Foundations of Feeling: Theorizing Emotions in Late Medieval Literature

"Are emotions primarily bodily or primarily cognitive? Is there such a thing as "natural" emotions? And what is the relationship between emotion and gender? In Foundations of Feeling, Jessica Rosenfeld shows how medieval literature can inform contemporary understanding of how emotions operate. She surveys the analytical literature of feeling in late medieval Europe, material still largely underexamined and that scholars have yet to recognize as the cultural foundation to the history of emotions. Rosenfeld ranges widely from love poetry to pastoral and theological writings, to political satire and more, revealing a wealth of extraordinarily close attention to emotions in both scientific and philosophical discourses of the time, and in the period's imaginative literature. By mining understudied Latin, medieval French, and Middle English traditions, she relates medieval concerns to the most central, current debates (and impasses) in the fields of history of emotion and affect theory today, reframing how we think about and define emotion. The book will be of primary interest to students of medieval literature, the history or emotions, and affect and gender/sexuality studies, and, secondarily, to those in religious studies, the history of law, philosophy, and political theory"-- Provided by publisher.