Affective and Emotional Economies in Medieval and Early Modern Europe

Abstract

This book analyzes how acts of feeling at a discursive, somatic, and rhetorical level were theorized and practiced in multiple medieval and early-modern sources (literary, medical, theological, and archival). It covers a large chronological and geographical span from eleventh-century France, to fifteenth-century Iberia and England, and ending with seventeenth-century Jesuit meditative literature. Essays in this book explore how particular emotional norms belonging to different socio-cultural communities (courtly, academic, urban elites) were subverted or re-shaped, engage with the study of emotions as sudden, but impactful, bursts of sensory experience and feelings, and analyze how emotions are filtered and negotiated through the prism of literary texts and the socio-political status of their authors.