Structures of Feeling in Seventeenth-Century Cultural Expression: (UCLA Clark Memorial Library Series)

Between the waning of the Renaissance and the beginning of the Enlightenment, many fundamental aspects of human behaviour - from expressions of gender to the experience of time - underwent radical changes. While some of these transformations were recorded in words, others have survived in non-verbal cultural media, notably the visual arts, poetry, theatre, music, and dance. Structures of Feeling in Seventeenth-Century Cultural Expression explores how artists made use of these various cultural forms to grapple with human values in the increasingly heterodox world of the 1600s. Essays from prominent historians, musicologists, and art critics examine methods of non-verbal cultural expression through the broad themes of time, motion, the body, and global relations. Together, they show that seventeenth-century cultural expression was more than just an embryonic stage within Western artistic development. Instead, the contributors argue that this period marks some of the most profound changes in European subjectivities.

Table of Contents:
Acknowledgments viii List of Illustrations ix Notes on Contributors xi Introduction: On Bodies, Affects, and Cultural Identities in the Seventeenth Century 1 SUSAN McCLARY (University of California Los Angeles, Musicology) I  The Science of Affect 1 Disciplining Feeling: The Seventeenth-Century Idea of a Mathematical Theory of the Emotions DANIEL GARBER (Princeton University, Philosophy) 2 Clockwork or Musical Instrument? Some English Theories of Mind-Body Interaction Before and After Descartes PENELOPE GOUK (University of Manchester, History) 3 The Sound World of Father Mersenne THOMAS CHRISTENSEN (University of Chicago, Music) II  Colonial Extensions 4 Transforming Amerindian “Savages” into Civilized French Catholics: The Art of “Voluntary Subjugation” as the French Colonial Ideal SARA MELZER (University of California Los Angeles, French and Francophone Studies) 5 Fear of Singing GARY TOMLINSON (Yale University, Music) 6 The Illicit Voice of Prophecy OLIVIA BLOECHL (University of California Los Angeles, Musicology) III  The Politics of Opera 7 Daphne’s Dilemma: Desire as Metamorphosis in Early Modern Opera WENDY HELLER (Princeton University, Music) 8. A Viceroy Behind the Scenes: Opera, Production, Politics, and Financing in 1680s Naples LOUISE STEIN (University of Michigan, Musicology) IV  Baroque Bodies 9 Crashaw and the Metaphysical Shudder; Or, How to Do Things with Tears RICHARD RAMBUSS (Emory University, English) 10 Cutting, Branding, Whipping, Burning: The Performance of Judicial Wounding in Early Modern England SARAH COVINGTON (Queens College of the City University of New York, History) 11 Excursions to See Monsters: Odd Bodies and Itineraries of Knowledge in the Seventeenth Century KATHRYN HOFFMAN (Northwestern University, Anthropology) V  Toward a History of Time and Subjectivity 12 Temporality and Ideology: Qualities of Motion in Seventeenth-Century French Music SUSAN McCLARY (University of California Los Angeles, Musicology) 13  Temporal Interventions: Music, Modernity and the Presentation of the Self RICHARD LEPPERT (University of Minnesota, Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature) Index

About the Author :
Susan McClary is Professor of Music at Case Western Reserve University and Distinguished Professor Emerita at UCLA

Review :
‘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.’ - Gail Kern Paster (Renaissance Quarterly vol 66:04:2013) ‘In a series of provocative essays on an array of topics in seventeenth-century studies, Structures of Feeling in Seventeenth-Century Cultural Expressions contributes to our understanding of the messiness of thought in early modern Europe.’ - Rebecca Cypess (H-France vol 15:53:2015) ‘The essays in this collection demonstrate smart approaches to thinking about fleeting feeling in the widely diverse cultures of seventeenth-century Europe… These essays will be useful to scholars of art, music, culture, history, and literary works.’ - Aleksondra Hultquist (Francia-Recensio -Perspectiva.net August 2015)