Violence and Emotions in Early Modern Europe


Book Description

Violence and Emotions in Early Modern Europe examines the purposes for which specific forms of violence and particular emotional states functioned, how they operated in relation to each other, or indeed how one provoked, sustained or diminished the other. These twelve original essays demonstrate the complexities of violence and emotions and the myriad possibilities of their inter-relationships. They emphasize the great efforts that were made by early modern societies to control modes of violence and emotional regimes to achieve positive as well as negative effects, such as creating order, healing, and bringing individuals and communities together around productive identities. Authors consider legal documents, news reports, memoirs, letters, confraternity statutes, and medical consultations to investigate the bodily and textual practices in which violent and emotional acts were created, supported and disseminated to investigate the power, aims, effect and outcomes of relationships between violence and emotions. The chapters look at a range of topics and countries including Renaissance Italy and sixteenth-century Germany, France in the grip of the religious wars, and England’s Civil Wars as well as a wide range of topics including murder, punishment, community healing, insults, threats, prophecy and medical and devotional practices. This collection will be essential reading for students and scholars of the history of emotions or violence.







Spaces for Feeling


Book Description

Spaces for Feeling explores how English and Scottish people experienced sociabilities and socialities from 1650 to 1850, and investigates their operation through emotional practices and particular spaces. The collection highlights the forms, practices, and memberships of these varied spaces for feeling in this two hundred year period and charts the shifting conceptualisations of emotions that underpinned them. The authors employ historical, literary, and visual history approaches to analyse a series of literary and art works, emerging forms of print media such as pamphlet propaganda, newspapers, and periodicals, and familial and personal sources such as letters, in order to tease out how particular communities were shaped and cohered through distinct emotional practices in specific spaces of feeling. This collection studies the function of emotions in group formations in Britain during a period that has attracted widespread scholarly interest in the creation and meaning of sociabilities in particular. From clubs and societies to families and households, essays here examine how emotional practices could sustain particular associations, create new social communities and disrupt the capacity of a specific cohort to operate successfully. This timely collection will be essential reading for students and scholars of the history of emotions.













Imagining the Irish child


Book Description

This book examines the ways in which ideas about children, childhood and Ireland changed together in Irish Protestant writing of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It focuses on different varieties of the child found in the work of a range of Irish Protestant writers, theologians, philosophers, educationalists, politicians and parents from the early seventeenth century up to the outbreak of the 1798 Rebellion. The book is structured around a detailed examination of six ‘versions’ of the child: the evil child, the vulnerable/innocent child, the political child, the believing child, the enlightened child, and the freakish child. It traces these versions across a wide range of genres (fiction, sermons, political pamphlets, letters, educational treatises, histories, catechisms and children’s bibles), showing how concepts of childhood related to debates about Irish nationality, politics and history across these two centuries.







Charting the Past


Book Description

Eighteenth-century England was a place of enlightenment and revolution: new ideas abounded in science, politics, transportation, commerce, religion, and the arts. But even as England propelled itself into the future, it was preoccupied with notions of its past. Jeremy Black considers the interaction of history with knowledge and culture in eighteenth-century England and shows how this engagement with the past influenced English historical writing. The past was used as a tool to illustrate the contemporary religious, social, and political debates that shaped the revolutionary advances of the era. Black reveals this "present-centered" historical writing to be so valued and influential in the eighteenth-century that its importance is greatly underappreciated in current considerations of the period. In his customarily vivid and sweeping approach, Black takes readers from print shop to church pew, courtroom to painter's studio to show how historical writing influenced the era, which in turn gave birth to the modern world.