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.

Builds on Barbara Rosenwein's influential notion of emotional communities

I: Introduction; Andreea Marculescu and Charles-Louis Morand Métivier.- II: Subverting Emotional Norms.- Passionate Politics: Emotion and Identity Formation Among the Menu Peuple in Early Fifteenth-Century France; Emily J. Hutchison.- Pity as a Political Emotion in Early Modern Europe; Natalia Wawrzyniak.- Issuing from the great flame of this joy": Louise of Savoy, Marguerite of Navarre and Emotional Intimacy; Tracy Adams.- Histories of Emotion and Power: Catherine de Medici's Advice to her Sons; Susan Broomhall.- III: Affective Encounters.- Emotional Contagion: Évrart de Conty and Compassion; Beatrice Delaurenti.- Love Conventional/Love Singular: Desire in Middle English Lyric; Sarah Kathryn Moore.- Internal Theatre and Emotional Scripts in French Jesuit Meditative Literature; Jennifer Hillman.- IV: Authoring Emotions.- Cruelty and Empathy in Théodore Agrippa d'Aubigné's Les Tragiques: The Gaze of and on the Reader; Kathleen Long.- Narrating a Massacre: the Writing of History and Emotions as Response to the Battle of Nicopolis (1396); Charles-Louis Morand Métivier.- 'Doel' in situ: The Contextual and Corporeal Landscape of Grief in La Chanson de Roland; Angela Warner.- Performing Chivalric Masculinity: Morality, Restraint, and Emotional Norms in the Libro del Cavallero Zifar; Kim Bergqvist.- V: Afterword; Stephanie Trigg.