Affect Theory and Early Modern Texts steps into a critical conversation about affect that has been underway for some time; there are many rewarding payoffs here, but non-initiates may find some chapters dense and difficult. In their introduction, Bailey and DiGangi rearticulate the dominant critical consensus on affect's ontology: affects are precognitive and corporeal, “pre-individual bodily forces,” “impersonal intensities that do not belong to a subject or object” (4), whereas emotions are “feelings that a subject is aware of and claims as his own” (1). The collection's purpose is to “leverage the insights of early modern writers to interrogate the foundational premises of contemporary affect theory” (2), and to offer a “corrective to the presentism” of this theoretical approach's primary concern with the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Several chapters complicate the binary of cognition and feeling presented as foundational to distinctions between emotion and affect. Benedict Robinson critiques contemporary affect theory's tendency to embrace “a radically embodied concept of affect” (123) and rallies impressive historical research to suggest that there are “real questions about whether there is any clear line between affect and emotion” (111). He argues for “a premodern understanding of passion as a kind of cognition” (111), and, correlatively, convincingly demonstrates that in late Scholastic psychologies there are “no fully disembodied theories of either emotion or passion” (112). He also reveals how “truly materialist” (123) seventeenth-century experiences of passionate experience were, offering fascinating accounts of passions understood to be not substances but forces, forms of bodily motion similar to “magnetism” or the “sympathetic vibrations of the strings of an instrument” (113). The material status or force of affect is explored by Drew Daniel, as well, who examines early modern theories of self-killing that posit the existence of vital spirits dwelling within the human body, spirits that “suffer their own affects” (92) and long for escape. The movement toward escape, Daniel shows, is a self-killing momentum, “responsible for our body's descent into putrefaction” (91). Affect in this account is “a force or motion within the body that manifests and expresses momentum toward a material outcome (putrefaction), which will result in the death of the living body and the liberation of the spirits thereby” (93).

Like Robinson, Evelyn Tribble challenges the celebration of affect as “pre-personal, located in the body, and … outside conscious awareness” (199), arguing that models that “place more stress upon the interplay between affect and cognition … hold more promise for understanding the affective practices of the early modern stage” (197). Such affective practices, Tribble stresses, involve labor; they were “actively created and need[ed] work to sustain” (201). Audiences at the Globe do not, she notes, laugh loudly and react boisterously “because they are mindlessly infected with some mysteriously transmissible affect.” Rather, their reactions are “skillfully elicited by the actors and reinforced by the shared light and the large number of groundlings” (205). Affective transmission and collective crowd response “involves constant micro-communications and adjustment” (204). Patricia Cahill also considers audience-stage interplay, but in her engagement with cross-temporal corporeal responses engendered by dramatic reenactments of history she finds the affect-cognition distinction worthwhile, “if merely heuristic,” in order to “prevent an overvaluing of the linguistic—even polemical—dimension of theatrical performance at the expense of the somatic” (168).

The privileging of bodily affect contributes to one of the affective fallacies Joseph Campana astutely engages. The “fallacy of sentience” involves affect theory's tendency to reverse the narrative of human exceptionalism by privileging animal affect, seeing animals as embodying “an immediacy of experience and self-evident vitality that exceeds human language and rationality” (134). Campana asks if we should assent to the idea that “some life forms seem more natural, even more happy, than others because they lack reason and speech” (147). The “fallacy of inclusion,” on the other hand, relies not on the privileging of animal affect but on “ties of identity between human and animal” (135); the fallacy is the assumption, based on the increased recognition that “animals have emotional lives” (137), that such a recognition “automatically or necessarily constitutes an ethics of cohabitation” (143) given questions of “resource competition” in “a planet of limit space” (137–38).

Materialist approaches to affect studies are evident, as well, in contributions by Julian Yates and David Landreth. Yates demonstrates how forms of personhood are linked to material-semiotic tropes like otium, “a wakeful but disassociated state” during which one is “a vegetal being allied to pure growth” (73). Landreth does not address the materialist ontology of affect, but instead asks how affective stances toward the past allow things that matter to acquire substance and become materialized or, contrarily, how affects, like envy, are seen to “unmake” the matter of history.

Affect Theory and Early Modern Texts successfully “use[s] affect as a prism through which to read early modern cultural, economic, and political phenomena” (5). In doing so, it contributes substantially to scholarly efforts to historicize affect and emotion, and to ongoing deliberations on the relationship between thinking and feeling.