Puritanism And Emotion In The Early Modern World

Puritanism has a reputation for being emotionally dry, but seventeenth-century Puritans did not only have rich and complex emotional lives, they also found meaning in and drew spiritual strength from emotion. From theology to lived experience and from joy to affliction, this volume surveys the wealth and depth of the Puritans' passions.

How can the concept of nostalgia illuminate the culturally specific ways in which societies understand the contested relationship between the past, present, and future? The word nostalgia was invented in the late seventeenth century to describe the debilitating effects of homesickness. Now widely defined as a sense of longing for a lost past, initially it was more closely linked with dislocation in space. By exploring some of its many textual, visual and musical manifestations in the tumultuous period between c. 1350 and 1800, this volume resists the assumption that nostalgia is a distinctive by-product of modernity. It also forges a fruitful link between three lively areas of current scholarly enquiry: memory, temporality, and emotion. The contributors deploy nostalgia as a tool for investigating perceptions of the passage of time and historical change, unsettling experiences of migration and geographical displacement, and the connections between remembering and forgetting, affect and imagination. Ranging across Europe and the Atlantic world, they examine the moments, sites and communities in which it arose, alongside how it was used to express both criticism and regret about the religious, political, social and cultural upheavals that shaped the early modern world. They approach it as a complex mixed feeling that opens a new window into individual subjectivities and collective mentalities.

A nuanced approach to the role played by clerics at a turbulent time for religious affairs.

Early Modern Emotions is a student-friendly introduction to the concepts, approaches and sources used to study emotions in early modern Europe, and to the perspectives that analysis of the history of emotions can offer early modern studies more broadly. The volume is divided into four sections that guide students through the key processes and practices employed in current research on the history of emotions. The first explains how key terms and concepts in the study of emotions relate to early modern Europe, while the second focuses on the unique ways in which emotions were conceptualized at the time. The third section introduces a range of sources and methodologies that are used to analyse early modern emotions. The final section includes a wide-ranging selection of thematic topics covering war, religion, family, politics, art, music, literature and the non-human world to show how analysis of emotions may offer new perspectives on the early modern period more broadly. Each section offers bite-sized, accessible commentaries providing students new to the history of emotions with the tools to begin their own investigations. Each entry is supported by annotated further reading recommendations pointing students to the latest research in that area and at the end of the book is a general bibliography, which provides a comprehensive list of current scholarship. This book is the perfect starting point for any student wishing to study emotions in early modern Europe.

This book investigates emotion in early modern Scotland, and provides the first exploration of a Scottish individual’s life and writing in light of the recent major advances in the study of emotion. It does this through the example of James Melville, a minister in the Reformed Protestant Church, whose autobiographical writing provides one of the earliest and fullest opportunities to explore the emotional world and range of experiences of an individual, offering the chance for a more rounded analysis of emotional experiences and language than has ever been offered for Scotland at the time. This book contributes a crucial new geographical and cultural context to the expanding world of the history of emotions in the early modern period.

John Owen between Orthodoxy and Modernity offers fresh reflections on a leading Reformed theologian who sits on the brink of a new age. Reflecting both pre-modern and modern tendencies, John Owen’s 17th-century theology and spirituality reflect the growing tensions of the time.

A study into the role of visual and material culture in shaping early modern emotional experiences, c. 1450–1800

This book seeks to add a needed introduction to a way of meditation used among early modern English Protestants, influenced by Bishop Joseph Hall. Furthermore, the major role that Hall had in his Arte of Divine Mediation on late-seventeenth-century Protestant spirituality went beyond the practice of meditation and established a positive claim on the role of the imagination in shaping souls, well into the modern period. Within this context, the questions related to ancient understandings of faith and the interrelationship of divine revelation are discussed with fresh insights for our own times. If a revival of interest emerges again in Hall's work, it would be a compelling and fresh impetus to reclaim the broken imagination evident in many parts of the Western Church.