The World Inside Out ─ Emotions and the Body in the French Wars of Religion

The World Inside Out explores how the traumatic events of the French wars of religion transformed ideas about the body and emotions. This book includes analysis of extraordinary bodies, the connection between the body and the sacred, through forensic explorations of saints’ bodies, and emphasis on the corporeality of Christ’s body in the Eucharist in Catholic preaching. Ordinary bodies on the scaffold, and the emotions that the spectacle of public executions elicited, the femininity and the gendering of bodies and lastly the political and intellectual ramifications of a contingent rejection of corporeality and emotionality as a prerequisite for bringing the wars of religion to an end.

Luc Racaut is a lecturer in hisotry at the University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne. His previous publications include Hatred in Print: Catholic Propaganda and Protestant Identity during the French Wars of Religion (2002).