This book analyzes how acts of feeling at a discursive somatic and rhetorical level were
theorized and practiced in multiple medieval and early-modern sources (literary medical
theological and archival). It covers a large chronological and geographical span from
eleventh-century France to fifteenth-century Iberia and England and ending with
seventeenth-century Jesuit meditative literature. Essays in this book explore how particular
emotional norms belonging to different socio-cultural communities (courtly academic urban
elites) were subverted or re-shaped engage with the study of emotions as sudden but impactful
bursts of sensory experience and feelings and analyze how emotions are filtered and negotiated
through the prism of literary texts and the socio-political status of their authors.
