1Under different names, triggered by more or less visible causes, justified or not, fear belongs to our more animal and, at the same time, more human condition. In all repositories related to the so-called “basic emotions”—from moral treatises to medical or legal dissertations—, fear has been always present. Unlike nostalgia, piety or philanthropy—to mention only some emotional experiences of more complex historical delimitation—, this passion has always played a role to understand the constitutive elements of the human soul. One of the characteristics of our condition is that, unlike those of animals, our fears are, in many occasions, counter-factual, in the sense that we may experience delight in the visual or literary representations of terror. At the same time, we may fear the loss of our current state of happiness, even without the presence of any threat. Because human fear does not only take place in the present, but can be projected or imagined, it has a clear pathological dimension, very often explored in the history of medicine. For this reason, its counterfactual qualities make it a good candidate on the literary stage. It is this relationship between the medical and the literary dimension of fear that this collection of essays examines.

2Along with some notable approaches to the cultural history of the passions—especially the chapter on pain in childbirth written by Professor Joanna Bourke, a scholar who has already published one of the best contributions on the history of fear—the volume moves mainly around the history of ideas. This is not a book about the experience of fear in the past, nor about the circumstances that may trigger it, but about the literary forms that fear can take from the medieval period to modern times. The book is divided into two parts: the first one, more focused on the relationship between fear and medicine, looks at fear as a therapy of the soul (Daniel McCann) and as a cause of melancholy (Mary Ann Lund). It also explores the fear of childbirth (Joanna Bourke), the development of psychophysics in the long eighteenth century (Allan Ingram and Clark Lawlor) and aesthetic fear in Victorian reading (Pamela K. Gilbert). The second section enters fully into the field of literature, and explores the rhetorical elements of dread. The section begins with the study of the semantic map of fear in the ancient Saxon language (Andrew Orchard), and includes a variety of themes: from the relationship between pain and despair in Stuart and Elizabethan literature (Elisabeth Hunter) to the connection between fear and phobias in Victorian psyche (Sally Shuttleworth); or from the mechanisms of contagion of fear typical of the interwar period (Neil Pemberton) to the role played by the frightened body in contemporary medical television drama (Martin Willis).

3Even if the introduction opens with an image of Caravaggio, which also serves as a cover for the volume, the different contributions hardly leave the discursive sphere of Anglo-Saxon culture. “The essays in this volume explore the multivalent understanding of fear in a range of historical periods”, the editors write in the introduction (p. 6). And rightly so. One may wonder, however, if the study of the cultural varieties of the complex emotion that we normally describe as fear, and that includes many other experiences and passions—such as dread or terror, for example—should have not taken into account its geographical variations. Despite the erudition of the contributors, some of the conclusions of the volume become more problematic when presented as universal. If the dreadful passions of the book’s subtitle are linked and rooted in cultural matrices, if passions are crossed by the culturally specific conditions that make them possible and that allows, among other things, to write their history, perhaps we should begin by recognizing that the truth value of the statements contained in this volume, which seem to trace a general history of fear we all would be part of, applies only to the cultural niche from which its sources come from. Despite the image of Caravaggio that opens the book, or a few references to non-English authors, the bulk of the volume assumes without further discussion that the discursive nature of fear throughout modern history depends on documents written in English. There is nothing wrong with this, except that perhaps this important clarification should have been included in the title of the volume and explicitly stated in many other different places throughout the book. After all, the history of fear is not the equivalent to the history of fear in England. If the image of Caravaggio was so important as to serve as an illustration to the volume, a chapter on the Italian dimension of fear we might call Baroque or Catholic might have been a nice addition to the collection. After all, the fear of contagious diseases that spreads throughout Europe (and of which Caravaggio’s picture is a magnificent example) does not find in all geographical or cultural milieus the same discursive response. Much less so when fear is related to armed conflicts or social uprisings.

4In the beautiful text that closes the volume, Priscilla Wald uses the Freudian notion of the uncanny to talk about the fear of the familiar that becomes strange. The history of emotions has come to stay for the simple reason that this new historiographical approach shades lights on what unites us all. It has emerged in the context of a globalized and post-colonial world where no one can speak on behalf of all the others. The root of the German equivalent of the word uncanny (Heim) refers to the familiar, to the homeland, to one’s country. We all belong to one, but fear does not always quite fit into any of them. The history of fear in England concerns us all, but it is not exactly the same as the history of fear. The authors of this collection, mostly English scholars from prestigious British universities, have written magnificent contributions to a story that cannot be told without the rest of Europe, without America or even without Asia. The editors of this volume are right in claiming a historical, and not only evolutionary, understanding of fear. They also demonstrate very convincingly how the relationship between the medical and literary experience of terror was subjected to numerous historical variations. The volume shows with crystalline rigor that human passions are not limited to the narrow frontiers of academic knowledge or their rigid disciplinary frameworks. And we could not agree more: the history of the human emotions cannot be understood within closed academic or geographical borders.