Reading the Early Modern Passions Essays in the Cultural History of Emotion Edited by Gail Kern Paster, Katherine Rowe, and Mary Floyd-Wilson "Thanks to the collection as a whole, the complex history of the passions in the early modern mind and body will now take a more prominent place in our study of the literature, art, and music of the period."--"MLR" "Provides an engaging and extremely useful introduction to historicized explorations of the early modern passions through the lens of the creative arts."--"Sixteenth Century Journal" How translatable is the language of the emotions across cultures and time? What connotations of particular emotions, strongly felt in the early modern period, have faded or shifted completely in our own? If Western culture has traditionally held emotion to be hostile to reason and the production of scientific knowledge, why and how have the passions been lauded as windows to higher truths? Assessing the changing discourses of feeling and their relevance to the cultural history of affect, "Reading the Early Modern Passions" offers fourteen interdisciplinary essays on the meanings and representations of the emotional universe of Renaissance Europe in literature, music, and art. Many in the early modern era were preoccupied by the relation of passion to action and believed the passions to be a natural force requiring stringent mental and physical disciplines. In speaking to the question of the historicity and variability of emotions within individuals, several of these essays investigate specific emotions, such as sadness, courage, and fear. Other essays turn to emotions spread throughout society by contemporary events, such as a ruler's death, the outbreak of war, or religious schism, and discuss how such emotions have widespread consequences in both social practice and theory. Addressing anxieties about the power of emotions; their relation to the public good; their centrality in promoting or disturbing an individual's relation to God, to monarch, and to fellow human beings, the authors also look at the ways emotion serves as a marker or determinant of gender, ethnicity, and humanity. Contributors to the volume include Zirka Filipczak, Victoria Kahn, Michael Schoenfeldt, Bruce Smith, Richard Strier, and Gary Tomlinson. Gail Kern Paster is Director of the Folger Shakespeare Library and the author of "The Body Embarrassed: Drama and the Disciplines of Shame in Early Modern England." Katherine Rowe is Associate Professor of English at Bryn Mawr College. She is the author of "Dead Hands: Fictions of Agency, Renaissance to Modern." Mary Floyd-Wilson teaches English literature at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and is the author of "English Ethnicity and Race in Early Modern Drama." 2004 392 pages 6 x 9 27 illus. ISBN 978-0-8122-3760-3 Cloth $75.00s 49.00 ISBN 978-0-8122-1872-5 Paper $28.95s 19.00 World Rights Cultural Studies, History Short copy: Authors here investigate specific emotions, such as sadness, courage, and fear. Others turn to emotions spread throughout society by contemporary events, such as a ruler's death, the outbreak of war, or religious schism, and discuss how such emotions have widespread consequences in both social practice and theory.

"Dead Hands" traces the fascinating career of a curious imaginative device: the wandering, disembodied, or ghostly hand. The author situates this familiar gothic convention in its richer literary and intellectual contexts, from early modern English drama through American fiction. Dexterously threading historical, theoretical, and formalist questions through readings of the plays of Shakespeare and Webster and the haunted tales of Maupassant, Le Fanu, and Twain, the book illuminates the complex social fictions invested in the faculties of the hand and tested by this evocative device.
The book brings together a broad and eclectic array of "manual" iconography: from sixteenth-century religious imagery, medical anatomies, emblem books, witchcraft and folklore, to the popular metaphors of nineteenth-century industrialism, contemporary labor movements, and forensic science. Literary "dead hands" draw on and elaborate these varied traditions, to sometimes humorous and sometimes chilling effect.
Across such disparate fields, the author argues, the figure of the "dead hand" represents a specific set of ideas about human agency: particularly, concerns about the fraught relationship between intentions (individual and collective) and meaningful action in the world. Severed and wandering, fictional dead hands challenge prevailing assumptions about bodily autonomy and control, directing us instead to the dependent, disabling, and self-alienating experiences of the acting self. In the process, they illuminate the changing assumptions about bodily experience--that "sense" of acting self--that sustain legal and political definitions of person in these different periods.
Outlining the dynamic history of this device--first as it migrates from visual art onto the Elizabethan and Jacobean stage, and later as it prospers in Anglo-American gothic fiction--"Dead Hands" advances a comparatist reading of early modern and modern concepts of bodily action and its relation to interiority, authority, and identity.