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Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries saw an extraordinary proliferation of theoretical ideas about the nature and meaning of emotion, and this introduction offers a survey of the sometimes complementary, sometimes contradictory, intellectual and aesthetic traditions that helped shape this debate. It responds to previous work in the field that has focused primarily on medical humoralism and makes a case for a more pluralistic view of emotion in the period. Renaissance literary texts provide compelling evidence that emotions were not a passive phenomenon, acting upon people’s bodies, but an active, imaginative and philosophical process. Characters in early modern texts often express dissatisfaction with a purely medical understanding of emotion, looking instead to other complex systems of knowledge – including religion and philosophy, rhetorical and language theory, and drama and performance – to articulate and reflect upon their emotional experiences. The introduction thus proposes a rereading of emotional texts from this period with a more pluralistic model of affective experience in mind, paying greater attention to how individuals in this period interrogated, cultivated and performed emotional experience in active and often self-defining ways.

This chapter examines the disputed place of children’s pain around the dawn of the twentieth century from the perspective of the history of emotions. It explores how the emotional expression of children’s suffering (cries and screams) was interpreted differently by various professional bodies with the performative authority to shape its meaning. Focusing on written texts and photographic practices, it compares the perspectives of scientists and psychologists with those of pediatricians, showing how the former claimed children were essentially insensitive to pain while the latter used pain to help diagnose children’s sickness. This paper questions whether specific expressions correspond mechanically and invariably to certain emotions, and shows how screams and cries created different “emotional bodies” in the pediatric and laboratory contexts.

The face is a vital site of embodied emotional display. By examining descriptions of facial pallor in a range of Chaucer’s works, Downes explores the poet’s representation of the face as an affective text, which launches an interpretative challenge to both the medieval and the modern reader of fiction, as well as deepening our understanding of cultural expressions of feeling in the pre-modern era.

Elizabeth Robertson brings together Keats’s ‘snail-horn perception’ with medieval theory of the senses, especially optics, and medieval theology, to analyse the first tenuous encounters between Troilus and Criseyde. During their sensually-charged optical exchanges, both physiological and psychological processes are at work to create great emotional force in the text and impact on the text’s readers.

From the earliest manuscript images through to cinematic depictions, Chaucer’s ‘persone’, that is his face and body, has been a key focus in the pursuit of transhistorical intimacy with the author. Chaucer’s physical self has been portrayed repeatedly across subsequent centuries in an array of media. Drawing upon the hermeneutic concept of Einfühlung (‘feeling into’) to examine the long ‘empathetic afterlife’ enjoyed by Chaucer’s ‘persone’, D’Arcens explores what Chaucer’s face and body have come to mean to post-medieval audiences; she traces how these differences intersect with the constantly changing nature of Chaucer’s legacy, especially as he and his work have been deemed to reflect national literary and comic traditions.

This chapter surveys current research, methodologies and debates in Chaucer criticism and medievalism studies as they appear in this volume, and discusses their relationship with the scholarship of Stephanie Trigg.

This chapter provides an overview of research on body language, gesture and emotion in connection with tears and laughter, and an account of its application in previous scholarship to ancient Greek literature, in order to assess the potential for extending these studies to Byzantium and for the productive interaction between classicists and Byzantinists. The chapter then gives guidance to the nature and organisation of the material, and reviews the range and significance of the material included in the remainder of the volume: authors and genres, themes and images, periods and approaches, language and style. Analysing the field from literary and anthropological perspectives on ritual, it draws links between chapters, sketches in gaps, and suggests lines for future research.

The idea of artistic expression as an outward manifestation of the self arose in literature and philosophy at least two generations before it came to be applied to music. Lyric poetry in particular provided a conceptual model for perceiving art as a form of autobiography; Goethe and Wordsworth encouraged such a reading of their works. In the meantime, philosophers were questioning the very nature of the self, and particularly the unconscious, which is to say, the primordial self. They began to recognize that while the unconscious might defy observation, its products could provide indirect evidence of its workings, and they regarded artworks as a synthesis of conscious and unconscious thought and as such capable of offering at least an occluded window onto the nature of the true inner self.

James Simpson’s central hermeneutic perception for knowledge in the Humanities is that cognition is re-cognition. Before we can know, we must already have known. He examines this paradox with reference to literary examples of facial recognition from, in particular, Chaucer and his reception in the early modern period. Linking literary face to textual face – the whole text as a kind of face – he applies the lessons learnt from facial recognition to textual recognition; and answers some possible objections to the paradox of knowing being dependent on having already known.

This chapter reviews the aims and achievements of the volume. The volume’s contributors confront phenomena that are universal among humans and more or less confined to our species But the meaning and even perhaps the emotional content underlying these universal phenomena are often, and to varying extents, historically determined. This chapter considers whether we can identify a specifically ‘Greek’ history of the emotions, given that Greekness itself has a history that involves huge changes as well as a degree of continuity. What emerges as in some sense continuous is the process itself of change, within as well as between the key stages that mark transitions from the ancient to the late antique, Byzantine and modern worlds. The chapter then concludes with some speculative thoughts about where the methodological insights and approaches highlighted in this book might have gone, or might go in a sequel, if coverage were to be extended more fully into the modern period.

Paul Strohm, both a biographer of Chaucer and a Chaucerian literary critic, meditates on what Chaucer might come to mean for those engaged with his life and poetic works. In a personal reflection on writing about this medieval clerk and poet, Strohm explores the identification or transference that can occur during an intense study of an author, generating new insights into how our emotional investments are implicated in our ‘relationship’ with an author.