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Enthusiasm seeks to contribute to a culturally and historically nuanced understanding of how emotions secure and ratify the truth of convictions. More than just pure affective intensity, enthusiasm is about something: a certainty, clarity, or truth. Neither as clearly negative as fanaticism nor as general as passion, enthusiasm specifically entails belief. For this reason, the book takes its starting point in religion, the social arena in which the concept was first debated and to which the term still gestures. Empirically based in modern German Protestantism, where religious emotion is intensely cultivated but also subject to vigorous scrutiny, it combines historical and ethnographic method...
Christmas is not a holiday just for Christians anymore, if it ever was. Embedded in calendars around the world and long a lucrative merchandising opportunity, Christmas enters multicultural, multi-religious public spaces, provoking both festivity and controversy, hospitality and hostility. The Public Work of Christmas provides a comparative historical and ethnographic perspective on the politics of Christmas in multicultural contexts ranging from a Jewish museum in Berlin to a shopping boulevard in Singapore. A seasonal celebration that is at once inclusive and assimilatory, Christmas offers a clarifying lens for considering the historical and ongoing intersections of multiculturalism, Chris...
Christmas is not a holiday just for Christians anymore, if it ever was. Embedded in calendars around the world and long a lucrative merchandising opportunity, Christmas enters multicultural, multi-religious public spaces, provoking both festivity and controversy, hospitality and hostility. The Public Work of Christmas provides a comparative historical and ethnographic perspective on the politics of Christmas in multicultural contexts ranging from a Jewish museum in Berlin to a shopping boulevard in Singapore. A seasonal celebration that is at once inclusive and assimilatory, Christmas offers a clarifying lens for considering the historical and ongoing intersections of multiculturalism, Chris...
States of emotion were vital as a foundation to society in the premodern period, employed as a force of order to structure diplomatic transactions, shape dynastic and familial relationships, and align religious beliefs, practices and communities. At the same time, societies understood that affective states had the potential to destroy order, creating undesirable disorder and instability that had both individual and communal consequences. These had to be actively managed, through social mechanisms such as children's education, acculturation, and training, and also through religious, intellectual, and textual practices that were both socio-cultural and individual. Presenting the latest research from an international team of scholars, this volume argues that the ways in which emotions created states of order and disorder in medieval and early modern Europe were deeply informed by contemporary gender ideologies. Together, the essays reveal the critical roles that gender ideologies and lived, structured, and desired emotional states played in producing both stability and instability.
Love, Honour, and Jealousy investigates the impact of the Italian economic miracle of the 1950s and 1960s on intimate life. Just as Italy was rapidly forged into an urban, industrial nation in these years, the ways in which Italians thought about family, love, and marriage were transformed by migration and modern consumer culture. At the core of this book lies the investigation of almost one hundred and fifty unpublished diaries and memoirs written by ordinary men and women who were coming of age during these years. These personal testimonies reveal unique insights into the experiences, thoughts, and feelings of those who came of age against the backdrop of a rapidly changing Italy. The pers...
The Palgrave Handbook of the History of Human Sciences offers a uniquely comprehensive and global overview of the evolution of ideas, concepts and policies within the human sciences. Drawn from histories of the social and psychological sciences, anthropology, the history and philosophy of science, and the history of ideas, this collection analyses the health and welfare of populations, evidence of the changing nature of our local communities, cities, societies or global movements, and studies the way our humanness or ‘human nature’ undergoes shifts because of broader technological shifts or patterns of living. This Handbook serves as an authoritative reference to a vast source of represe...
Examines depictions of grief in the Middle Ages by exploring how grief relates to gender and identity, as well as how men and women perform grief within the various constructions of both gender and grief established by medieval culture.
Offering a re-reading of Erasmus's works, this book shows that emotion and affectivity were central to his writings. It argues that Erasmus's conception of emotion was highly complex and richly diverse by tracing how the Dutch humanist writes about emotion not only from different perspectives-theological, philosophical, literary, rhetorical, medical-but also in different genres. In doing so, this book suggests, Erasmus provided a distinctive, if not unique, Christian humanist emotional style. Demonstrating that Erasmus consulted multiple intellectual traditions and previous works in his thoughts on affectivity, The Renaissance of Feeling sheds light on how understanding emotions in late medi...
Archives and Emotions argues, at its most fundamental level, that emotions matter and have always mattered to both the people whose histories are documented by archives and to those working with the documents these contain. This is the first study to put archivists and historians-scholars and practitioners from different settings, geographical provenance, and stages of career-in conversation with one another to examine the interplay of a broad range of emotions and archives, traditional and digital, from the eighteenth to the twenty-first centuries across national and disciplinary borders. Drawing on methodologies from the history of emotions and critical archival studies, this book provides...
Racializing the Soldier explores the impact of racial beliefs on the formation and development of modern armed forces and the ways in which these forces have been presented and historicized from a global perspective. With a wide geographical and temporal spread, the collection looks at the disparate ways that race has influenced military development. In particular, it explores the extent to which ideas of racial hierarchy and type have conditioned thinking about what kinds of soldiers should be used and in what roles. This volume offers a highly original military, social and cultural history, questioning the borders both of racialization and of the military itself. It considers the extent to...