The central topic of Anna Rosensweig’s book is the role of affect in political resistance theory in early modern France. The book emphasizes the degree to which both sixteenth-century French resistance treatises and sixteenth-century French tragic theater predicate political resistance to a monarch on communal affect and emotion. Arguing that this communal and relational aspect of political resistance is obscured when the ideology of absolutism reframes resistance in terms of the “private” space of the individual, Rosensweig offers new readings of several canonical plays, as well as of less canonical theatrical works, that highlight the persistence of earlier, communal, affective understandings of political resistance under so-called absolutism.

While older scholarship posited a certain harmony between monarchical politics and neoclassical stage drama in France, recent research has complicated that picture to show how these works could themselves be agents of political resistance. Rosensweig’s technique of pairing and therefore comparing a sixteenth-century...

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