Anger has been a productive topic for premodern histories of emotions in Europe. Anger, with its long history of theorization and its changing relation to theories of self and society, is taken as one of the clearest demonstrations of the historicity of emotions. Barbara Rosenwein's Anger's Past: The Social Uses of an Emotion in the Middle Ages (1998) remains a landmark in this area. The volume under review gathers work by literature scholars, historians of philosophy, and art historians in an attempt to trace the discursive aspects of anger in early modern Europe (and beyond, in two chapters). Almost five hundred pages long, the book is an extensive collection of case studies that will be useful for scholars interested in particular philosophical and literary discourses.

The book encompasses three essays in a subsection titled “Learned Debates” (of which two study philosophical thought), four essays on literary discourses of anger, only one on visual representations, two on anger in political discourses, and two on “Transcultural Notions.” The majority of the contributions focus on one thinker, author, or artist: Johann Weyer (Karl A. E. Enenkel), Montaigne (Anita Traninger), Lipsius (Jan Papy), Descartes (Michael Krewet), Giovanni Pontano (John Nassichuk), Torquato Tasso (Betül Dilmac), Pierre Corneilles (Jakob Willis), Rembrandt and Rubens (Maria Berbera). Others focus on groups, moments, or themes: anger in Puritan thought (David M. Barbee), the Scottish Enlightenment (Tamás Demeter), eighteenth-century Germany (Johannes F. Kehmann), debates on the Berzerkers (Bernd Roling), the sultan's anger in Ottoman Turkey (N. Zeynep Yelçe), seventeenth-century French political officers (Tilman Haug), reconciliation in early modern England (Jan Frans van Dijkhuizen), anger and rage in China (Paolo Santangelo), and Neo-Latin epic (Christian Peters).

While the individual case studies will appeal to scholars with aligned interests, the work does not transcend its origins as a set of conference papers on disparate topics, and its length harms its cogency. The introduction ends abruptly, without attempting to indicate what is gained by having gathered these particular papers together. It alleges a schematic history of anger. The argument runs that at the end of the early modern period, “anger became, for the first time, a purely psychological problem. It was no longer a social phenomenon, but rather an inner experience of the individual.” While such a general tendency remains convincing, the “inward” turn was by no means ubiquitous. Furthermore, assuming unidirectional changes in anger discourses silences the vitally important class, racial, and gender variations in understandings of anger.

One largely coherent collection nestled within is the collection of essays on “Anger Management in Early Modern Philosophical Discourses.” The importance of Neo-Stoic influence on early modern European conceptions of anger is demonstrated in two essays by Jan Papy and Michael Krewet. The volume would have done well to problematize the term anger management, however, as European early modern idioms drew from the political, the government of anger, rather than the management. The connections between anger and internal and external governance are a fascinating topic.

A problematic aspect of the volume's organization is the treatment of the Chinese and Ottoman case studies, which, despite offering a welcome expansion of perspective, are the sole occupants of a “transcultural notions of anger” category. As these contributions concentrate, respectively, on internal anger discourses in China and Ottoman Turkey, it is unclear exactly what purpose “transcultural” serves here apart from to highlight that the subject matter is not European. Considering that the work does not have “Europe” or “European” anywhere in its title or subtitle, it gives the unfortunate impression that European discursive frames are defaults and that any turn to another geographic region constitutes a crossing of borders. Further, there is only one explicit reference to Europe in the introduction, twelve pages into the work. This lack of clarity regarding scope means that repeatedly citing “early modern anger” or “the early modern period” leads to an unfortunate, nearly silent, elision of “the early modern” with “the early modern (Christian) European.” Considering the global significance of anger discourses as key elements in conquest, imperialism, and anti-colonial resistance, as well as their intersections with discourses of barbarity and civilization, these elisions are regretful.