Before Emotion ― The Language of Feeling, 400-1800

Before Emotion: The Language of Feeling, 400-1800 advances current interdisciplinary research in the history of emotions through in-depth studies of the European language of emotion from late antiquity to the modern period. Focusing specifically on the premodern cognates of ‘affect’ or ‘affection’ (such as affectus, affectio, affeccioun, etc.), an international team of scholars explores the cultural and intellectual contexts in which emotion was discussed before the term ‘emotion’ itself came into widespread use. By tracing the history of key terms and concepts associated with what we identify as ‘emotions’ today, the volume offers a first-time critical foundation for understanding pre- and early modern emotions discourse, charts continuities and changes across cultures, time periods, genres, and languages, and helps contextualize modern shifts in the understanding of emotions.

Juanita Feros Ruys received her PhD in English from the University of Sydney. She was Director of the University of Sydney Node of the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions, 2011-2108. She is the author of The Repentant Abelard (2014) and Demons in the Middle Ages (2017), and co-editor of the forthcoming A Cultural History of Emotions in the Medieval Age (Bloomsbury). She is also the writer and producer of the documentary The Devil’s Country, which explores links between the imagery of medieval demonology and the colonial European experience of the Australian landscape.

Michael Champion (PhD, Late-Antique Studies, London) is Deputy Director of the Institute for Religion and Critical Inquiry at the Australian Catholic University. His research focuses on late-antique and early-medieval cultural and intellectual history, including the history of emotions and the history of violence. He is the author of Explaining the Cosmos: Creation and Cultural Interaction in Late-Antique Gaza (OUP, 2014) and co-editor of Understanding Emotions in Early Europe (with Andrew Lynch, Brepols, 2015), and Cultural Perceptions of Violence in the Hellenistic World (with Lara O’Sullivan, Routledge 2017).

Dr Kirk Essary (PhD, Religion, Florida State University) is Lecturer in History and Classics at the University of Western Australia. His research focuses on intellectual and religious history in the Renaissance and Reformation. He is author of Erasmus and Calvin on the Foolishness of God: Reason and Emotion in the Christian Philosophy (Toronto, 2017), and has published work in several top journals, including Emotion Review, Church History, Erasmus Studies, English Studies, and the Scottish Journal of Theology.