism 16 Vivaldi, Antonio 66, 67 vocabulary of emotions, musical 62–4 Voltaire 42–3, 45 Waldensian heresy 36–8 Walsham, Alexandra 44 Walton, Izaak 121, 122 Watson, Ursula 148 Watt, Ian 133 Way of the World (Congreve) 76, 79–81, 81 Weber, Max 39 Wedgwood family 150 Wesley, John 5 White, R. S. 2 White, Stephen 115 Whitefield, George 40 Willis, Thomas 20, 21–2, 22 witchcraft 38 Wollstonecraft, Mary 145 women caricatures of 151–2 and civility 161 decision-making of 6 and emotional labour 139–40 and family life 148–9 motherhood 152 paintings of 103, 104–5 and religious experience 35–6 and sensibility 145 and sentiment 48 writing about emotions 141–2 wonder 92, 118 word-painting in music 59–60 Wordsworth, William 74, 133–4 Works (Josephus) 1 Wright, Thomas 18–19, 161 Wrightson, Keith 141 Wroth, Mary 111–12, 133, 135 Yonker Ramp and his Sweetheart (Hals) 106, 107 Young Man and Woman in an Inn (Hals) 106, 107 Young, Spencer 35 Zika, Charles 38

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