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Article: Reading the Early Modern Passions: Essays in the Cultural History of Emotion.(Book review)
- Article from:
- The Modern Language Review
- Article date:
- October 1, 2006
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2006 Modern Humanities Research Association. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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Reading the Early Modern Passions: Essays in the Cultural History of Emotion. Ed. by GAIL KERN PASTER, KATHERINE ROWE, and MARY FLOYD-WILSON. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. 2004. vi + 384 pp. $24.95. ISBN 0-8122-1872-8.
When we read a restrained early modern elegy written by a mother lamenting the loss of a child, or watch the characters in a Renaissance comedy laugh at one another's misfortunes, do we understand these emotions in the same ways as their authors did? Were the feelings of the seventeenth-century poet similar to those of a modern parent, but expressed in the only available terms? Was early modern theatre perhaps based on quite ...