Early Modern Trauma: Europe and the Atlantic World ed. by Erin Peters and Cynthia Richards (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Early Modern Trauma: Europe and the Atlantic World ed. by Erin Peters and Cynthia Richards Justine Semmens Erin Peters and Cynthia Richards, eds., Early Modern Trauma: Europe and the Atlantic World (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2021), xii + 397 pp., 7 ills. Melinda Rabb opens the afterword to Early Modern Trauma with a rich and satisfying salvo that more than justifies the need for more research into the role and impact that trauma played in shaping early modern texts: “Seen through the complex lens of contemporary trauma theories, the early modern world discloses its vulnerabilities, its catastrophes, and its strategies for representing experiences that defy representation” (361). First developed as a field of Freudian psychoanalytical theory in the 1990s, trauma studies originally posited that extreme experiences of physical, psychological, and emotional suffering can cause severe disruptions in memory, the integrity of identity and the psyche, and an epistemological rupture between the experience of this suffering and the inadequacy of language to describe or comprehend it. Although trauma was initially pathologized as a diagnostic function for clinical settings, by the early aughts deploying trauma as a category of analysis was beginning to enter the margins of the lexical toolbox of literary criticism, cultural studies, and historical analysis. Much of this scholarship has concentrated on examinations of trauma in modern or, even more precisely, the late modern contexts and social rupture of industrialized war, genocide, and mass economic migration that has isolated the interrogation of trauma from the more distant past. The first aim of Early Modern Trauma, a collection of essays edited by Erin Peters and Cynthia Richards, is to urge scholars of premodern art, literature, and society to take more seriously the opportunity to examine the early modern past through the lens of trauma studies—a lacuna they argue that is all the more vexing because the early modern world was shaped by the sort of rupture and violence that trauma studies is devoted to understanding. Peters and Richards point out that scholars of the early modern world have exhibited a certain amount of reticence about configuring trauma studies into their analyses on the basis that it introduces anachronistic models of identity, individuality, and social belonging that cannot be accurately or reliably transported to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The second aim of this collection of essays is to demonstrate that trauma theories can be applied fruitfully “beyond and before” contemporary experience that “transcends time” (4). In other words, while what constitutes a traumatic event is specific to cultural, historical, and social contexts, violent and unspeakable rupture remains germane to the human experience of trauma. The ways that various texts and the authors that produce them ultimately derive meaning from trauma by synthesizing it into their specific contexts, worldviews, and cultural and social lexica provide an important opportunity to understand the past. This volume is organized into two parts with the somewhat presentist intention of exploring “what early modern texts can teach us about the concept of early modern trauma and what the modern concept of trauma can teach us about early modern texts” (15). The essays in part 1, “Reframing Modern Trauma,” [End Page 255] discover the utility and limitations of applying modern trauma theory to the historical interpretation of texts from the past. This section opens with Susan Broomhall’s fascinating essay on spiritual, theological, and philosophical responses to the collective suffering and environmental devastation resulting from natural catastrophe in court poetry during the French Renaissance. Zachariah Long examines the exegesis of rape trauma in Shakespeare’s The Rape of Lucrece (1594) by synthesizing the “identification with the aggressor” theory of posttraumatic stress survival proposed by the early twentieth-century century Freudian analyst Sándor Ferenczi with Edward Reynold’s humoral theory of conceptual identification which he exposited in A Treatise of the Passions and Faculties of the Soul of Man (ca. 1640). Amelia Zurcher explores as a trauma narrative the unexplainable experience of conversion, identity formation, rupture, and reformation described in the English nonconformist Hannah Allen’s spiritual biography A Narrative of God’s Gracious Dealings with the Choice Christian (1683). Moving away from themes of environmental, personal, and spiritual apocalypse, Katherine Ellison examines poetic...