Emotions and Health, 1200-1700

Emotions and Health, 1200-1700 examines the Aristotelian and Galenic understandings of the ‘passions’ or ‘accidents of the soul’ as alterations of both mind and body across a wide range of medieval and early modern cultural discourses: Aquinas’s Summa, canonization inquests, medical and natural philosophical texts, drama, and the London Bills of Mortality. The essays in this collection focus on notions such as death from sorrow, physiological explanations of fear, physicians’ advice on the harmful and beneficial effects of anger and of sex, medical and philosophical constructions of the melancholic subject, and theological and medical discussions on the impact of music in moderating the passions and maintaining health.

Contributors include: Nicole Archambeau, Elena Carrera, Penelope Gouk, Angus Gowland, Nicholas E. Lombardo, William F. MacLehose, Michael R. Solomon and Erin Sullivan.

Elena Carrera, DPhil (Oxford), is Senior Lecturer in Spanish Golden Age Culture at Queen Mary, University of London, and a founder member of its Centre for the History of the Emotions. She has published on medieval and early modern emotions, mysticism and madness.

‘’Carrera and her contributors provide an excellent collection of essays […] these essays should be essential reading for scholars interested in the history of emotions and the history of the body’’.
John M. Hunt, Utah Valley University. In: Sixteenth Century Journal, Vol. 45, No. 2, 2014, p. 436.

“Emotions and Health … succeeds in achieving its aim of re-examining pre-modern conceptualisation of emotion, and, in doing so, opens up a number of avenues for further research.”
Bronwyn Reddan, The University of Melbourne. In: Emotions: History, Culture, Society, Vol.1, No.1 (2017), pp. 200-202.