Generations of Feeling
A History of Emotions, 600–1700

An exploration of emotional life in the West, considering the varieties, transformations and constants of human emotions over eleven centuries.

Barbara H. Rosenwein (Author)

9781107480841, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 6 October 2015

390 pages, 16 b/w illus. 8 maps 30 tables
22.6 x 15 x 2.3 cm, 0.5 kg

'This book, a masterpiece, offers like everything else that Barbara Rosenwein has written over the last two decades, a lesson in methodology of the history of emotions. … Generations of Feeling, written in a very pleasant and often diverting style … achieves the program Rosenwein outlined in the first decade of our millennium. The author provides in this book an excellent answer to the questions and worries she expressed some fifteen years earlier … an implicit manifesto against any teleological vision of history, even against historical evolution in emotional terms.' Piroska Nagy, Speculum

Generations of Feeling is the first book to provide a comprehensive history of emotions in pre- and early modern Western Europe. Charting the varieties, transformations and constants of human sentiments over the course of eleven centuries, Barbara H. Rosenwein explores the feelings expressed in a wide range of 'emotional communities' as well as the theories that served to inform and reflect their times. Focusing specifically on groups within England and France, chapters address communities as diverse as the monastery of Rievaulx in twelfth-century England and the ducal court of fifteenth-century Burgundy, assessing the ways in which emotional norms and modes of expression respond to, and in turn create, their social, religious, ideological, and cultural environments. Contemplating emotions experienced 'on the ground' as well as those theorized in the treatises of Alcuin, Thomas Aquinas, Jean Gerson and Thomas Hobbes, this insightful study offers a profound new narrative of emotional life in the West.

Introduction
1. Ancient theories
2. Attachment and detachment
3. Alcuin's therapy
4. Love and treachery
5. Thomas' passions
6. Theatricality and sobriety
7. Gerson's music
8. Despair and happiness
9. Hobbes' motions
Conclusion
Bibliography
Index.

Subject Areas: Psychology: emotions [JMQ], History of ideas [JFCX], Early history: c 500 to c 1450/1500 [HBLC]