Elodie Lecuppre-Desjardin

The attraction to the emotions has not been resisted by modern thinkers and recent scholarship. This work compiles a number of articles on where emotions surface in city life between 1400-1600. The question as to whether historians or literary scholars can really find anything to learn or to say about the emotional life of the medieval period is answered by the great utility of this collection.

Anglo-Saxon studies have proved since the beginning of the seventies that we can give historical meaning to fierce emotions like anger and fear, to mental suffering characterized by tears and pain, or even to the sudden feeling of aesthetic pleasure, mystical ecstasy and delightà all those emotions which put the breath of life into anonymous people crowded into our historical studies. Outside the debates of psycho-history, our study views the topic of emotions from the angle of social construction and civilization's process.… (more)