This editor’s introduction to the special issue analyzes some of the historical, semantic and disciplinary differences between the terms “feelings,” “passions,” “emotions,” “sentiments,” and “affects,” and assesses their usefulness in the study of medieval and early modern culture, and within the disciplinary frame of the “history of emotions.” The “affective turn” — both in cultural theory and in the autobiographical impulse in the humanities — is a strong impulse in much modern scholarship but as the essays in this special issue show, the discipline of the history of emotions offers rich and promising insights into the social, political, and cultural frameworks in which medieval and early modern individuals navigated, narrated, and performed emotional and social relationships.
Stephanie Trigg (Wed,) studied this question.