Description
By drawing on a broad range of disciplinary and cross-disciplinary expertise, this study addresses the history of emotions in relation to cross-cultural movement, exchange, contact, and changing connections in the later medieval and early modern periods.
All essays in this volume focus on the performance and negotiation of identity in situations of cultural contact, with particular emphasis on emotional practices. They cover a wide range of thematic and disciplinary areas and are organized around the primary sources on which they are based. The edited volume brings together two major areas in contemporary humanities: the study of how emotions were understood, expressed, and performed in shaping premodern transcultural relations, and the study of premodern cultural movements, contacts, exchanges, and understandings as emotionally charged encounters. In discussing these hitherto separated historiographies together, this study sheds new light on the role of emotions within Europe and amongst non-Europeans and Europeans between 1100 and 1800.
The discussion of emotions in a wide range of sources including letters, images, material culture, travel writing, and literary accounts makes Matters of Engagement an invaluable source for both scholars and students concerned with the history of premodern emotions.
Table of Contents
1. Matters of Engagement: Emotions, Identity, and Cultural Contact in the Premodern World. An Introduction
Daniela Hacke, Claudia Jarzebowski, and Hannes Ziegler
Part 1: Letters
2. Bridging the Gap: Techniques of Appresentation and Familiar(izing) Narratives in Eighteenth-Century Transmaritime Family Correspondence
Christina Beckers
3. An Emotional Company: Mobility, Community and Control in the Records of the English East-India Company
Mark Williams
Part 2: Images
4. Lust, Love and Curiosity: The Emotional Threads in the Dutch Encounter with an Exotic East
Natsuko Akagawa
5. Santiago Matamoros/Mataindios: Adopting an Old World Battlefield Apparition as a New World Representation of Triumph
Heather Dalton
6. Riding the Juggernaut: Embodied Emotions and ‘Indian’ Ritual Processions through European Eyes, c. 1300-1600
Jennifer Spinks
Part 3: Materials
7. Robbing the Grave: Stealing the Remains of the Blessed John of Matha from the Church of S. Tommaso in Formis in 1655
Lisa Beaven
8. Days of Wrath, Days of Friendships: The Materiality of Anger and Love in Early Modern Denmark
Jette Linaa
Part 4: Travel Writing
9. "A Country Where Reason Does Not Rule the Heart": Spanish Exuberance and the Traveller’s Gaze
Thomas C. Devaney
10. Sensible Distances: The Colonial Projections of Therese Huber and E.G. Wakefield
Lisa O'Connell
11. Animals and Emotions in the Early Modern World
Margaret R. Hunt
Part 5: Literary Accounts
12. Travel, Emotions and Timelessness: On Otherworldly Encounters in Medieval Narratives
Jutta Eming
13. "Always fleeing away": Emotion, Exile and Rest in the Old English Life of St Mary of Egypt
Andrew Lynch
14. From Aaron to Othello: The Changing Emotional Register of Blackness in Shakespeare
Bríd Phillips
15. Emotions, Identity and Propaganda: Ottoman Threat and Confessional Divide in Later Sixteenth-Century Germany
Hannes Ziegler
