Foundations of Feeling

A fresh reading of medieval literature as deeply concerned with thinking about feelings. Are emotions primarily bodily or primarily cognitive? Is there such a thing as “natural” emotions? And what is the relationship between emotion and gender? In Foundations of Feeling, Jessica Rosenfeld shows how medieval literature informs contemporary ideas about how emotions operate. She ranges widely from love poetry to pastoral and theological writings, to political satire and more, revealing a wealth of attention to emotions in both scientific and philosophical discourses of the time. By mining Latin, medieval French, and Middle English traditions, Rosenfeld relates medieval concerns to the most central, current debates (and impasses) in the fields of history of emotion and affect theory today, reframing how we think about and define feelings.