This collection of essays is an important addition to a growing body of emotion historiography. It is a broad and eclectic work, addressing the articulation and treatment of affect in western art, music and medicine between the fourteenth and twentieth centuries. Yet despite this diversity it remains coherent as a collection, being well-ordered, well-edited, and contemplative about its role in the production of histories of emotions.
Deriving from a symposium organized by the editors in 2001, the book is formed of four parts, entitled ‘Introduction’; ‘Emotion and religious belief’; ‘Emotions and the body’; and ‘Emotions and discipline’. In the first part, theories of emotions are respectively considered by the editors, by Peter Burke, and by Graham Richards. Gouk and Hills provide a good introduction to some of the most important issues affecting historians of emotion today, and their essay stands as a framework for those that follow. Peter Burke's question—“Is there a cultural history of emotions?”—is one which is as pertinent today as it was when Nietzche raised the issue in 1882 (p. 34). “Emotionology”, a culture's display codes and rules used to express emotion, receives as much criticism as theatrical metaphors in Burke's considered account of the breadth of emotion perspectives in constructivist and essentialist historiographies. And Graham Richards' contribution reminds us that when we attempt to put emotions into words (“or words into emotions”) we run up against the “available verbal categories”, whether they are “traditional” or “psycho-medical” in origin (p. 50).
The second part of this volume addresses emotions and religious beliefs. In his article on the ‘Spirit of affect in Giotto and Piero’, Michael Schwartz explores the picturing of human emotions in late-medieval and early-Renaissance art. This inspiring piece argues against the “rationalistic and atomistic” approach to interpreting facial expressions that dominates modern scholarship, replacing individual identifications of affect with the spiritual, the collective, the “body-mind” (p. 83). Helen Hills deals with emotional expressions of another sort in her essay on Leon Battista Alberti and architectural affect. Rightly pointing out that art historical studies of emotion privilege painting rather than architecture, Hills links aesthetics, religion, morals and emotions in ways that have echoes in classical and early modern philosophy. Spiritual passion is also a theme taken up by Dalia Judovitz in her essay on the work of Georges de la Tour. Problematizing the language of “the passions” in a way which has more recently been taken up by other scholars, Judovitz notes the contrasts between La Tour's motivation and that of other, more considered philosophies. René Descartes' focus on reason and the control of the passions is thus juxtaposed with the prioritizing of spiritual passions by La Tour, “as vehicles for engagement with the divine” (p. 110). Michael Heyd's much-needed account of the emotional significance of changing concepts of Original Sin ends this section of the book. Here the analysis of Nonconformist “ego-documents” (p. 128) provides Heyd with access into the narrative construction of emotions in specific contexts.
In the third part of this collection, Christine Battersby, Marcia Pointon and Christopher Gärtner examine aspects of emotions and the body in history. Each of these contributions deals with the problem of controlling the body, and the (gendered) links between emotion and reason in historical interpretations of embodied affect. Each contributor manages the subject admirably, but Pointon's work is perhaps most memorable for its graphic accounts of the ‘Aesthetics of excess’ (p. 156) in Hogarth's Sigismunda (1759). Here, Pointon's richly evocative prose brings new insights into the commodification of tears and other bodily fluids as paradoxical symbols of affective engagement.
A less somatic vision is conjured up by Gärtner and Gouk in their accounts of the relationships between music, emotions and the mind in the eighteenth century. Gärtner's account focuses on the relationship between music and the soul, as articulated by the writer Jean Jacques Rousseau and the physician Jean-Joseph Menuret de Chambaud. This theme is taken up more forcefully in Gouk's analysis of music's ‘Pathological and therapeutic effects on the body politic’, in which Gouk unravels the nationalistic, medical, philosophical and affective effects of music in her account of the Edinburgh physician John Gregory. Ably demonstrating the importance of music to theories of sensibility in eighteenth-century culture, Gouk asks why it is that music has been so “comprehensively overlooked by historians” (p. 202)? Gouk's answer is that this results from a lack of musical education (and therefore discussion) amongst the most prominent and studied figures in the field, including Cullen, Hume and Reid. That this has been continued in the present day—most notably through the absence (and presumed irrelevance) of musical training as an aspect of the scientific enterprise—reminds us how necessary it is to step outside modern constructions of appropriate knowledge in order to appreciate the complexity of eighteenth-century medico-scientific beliefs.
Gouk's essay introduces the final section of this collection, and she raises themes that are continued in the contributions by Charles Brotman (in his analysis of the ‘Rhythmic conception of music and the emotions’) and by Otniel Dror. Dror's ‘Science, amusement and the civilizing process’ ably demonstrates the emergence of emotion as an object of laboratory investigation in the early twentieth century. Although rather brief, this essay draws together many of the themes raised above, focusing as it does on the issues of “control” and “discipline” (mental or bodily); the interplays between observing and experiencing emotions; between science and art; and between nature and culture. By bringing the reader into the twentieth century, Dror's essay makes us think about the shifting meanings of emotion as experience and as performance across the broad sweep of time covered by this collection. It also reminds us how present-centred can be our own acts of intellectual and emotive engagement with the past.