front cover of Foundations of Feeling
Foundations of Feeling
Theorizing Emotions in Late Medieval Literature
Jessica Rosenfeld
University of Chicago Press, 2026

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.

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front cover of Theorizing Emotions
Theorizing Emotions
Sociological Explorations and Applications
Edited by Debra Hopkins, Jochen Kleres, Helena Flam, and Helmut Kuzmics
Campus Verlag, 2009

Theorizing Emotions reflects the recent turn to emotions in academia—not just in sociology but also in psychology, evolutionary biology, and neuroscience. Drawing on the classic studies of Max Weber, Erving Goffman, and Norbert Elias, several leading European scholars present their findings on the role of emotions in various facets of society, from the laboratory to the office to the media. Among the topics discussed are the tensions between feelings and feeling rules, the conscious and unconscious emotions of scientists, emotions and social disorder, the effect of the emotional turn as an element of advancing modernity, romantic love in U.S. and Israeli codes of conduct, and the role of mass media in generating massive public emotions.

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