Emotion in the Tudor Court examines both the emotional culture underpinning sixteenth-century English court life and the body of scholarship treating early modern emotion, affectivity, and sociability. Much of the work that has characterized the affective turn in historiography and literary criticism of the period has been historicist, tracing the interrelation between Galenic humoral physiology and the sociopolitical and religious mores that shaped how early moderns understood their emotional states. Emotion in the Tudor Court pays tribute to the exploration of embodied emotion launched nearly fifteen years ago by Paster, Floyd-Wilson, Rowe, and Schoenfeldt, but ultimately Bradley J. Irish proffers a more expansive and self-consciously interdisciplinary trajectory for the study of early modern emotion.
One of the central questions Emotion in the Tudor Court takes up is methodological, asking what critical approach best facilitates analysis of early modern affective expression. Irish aims “not to historicize the features of emotionality in early modern experience, but rather to use features of emotionality to historicize early modern experience more broadly” (7). He approaches this methodological intervention by focusing each chapter on a major moment of courtly significance and a prominent emotion he associates with a key court figure. Chapter 1 treats literary portrayals of “The Disgusting Cardinal Thomas Wolsey” that employ images of disease, appetite, and bodily discharge to undermine Wolsey's influence on king and country by associating him with the affective state of disgust. Chapter 2 examines “The Envious Earl of Surrey,” Henry Howard, whose self-styling and envious affiliation with King Henry's illegitimate son Henry Fitzroy trigger his downfall. Chapter 3 pivots between Robert Dudley, “The Rejected Earl of Leicester,” and his nephew, the equally “Rejected Sir Philip Sidney,” to explore how male courtiers situated at the head of vast patronage networks and born into social systems encouraging them to view political influence as their birthright managed political failure through the oppositional dynamics of courtly entertainment. The final chapter, “The Dreading, Dreadful Earl of Essex,” underscores the affective register of dread as a collective emotional experience in late Elizabethan England by revealing how the last royal favorite, Robert Devereux, both inspired dread in his political opponents and was spurred toward his ill-fated rebellion by psychic instability and terror tantamount to dread.
Emotion in the Tudor Court thus presents a departure from previous treatments of early modern emotion in that Irish is primarily interested in understanding key emotional states themselves, rather than how early moderns understood emotion. Irish flips the historicist approach that has widely privileged humoral readings of early modern literature on its head by insightfully drawing from current research on emotions and affectivity in the sciences and social sciences to illuminate the emotionality of the Henrician and Elizabethan courts. For example, Irish frames the circumstances leading up to the Essex rebellion through the lens of terror-management theory (TMT), an approach founded in cultural anthropology that explains “emotion within the context of self-esteem, culture-building, and interpersonal conflict” (141). A core component of TMT is regulating terror over one's mortality by recognizing the self as a valuable contributor to society. Few would argue the claim that existential feelings of dread over the fate of the monarch, the nation, and the future standing of England's most established political families saturated the final years of the Tudor reign. Far from feeling anachronistic, TMT instructively describes the emotional climate of Elizabeth's late court, where courtiers like Essex had profound personal and cultural capital at stake. This approach also helpfully contextualizes the extreme measures Essex utilized not only to secure the political upper hand, but also to fashion a greater sense of psychic equilibrium to counter those dreadful times. In this fashion, Irish breaks with the critical trend to spotlight the alien otherness of the Renaissance, a seemingly unavoidable outcome of criticism inflected only by humoral theory. Instead, Irish begins to draw out the emotional affinities that may exist between men and women of the Renaissance and ourselves. This is where Emotion in the Tudor Court is most compelling: in its commitment to an interdisciplinarity that illustrates how emotion has always been, and continues to be, a multidimensional experience, shaped by a complicated interplay between biological and cultural phenomena.
