Emotions In The Household 1200 1900

This collection asks new questions about the household, examining the kinds of positive and negative emotional scope available to household members drawn together by shared economic, social and biological needs rather than by blood ties.

Exploring the contradictory forces shaping women's identities and experiences, this collection examines the possibilities for commonalities and the forces of division between women in early modern Europe. The contributors analyse the critical power of gender to structure identities and experiences, adding new depth to our understanding of early modern women's senses of exclusion and belonging.

Spaces for Feeling explores how English and Scottish people experienced sociabilities and socialities from 1650 to 1850, and investigates their operation through emotional practices and particular spaces. The collection highlights the forms, practices, and memberships of these varied spaces for feeling in this two hundred year period and charts the shifting conceptualisations of emotions that underpinned them. The authors employ historical, literary, and visual history approaches to analyse a series of literary and art works, emerging forms of print media such as pamphlet propaganda, newspapers, and periodicals, and familial and personal sources such as letters, in order to tease out how particular communities were shaped and cohered through distinct emotional practices in specific spaces of feeling. This collection studies the function of emotions in group formations in Britain during a period that has attracted widespread scholarly interest in the creation and meaning of sociabilities in particular. From clubs and societies to families and households, essays here examine how emotional practices could sustain particular associations, create new social communities and disrupt the capacity of a specific cohort to operate successfully. This timely collection will be essential reading for students and scholars of the history of emotions.

Emotions and Health, 1200-1700 examines the Aristotelian and Galenic understandings of the ‘passions’ or ‘accidents of the soul’ as alterations of both mind and body across a wide range of medieval and early modern cultural discourses: Aquinas’s Summa, canonization inquests, medical and natural philosophical texts, drama, and the London Bills of Mortality. The essays in this collection focus on notions such as death from sorrow, physiological explanations of fear, physicians’ advice on the harmful and beneficial effects of anger and of sex, medical and philosophical constructions of the melancholic subject, and theological and medical discussions on the impact of music in moderating the passions and maintaining health. Contributors include: Nicole Archambeau, Elena Carrera, Penelope Gouk, Angus Gowland, Nicholas E. Lombardo, William F. MacLehose, Michael R. Solomon and Erin Sullivan.

Comfort, both physical and affective, is a key aspect in our conceptualization of the home as a place of emotional attachment, yet its study remains under-developed in the context of the European house. In this volume, Jon Stobart has assembled an international cast of contributors to discuss the ways in which architectural and spatial innovations coupled with the emotional assemblage of objects to create comfortable homes in early modern Europe. The book features a two-section structure focusing on the historiography of architectural and spatial innovations and material culture in the early modern home. It also includes 10 case studies which draw on specific examples, from water closets in Georgian Dublin to wallpapers in 19th-century Cambridge, to illustrate how people made use of and responded to the technological improvements and the emotional assemblage of objects which made the home comfortable. In addition, it explores the role of memory and memorialisation in the domestic space, and the extent to which home comforts could be carried about by travellers or reproduced in places far removed from the home. The Comforts of Home in Western Europe, 1700-1900 offers a fresh contribution to the study of comfort in the early modern home and will be vital reading for academics and students interested in early modern history, material culture and the history of interior architecture.

During the period of the Baroque and Enlightenment the word “emotion”, denoting passions and feelings, came into usage, albeit in an irregular fashion. “Emotion” ultimately emerged as a term in its own right, and evolved in English from meaning physical agitation to describe mental feeling. However, the older terminology of “passions” and “affections” continued as the dominant discourse structuring thinking about feeling and its wider religious, political, social, economic, and moral imperatives. The emotional cultures described in these essays enable some comparative discussion about the history of emotions, and particularly the causes and consequences of emotional change in the larger cultural contexts of the Baroque and Enlightenment. Emotions research has enabled a rethinking of dominant narratives of the period-of histories of revolution, state-building, the rise of the public sphere, religious and scientific transformation, and more. As a new and dynamic field, the essays here are just the beginning of a much bigger history of emotions.

Country houses were grand statements of power and status, but they were also places where people lived. This book traces the changes in layout, the new technologies, and the innovations in furniture that made them more convenient and comfortable. It argues that these material changes were just one aspect of comfort in the country house: feeling comfortable was just as important as being comfortable. Achieving this involved the comfort and solace to be found in daily routines, religious faith and, above all, relationships with family and friends. Such emotional comforts, and the attachment to things and places that embodied and memorialized them, made country houses into homes.

This book is notable for bringing together humanist schooling and familial instruction under the banner of emotions and for studying seminal works of early modern literature within this new analytical context. It thus furnishes unique ways to think about two closely interrelated moral imperatives: shaping boys into civil subjects; and fashioning heroic agency and selfhood in literature. In tracing the emotional dynamics of the humanist classroom, this book shows just how thoroughly school could accommodate resistance to authority and foster unruly boys. In gauging the emotional pressures at work in filial relationships, it shows how profoundly sons could experience patriarchal authority as provisional, negotiable, or damaging. In turning to Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Spenser’s Prince Arthur, and Sidney’s Arcadian heroes, Emotional Settings highlights the ways in which the respective emotional and moral imperatives of home and school could bring conflicting pressures to bear in the formation of heroic agency – and at what cost. Engaging and accessible, this book will appeal to scholars interested in early modern literature, pedagogy, histories of emotion, and histories of the family, as well as to graduate students and advanced undergraduate students in these fields.