The Renaissance Of Emotion

This collection of essays offers a major reassessment of the meaning and significance of emotional experience in the work of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. Recent scholarship on early modern emotion has relied on a medical-historical approach, resulting in a picture of emotional experience that stresses the dominance of the material, humoral body. While such scholarship has been important in foregrounding questions related to historical phenomenology and embodiment, it has obscured the extent to which other intellectual and creative frameworks - including religion, philosophy, rhetoric and drama - also shaped cultural beliefs about emotion in the period. The Renaissance of Emotion seeks to redress this balance by examining the ways in which Shakespeare and his contemporaries explored emotional experience from perspectives other than humoral medicine. Bringing together an international group of established and emerging scholars, the volume demonstrates how open, creative and agency-ridden the experience and interpretation of early modern emotion could be. Taken individually, the chapters offer much-needed investigations into previously overlooked areas of emotional experience and signification; taken together, they offer a thorough re-evaluation of the cultural priorities and phenomenological principles that shaped the understanding of the emotive self in the early modern period. The Renaissance of Emotion will be of particular interest to students and scholars of Shakespeare and Renaissance literature, the history of emotion, theatre and cultural history, and the history of ideas.

Emotion in the Tudor Court is a transdisciplinary work that uses Renaissance and modern scientific models of emotion to analyze the literary cultures of Tudor-era English court society, providing a robust new analysis of the emotional dynamics of sixteenth-century England.

Offering a re-reading of Erasmus's works, this book shows that emotion and affectivity were central to his writings. It argues that Erasmus's conception of emotion was highly complex and richly diverse by tracing how the Dutch humanist writes about emotion not only from different perspectives-theological, philosophical, literary, rhetorical, medical-but also in different genres. In doing so, this book suggests, Erasmus provided a distinctive, if not unique, Christian humanist emotional style. Demonstrating that Erasmus consulted multiple intellectual traditions and previous works in his thoughts on affectivity, The Renaissance of Feeling sheds light on how understanding emotions in late medieval and early modern Europe was a multi-disciplinary affair for humanist scholars. It argues that the rediscovery and proliferation ancient texts during the so-called renaissance resulted in shifting perspectives on how emotions were described and understood, and on their significance for Christian thought and practice. The book shows how the very availability of source material, coupled with humanists' eagerness to engage with multiple intellectual traditions gave rise to new understandings of feeling in the 16th century. Essary shows how Erasmus provides the clearest example of such an intellectual inheritance by examining his writings about emotion across much of his vast corpus, including literary and rhetorical works, theological treatises, textual commentaries, religious disputations, and letters. Considering the rich and diverse ways that Erasmus wrote about emotions and affectivity, this book provides a new lens to study his works and sheds light on how emotions were understood in early modern Europe.

Emotions depend on language, cultural practices, expectation and moral beliefs. Hate, fear, cruelty and love are always turning history into the history of passion and lust, because emotional life is always ready to overflow intellectual life. This fascinating study of emotion in Renaissance Italy shows that emotions are built and created by the society in which they are expressed and conditioned. The contributors examine, among others, the emotional language of the court, around public execution, religious practices and during outbreaks of disease.

The crises of faith that fractured Reformation Europe also caused crises of individual and collective identity. Structures of feeling as well as structures of belief were transformed; there was a reformation of social emotions as well as a Reformation of faith. As Steven Mullaney shows in The Reformation of Emotions in the Age of Shakespeare, Elizabethan popular drama played a significant role in confronting the uncertainties and unresolved traumas of Elizabethan Protestant England. Shakespeare and his contemporaries—audiences as well as playwrights—reshaped popular drama into a new form of embodied social, critical, and affective thought. Examining a variety of works, from revenge plays to Shakespeare’s first history tetralogy and beyond, Mullaney explores how post-Reformation drama not only exposed these faultlines of society on stage but also provoked playgoers in the audience to acknowledge their shared differences. He demonstrates that our most lasting works of culture remain powerful largely because of their deep roots in the emotional landscape of their times.

This interdisciplinary study argues that the intersection of pedagogical and affective language in Renaissance literature shows that emotion was conceived as a conventional practice.

The period 1300-1600 CE was one of intense and far-reaching emotional realignments in European culture. New desires and developments in politics, religion, philosophy, the arts and literature fundamentally changed emotional attitudes to history, creating the sense of a rupture from the immediate past. In this volatile context, cultural products of all kinds offered competing objects of love, hate, hope and fear. Art, music, dance and song provided new models of family affection, interpersonal intimacy, relationship with God, and gender and national identities. The public and private spaces of courts, cities and houses shaped the practices and rituals in which emotional lives were expressed and understood. Scientific and medical discoveries changed emotional relations to the cosmos, the natural world and the body. Both continuing traditions and new sources of cultural authority made emotions central to the concept of human nature, and involved them in every aspect of existence.

Tilting the English Renaissance against the present moment, The Melancholy Assemblage examines how the interpretive experience of emotion produces social bonds. Placing readings of early modern painting and literature in conversation with psychoanalytic theory and assemblage theory, this book argues that, far from isolating its sufferers, melancholy brings people together.