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  3. Generations of Feeling
  • Cited by 84
Publisher:
Cambridge University Press
Online publication date:
November 2015
Print publication year:
2015
Online ISBN:
9781316156780
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781316156780
Subjects:
Area Studies, European History 1000-1450, European History after 1450, History, European Studies
Information

Book description

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.

Awards

Winner, 2016 Choice Outstanding Academic Title

Reviews

'In this deeply learned but lively excavation of premodern emotions, short chapters on theories of the emotions alternate with longer chapters comparing two or more ‘emotional communities’ in representative historical periods. Sensitive to the ambiguity of the term emotion, Rosenwein focuses on the words for understanding, expressing, and feeling emotions and on the shifting valorizations of specific emotions over time … This is a rich narrative of tradition, continuity, and change. Summing up: highly recommended.'

J. Bussanich Source: Choice

'Barbara Rosenwein’s Generations of Feeling is also ambitious and wide-ranging.'

Catriona Kennedy Source: History Today

'… it is this insistent attention to the many shifting and overlapping definitions of emotion, and the work that they do - socially, culturally, and communally; in the world and in history - that makes Rosenwein’s book a valuable new contribution to the field.'

Stephanie Downes Source: Cromohs

'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 Source: Speculum

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