Generations of Feeling : A History of Emotions, 600–1700

This new narrative of emotional life in the West considers the varieties, transformations and constants of human emotions over eleven centuries. Covering both emotions as expressed 'on the ground' and as theorised in treatises, it offers the first complete picture of the history of emotions in pre-modern Western Europe.

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.