Much as I enjoyed a number of the essays assembled, I am not sure we needed this book. In their introduction, the editors explain that they wished to “revisit the baroque and the neo-baroque, and to investigate the relationship between the two in the context of new methodological approaches that examine the phenomena of the (neo) baroque through the lens of space, the senses, and the history of the emotions” (6). As the title indicates, the editors stress how Baroque artifacts both generate and manipulate vivid sensory experiences with a view to inducing readers and audiences to think and, above all, feel in ways they otherwise would not. The trouble is that this is a thoroughly uncontroversial claim. Scholars of the Baroque argue about many things. Is it best thought of in formalist ways, as a matter of style, or in historicist terms, as a period culture and ethos? And, if the latter, should we adopt José Maravall's interpretation, seeing the Baroque as a product of the Counter-Reformation's effort to roll back Protestant heresy and the republican politics with which Protestantism is associated, or follow Walter Benjamin's Weberian lead, defining it as a melancholy symptom of modern disenchantment? Or should we espouse Jonathan Israel's view in taking the Baroque as a multifaceted, and signally conflicted, response triggered by the standpoint of radical immanence that the Theologico-Political Treatise and the Ethics champion? What scholars do not argue about, however, is the role sense-based affect plays. On the contrary, as Monika Kaup notes in the opening sentence of the first essay in the collection, “Feeling Baroque in Art and Neuroscience: Joy, Sadness, Pride, and a Spinozist Solution to the Quest for Happiness,” there is in fact “widespread agreement about the baroque's inherent connection with the emotions, as the baroque saw an interest in the depiction of psychological states of mind and an intensified interest in the inner life of humans” (19). The volume does not, then, offer fresh perspectives on any of the debates surrounding the Baroque. Though a number of the essays shed welcome light on individual authors or aspects, none changes the basic outlines of scholarly discussion.

I confess that the three chapters on neo-Baroque themes did not appeal to me. Nor did the exercise in computer-driven “sentiment analysis” in Javier de la Rosa, Adriana Soto-Corominas, and Juan Luis Suárez's “The Role of Emotions in the Characters of Pedro Calderón de la Barca's Autos Sacramentales.” A tautological count of emotional expressions sorted by character type explains nothing about how those expressions do the work the authors claim—namely, exert ideological control over the masses gathered in corrales to watch and listen. A number of essays do enrich our grasp of the specific texts, images, set designs, and practices they describe. From this standpoint, Katrina Grant sheds helpful light on the contribution visual effects made to Baroque opera; Matthew Martin and Lisa Beavan provide fascinating details on the use of relics and the handling of personalized votive objects like crucifixes and rosary beads; and I learned a lot from John Weretka's physiognomic iconography of states of ecstasy, mystic vision, and rapture even if, unlike him, I continue to believe that the ecstasy of Bernini's Saint Teresa is indelibly sexualized. Yet, good as they are, none of these essays promotes the reenvisioning of the Baroque the introduction promises since all of them focus on features of individual works or practices traditionally characterized as Baroque without engaging the question of the Baroque itself at large.

There were, however, two essays that successfully engaged more general issues. Monika Kaup's account of the dialogue between Spinoza and the neuroscientist Antonio Damasio is suggestive, albeit in part because it highlights the shortcomings of Damasio's crypto-dualist fixation on the brain as opposed to the broader understanding of the body as a whole in Spinoza's philosophy of the mind. And though I tend to see the Baroque as a pan-European phenomenon that embraces the demotic realisms of the Reformed north as well as the Catholic and aristocratic idealisms of the Counter-Reformation south, I admire Justin Clemens's reading of Milton's attempt to turn the techniques of Catholic illusionism against themselves in order expose its ideological fraudulence. I may disagree with Kaup concerning Damasio's grasp of what makes Spinoza so central to the Baroque; and I may, contra Clemens, and precisely with Spinoza in mind, be more ready to see Milton as being as visibly and symptomatically Baroque as, say, Tasso or Cervantes. The fact remains that both writers go beyond offering valuable yet theoretically underdeveloped accounts of single items or issues.