William French's compelling book on courtship practices and romantic love in the mining towns of Chihuahua in northern Mexico broadens the field of modern Mexican cultural history by drawing on a rich corpus of love letters, 86 legal proceedings of rapto (abduction) and estupro (copulation with a chaste and decent woman), novels, newspapers, advertising, letter- writing manuals, and coplas (popular non-narrative oral verses). French charts the emergence of the “passionate public sphere” through the lens of courtship practices of novios (men and women in courting relationships). His book is a welcome contribution to the emerging field of the history of emotions, showing the rise of sentiment in the practice of courtship in northern Mexico. This anatomy of sentiment in courting relationships includes the escalation of demands drawing on the emotions of love, passion, and trust, and the increasing economic transactions within the context of new reading and writing practices between the 1860s and the 1930s.

French has organized his primary sources in a sophisticated argument structured in three sections titled The Letter of the Law, The Lettered Countryside, and The Body of the Letter, which allow the author to develop his thesis on the emergence of a public sphere shaped by both oral culture and written word. The first section introduces the narrative strategies in love letters found in legal proceedings, which were presented to authorities as families used the courts to argue that their honor was sullied by the abduction of their daughters. Love letters, as French notes, were used as promises of marriage or legally enforceable contracts. The use of his notion of sentimental anatomy,” also introduced in the second section, enables the author to analyze symbols and metaphors embedded in the emotion of romantic love. French's sentimental anatomy encompasses both body and soul. In the third section, he shows, through letters written by Eleno G. and Remedios V., a tailor and a carpenter from the town of Parral, that passion had various effects on courtships. Both letter writers highlighted the unbearable and disruptive effects of their passions. Another letter writer, Enqueta, described her passions as compulsions (187). Other emotions, such as will and trust, were key in the courting phases, which are analyzed extensively throughout the sections.

Although scholars of the Porfiriato have focused primarily on Mexico City, French's main contribution to the field of Mexican cultural history and to the burgeoning field of the history of emotions is his employment of emotions as an analytical category, which allows him to situate the development of the lettered countryside through the lens of letter writing. French's book is a strong contribution to the field of the study of emotion, particularly to the histories of romantic love, and also to interdisciplinary scholarship, which approaches literacy as a social practice. In arguing for an “event-centered” approach to the study of literacy, French provides a model for scholars interested in further researching the multiple literacy practices of non-elites beyond the composition of letters. By blending sources from the emerging public spheres across the Americas, nineteenth-century sermons, oral and written, become potentially useful sources for future research on elites and non-elite cultural production.

Ultimately, a comparative perspective of personal letters with other regions characterized by cycles of boom and bust in Porfirian Mexico might elucidate the extent to which literacy practices associated with religious and secular contexts differ across regions, class, and gender. This book is an indispensable reference for understanding literacy practices in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Mexico. It will certainly become a reference for students and scholars interested in further researching the role of emotions in the categories and processes in letter writing, the economic dimensions of letter writing, and the role that emotions played in the dissemination of letters, sermons, news, and gossip outside urban centers throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in Latin America.