Matters of Engagement

Emotions, Identity, and Cultural Contact in the Premodern World

Daniela Hacke, Claudia Jarzebowski, Hannes Ziegler, Daniela Hacke, Claudia Jarzebowski, Hannes Ziegler

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9780429949630
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Ancient History
• Index: History

By drawing on a broad range of disciplinary and cross-disciplinary expertise, this study addresses the history of emotions in relation to cross-cultural movement, exchange, contact, and changing connections in the later medieval and early modern periods.

All essays in this volume focus on the performance and negotiation of identity in situations of cultural contact, with particular emphasis on emotional practices. They cover a wide range of thematic and disciplinary areas and are organized around the primary sources on which they are based. The edited volume brings together two major areas in contemporary humanities: the study of how emotions were understood, expressed, and performed in shaping premodern transcultural relations, and the study of premodern cultural movements, contacts, exchanges, and understandings as emotionally charged encounters. In discussing these hitherto separated historiographies together, this study sheds new light on the role of emotions within Europe and amongst non-Europeans and Europeans between 1100 and 1800.

The discussion of emotions in a wide range of sources including letters, images, material culture, travel writing, and literary accounts makes Matters of Engagement an invaluable source for both scholars and students concerned with the history of premodern emotions.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgements
• List of contributors
• 1 Matters of engagement. Emotions, identity, and cultural contact in the premodern world: an introduction
• Part I Letters
• 2 Bridging the gap: techniques of appresentation and familiar(izing) narratives in eighteenth-century transmaritime family correspondence
• 3 An emotional company: mobility, community, and control in the records of the English East India Company
• Part II Images
• 4 Lust, love and curiosity: the emotional threads in the Dutch encounter with an exotic East
• 5 Santiago Matamoros/Mataindios: adopting an Old World battlefield apparition as a New World representation of triumph
• 6 Riding the juggernaut: embodied emotions and ‘Indian’ ritual processions through European eyes, c. 1300–1600
• Part III Materials
• 7 Robbing the grave: stealing the remains of the blessed John of Matha from the church of S. Tommaso in Formis in 1655
• 8 Days of wrath, days of friendships: the materiality of anger and love in early modern Denmark
• Part IV Travel writing
• 9 “A country where reason does not rule the heart”: Spanish exuberance and the traveller’s gaze
• 10 Sensible distances: the colonial projections of Therese Huber and E. G. Wakefield
• 11 Animals and emotions in the early modern world
• Part V Literary accounts
• 12 Travel, emotions and timelessness: on otherworldly encounters in medieval narratives
• 13 “Always fleeing away”: emotion, exile and rest in the Old English Life of St Mary of Egypt
• 14 From Aaron to Othello: the changing emotional register of blackness in Shakespeare
• 15 Emotions, identity and propaganda: Ottoman threat and confessional divide in later sixteenth-century Germany
• Index