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Blind Impressions: Methods and Mythologies in Book History by Joseph A. Dane (review)

Although the collection is well conceptualised and, in general, well focused, one or two of the essays here seem less relevant to the overall topic than most. Here I think of Joe Moshenska’s essay on metaphor and touching, which is interesting and well written, but not clearly related to the study of the passions. Unfortunately, the quality of the essays subsides towards the end of the collection. Some of the final essays were not very clearly argued, or else rest on rather dubious assumptions of influence or causality. Stephan Laqué’s essay, for example, is plagued by the desire to read Shakespeare as ahead of his time – in this case, as an influence on Descartes’s theories of the passions. Laqué asserts that ‘in Descartes there is an unacknowledged debt to the Danish prince’ (p. 268) – a claim of which I am unconvinced despite a very interesting discussion of what he terms the ‘theatre of the passions’ as played out in Hamlet. However, overall this collection is well worth consulting for anyone interested in the passions in early modern thought, literature, and history.