Because most recent anthologies on the history of early modern emotions have been compiled by literary scholars, this gathering of essays by distinguished musicologist Susan McClary is especially welcome. Thanks to a central emphasis on music in eight of thirteen essays and abundant crosscurrents among the five sections into which they are organized, new contexts and emotion scripts emerge to produce a somewhat unfamiliar, hence deeply interesting, cultural landscape. The result is a salutary reminder — especially to literary scholars like myself — of the need to look long and hard beyond our own disciplinary boundaries before we venture into the fraught territory of historical generalizations.
It is not surprising, though, that the figure of Descartes looms large here as scholars such as Daniel Garber, Penelope Gouk, and Thomas Christensen describe the transformations upon affect theory wrought by developing technologies. Garber is interested in the cultural dream of a “mathematical theory of the emotions” (still with us today, I would add); Gouk painstakingly explains the interest displayed in music’s effect upon the passions by English thinkers Timothy Bright, Robert Fludd, and Richard Browne; Christensen focuses on Marin Mersenne’s long-standing interest in the relation of “music and mechanics,” represented especially in the Harmonie universelle (61).
Several essays consider cultural voices to be feared. In “Fear of Singing,” Gary Tomlinson offers a detailed account of the well-founded fear among Spanish missionaries that the survival of native music indicated resistance to conversion, while Olivia Bloechl describes “The Illicit Voice of Prophecy” in transatlantic contexts, noting how English colonists linked Eastern Woodlands singing to the subversive prophecies of Quaker women and other dissenters. The less fearful, perhaps more naive French colonial strategies, as presented by Sara Melzer in “Voluntary Subjection,” emphasized assimilation of “good, docile colonial subjects capable of inclusion” (113) into the self-evidently superior French culture.
“The Politics of Opera” garners two essays: Wendy Heller, inspired by Leonard Barkan’s work on Ovidian metamorphosis, looks at the transformations wrought by desire in Venetian opera, where “Ovidian narratives played a special role in the expression of gender ideology” and hence in the development of what she calls “a very peculiar ‘structure of feelings’” (178). In “A Viceroy Behind the Scenes,” Louise Stein redraws the picture of Spanish connoisseurship of music, art, and theater in late seventeenth-century Naples, suggesting that the motivations for such connoisseurship were more private, less political than has been widely assumed by scholars.
Studies of emotions can hardly avoid the body. Richard Rambuss, thinking profitably on the rich subject of disgust in “Crashaw and the Metaphysical Shudder,” shows how in Crashaw’s ecstatic, extravagant poetry “matters of the soul appear as spectacles of the body” (262). Sarah Covington returns to the influence of Descartes in her powerful treatment of judicial torments in “Law’s Bloody Inflictions.” Punishments and executions — whether faced with stoic martyrdom, defiance, or terror — were entertainment for the fascinated gazer “serving to compel, not repulse” (281). Similar evidence of historical difference in structures of feeling is to be found in Kathryn Hoffman’s “Excursions to See ‘Monsters,’” with its discussion of what she nicely calls the “tourism of anomaly” — showing us how “spectacle, travel, and reveries on the body functioned in the seventeenth century” (299).
Finally McClary herself and Richard Leppert consider music’s temporality — McClary in a study of “qualities of motion in French music” where, paradoxically, French music is designed to induce “a quality of stillness in which consciousness hovers suspended outside linear time” (315), and Leppert in “Temporal Interventions” addressing, again paradoxically, the representation of musical accoutrements as a status-conscious form of self-presentation in paintings.
There is much to be gained from reading the work of a distinguished group of scholars working at the top of their game, drawing broadly on literary, musical, art historical, and colonial histories to particularize what McClary, borrowing a term from Raymond Williams, calls “the structures of feeling” of early modernity. Where the book disappoints is in its lack of an overall theoretical apparatus of the kind that an editor usually presents in the introduction. Instead the introduction is merely that — a preview of the essays to come rather than an effort to set the essays in the context of the rich scholarly literature on the history of emotions and to suggest how this volume’s unusual emphasis upon musicology might offer a useful corrective. The reader will have to figure that out for herself.
