History of Emotions

The main concern of this book is with the possibilities for an interdisciplinary dialogue between psychology and history. At fi rst sight it might seem obvious that psychology and history, as scholarly disciplines, have a lot in common. For one thing the two traditions of enquiry share, and are continuously brought into contact by, their concern with the human condition: with individual and collective beliefs, mentalities, human behaviour and motivation, memory, personality, emotions and feelings. And yet the dialogue between the two disciplines has been, for the most part, sporadic and fraught with both theoretical and epistemological tensions.

The representation of emotions in Early Byzantine historical texts is still a field rich in potential for further investigations and interpretations. In this article, we aim to approach just a small section of this, looking at how some specific emotions: fear, love, anger, sorrow and joy, and their particular expressions, appear in Procopius' History of Wars. We look particularly at manifestations of emotions depicted in military and political contexts and ask how and why these fitted with societal norms and expectations, what were the gender specificities, real or imagined, of expressing emotions.

Overly sentimentalized and naturalized in the past, regarded only as objects used by bourgeois newlyweds and frustrated nuns, this paper argues that so-called " holy dolls " representing the Christ Child in life-size form had much richer and widespread effects, emotive and devotional, in early Renaissance Italy. Engaging viewers in the passion, reality, and thus enduring truth of their faith was an essential function of Christian visual culture. Three-dimensional objects of the Child reinforced pious conviction not only about the particular narrative of birth but also about the fundamental theological tenet of Incarnation, of the divine word being miraculously enfleshed in human form. Both the details of the tale and its awe-inspiring, celebratory import are vividly encapsulated in crèche scenes, usually consisting of polychromed terracotta statues. These ensembles began with a Christmas Eve mass arranged by St Francis at Greccio in 1223, in which a knight experienced a vision of the Christ Child. My paper examines the role and emotional impact of actualized figures of the Child during the Christmas calendar, in relation to public practices such as liturgical drama, crèche scenes, and confraternal plays that urged members to kiss the newborn's feet. The paper also pays attention to a range of viewers, including men and children. For full programme and all abstracts see http://www.historyofemotions.org.au/media/259700/devotions-program-lowres.pdf

To avoid molecular damage of biomolecules due to oxidation, all cells have evolved constitutive and responsive systems to mitigate and repair chemical modifications. Archaea have adapted to some of the most extreme environments known to support life, including highly oxidizing conditions. However, in comparison to bacteria and eukaryotes, relatively little is known about the biology and biochemistry of archaea in response to changing conditions and repair of oxidative damage. In this study transcriptome, proteome, and chemical reactivity analyses of hydrogen peroxide (H 2 O 2 ) induced oxidative stress in Sulfolobus solfataricus (P2) were conducted. Microarray analysis of mRNA expression showed that 102 transcripts were regulated by at least 1.5 fold, 30 minutes after exposure to 30 mM H 2 O 2 . Parallel proteomic analyses using two-dimensional differential gel electrophoresis (2D-DIGE), monitored more than 800 proteins 30 and 105 minutes after exposure and found that 18 had significant changes in abundance. A recently characterized ferritin-like antioxidant protein, DPSL, was the most highly regulated species of mRNA and protein, in addition to being post-translationally modified. As expected, a number of antioxidant related mRNAs and proteins were differentially regulated. Three of these, DPSL, superoxide dismutase, and peroxiredoxin were shown to interact and likely form a novel supramolecular complex for mitigating oxidative damage. A scheme for the ability of this complex to perform multi-step reactions is presented. Despite the central role played by DPSL, cells maintained a lower level of protection after disruption of the dpsl gene, indicating a level of redundancy in the oxidative stress pathways of S. solfataricus. This work provides the first ''omics'' scale assessment of the oxidative stress response for an archeal organism and together with a network analysis using data from previous studies on bacteria and eukaryotes reveals evolutionarily conserved pathways where complex and overlapping defense mechanisms protect against oxygen toxicity.

Abstract: The marks left by readers in their personal copies of Charlotte Smith’s Elegiac Sonnets provide traces of how manuscript engages print, and readers materially engage writers, in the Romantic period. Surveying 152 copies of Elegiac Sonnets and other contemporary sonnet collections by Bowles, Robinson, and Seward, this essay considers how marginalia challenges us to reconsider how readers used books—and how books might use their readers—in soliciting and forging affective relationships through print. We chronicle Smith’s careful recollecting and reframing of her own poetry in printed editions, a practice which seems to have licensed readers in turn to change how they responded to her verse. Why did Smith’s readers mark, interleave, or otherwise thicken their copies more often and with greater urgency than the readers of other late eighteenth-century sonneteers, particularly as the Elegiac Sonnets grew? Tracing these various annotations, from the most conventional to the most transgressive, heightens our historical sense of the dynamism of Smith’s publishing practice and illuminates the sentimental and aesthetic bonds she formed with readers. It also, we argue, exposes something more radical: a blurring of lines between persona and poet, author and reader, and between book-writer and book-owner.

Keywords: Charlotte Smith, Elegiac Sonnets, Sonnet Collections, Marginalia, Reading, Thickening, Affect

Статья посвящена вопросу об использовании письменности, письменных документов, в религиозных практиках. В день Пасхи – 20 апреля 1511 г., в Пинске владелец Пинска, Клецка, Городка Давыдова и Рогачёва князь Фёдор Иванович Ярославич сделал земельное пожалование для своего подданного и написал текст документа на это пожалование своей рукой. Данный поступок рассматривается как момент личного выбора князя, оригинальная форма выражения и репрезентации его благочестия, христианского человеколюбия.

The article discusses the problem of the use of literacy, written charters, in religious practices. On Easter – April 20, 1511, in Pinsk prince Fyodor Ivanovich Yaroslavich, the ruler of Pinsk, Kletsk, Gorodok Davydov and Rogachev, granted land for his subject and wrote the text of the charter on this land with his hand. This act is considered as the moment of the prince's personal choice, original form of expression and representation of his piety, Christian philanthropy.

_The Physiology of Love and Other Writings_ is the first English annotated collection of Mantegazza’s selected works. In my extensive introductory essay, Mantegazza’s hybrid contributions from fiction, travel-writing, and ethnography to physiology, medicine, and politics are reevaluated as instances of a proto-cultural-studies approach attuned to the cross-fertilization of disciplines and the circulation of ideas in a period of European intellectual history that defied the notion of specialization.
Table of contents:
The Physiology of Love
And Selections from:
On The Hygienic and Medicinal Virtues of the Coca Plant and on Nervine Nourishment in General
One Day in Madeira
A Voyage to Lapland with my Friend Stephen Sommier
India
Epicurus: Essay in a Physiology of the Beautiful
The Neurosic Century
The Tartuffe Century
Head: Or, Sowing Ideas to Create New Deeds
Political Memoirs of a Foot Soldier in the Italian Parliament
The Year 3000: A Dream
The Psychology of Translation

After presenting the reasons for undertaking an analysis of the Symposium and the Apology with regard to emotions, I focus on the groups of pleasure/joy and love/friendship and discuss relevant contexts. They provide us with a complex picture which I then try to interpret by means of a concept of hierarchy. Next, I touch upon on the issue of the expression of emotions. Finally I show why and how the Symposium and the Apology may be helpful in the study of emotions.

En los algunos de los relatos que dejaron combatientes chilenos de la Guerra del Pacífico, y que han sido publicados desde fines del conflicto hasta el presente, quedaron plasmadas las consecuencias emocionales que experimentaron estos y sus compañeros durante el conflicto y para el resto de sus vidas. Estas consecuencias derivan de que quienes dejaron un relato de sus vivencias son parte de una misma comunidad emocional, y para poder acercarnos a estas, los estudios sobre la memoria permiten reconocer en las narraciones de los combatientes fragmentos, silencios y olvidos.

FREE to download until October 2, 2020. Co-authored with Mark M Smith: Emotion, Sense, Experience is a short, pointed, engaging book calling on historians of emotions and historians of the senses to partake in serious and sustained dialogue. The book outlines the deep, if largely unacknowledged, genealogy of historical writing, insisting on a braided history of emotions and the senses; explains why recent historical treatments have sometimes profitably but nonetheless unhelpfully segregated the emotions from the senses; and makes a compelling case for the heuristic and interpretive dividends of bringing emotions and sensory history into conversation. We claim that histories of emotions and the senses should be written in tandem, not only in an effort to dilute some of the shortcomings of the respective fields as they are currently conceived and written but, more importantly, to grant historians access to a new way of understanding historical experience generally. Such a project necessarily opens up the question of the object of historical enquiry – the human being – and points us towards new interdisciplinary engagement and collaboration. As the neurosciences turn toward the social and the cultural, so historians might usefully turn towards the neurosciences. Unpicking some commonly held assumptions about affective and sensory experience, we radically re-imagine the human being as both biocultural and historical, reclaiming the analysis of human experience from biology and psychology and placing it squarely under the purview of the humanities.

In his Lectures on Aesthetics, Hegel describes tragedy as a ‘collision’ between opposing notions of the good. Two moral paradigms, each internally consistent, yet each apparently incompatible with the other, struggle ‘to destroy one another in their mutual conflict.’ In Greek tragedy, these ‘two sides’ tend to be represented by a different characters: Antigone vs. Creon; Philoctetes vs. Odysseus; Orestes vs. the Eumenides.  Building on this basic concept of what tragedy is, but departing from Hegel’s sense of Shakespeare’s distinctiveness, I argue here that in Shakespeare’s tragedies, as in those of Seneca, the two sides of the ethical dilemma at the heart of the play’s interest tend to be presented, not as opposing characters, but instead within the psyche of a single individual: the so-called ‘tragic hero.’ They appear as contending moral paradigms, not necessarily each personified: rival imperatives, each grounded in a different emotional impulse. The tension between these two poles is most clearly expressed in the protagonist’s repeated, climactic soliloquies, which show him deciding between irreconcilable courses of action. Moreover, the two value-systems in question tend to be more or less the same across all four of the major tragedies: ‘pity’ vs. ‘ambition’; ‘kindness’ vs. ‘honour’; ‘mercy’ vs. ‘constancy.’ Over the course of their soliloquies, Macbeth, Othello, Hamlet, and Lear articulate and expose the incongruity Shakespeare discerns between Christianity and contemporary notions of honour: Christian compassion proves at odds with the desire to subjugate, dominate, and command.

The Cold War’s end infused electronic music in Berlin after 1989 with an ecstatic intensity. Enthused communities came together to live out that energy and experiment in conditions informed by past suffering and hope for the future. This techno-scene became an ‘intimate public’ (Berlant) within an emergent ‘structure of feeling’ (Williams). Techno parties held out a promise of freedom while Germany’s re-unification quickly broke into disputes and mutual suspicion. Tracing the historical movement during the first years of re-unified Germany, this article adds to accounts of ecstasy by considering it in conjunction with melancholy, arguing for an ambivalent description of ecstatic experience – and of emotional life more broadly.

Suicide plays a dynamic role in both the narrative and structure of Dante’s Inferno, and yet, in accordance with there being no term for the act in European languages until the 1600s, the poet mentions it only euphemistically: Dido ‘slew herself for love’ (Inf. 5.61), Pier della Vigna describes suicide as a process in which ‘the ferocious soul deserts the body / after it has wrenched up its own roots’ (Inf. 13.94–95), and the anonymous Florentine suicide simply ‘made [his] house into [his] gallows’ (Inf. 13.151). It is thus unsurprising that the notion of mental health in connection with suicide is equally absent in explicit terms. Reading between the lines of Dante’s poetry, however, it becomes clear that the emotive language and embodied hybridity associated with the suicides within Dante’s oltremondo, and of Dante the pilgrim as he responds to their narratives, highlights a heterogeneous yet shared experience of loss and despair, mirroring contemporary understandings of mental health issues. Through an analysis of the emotive language associated with the narratives of a number of Dante’s suicides, and the hybrid embodiment of numerous suicides inscribed in Dante’s text, this paper hopes to explore the ways in which, even inadvertently, Dante reflects on the distancing of the suicides from the civic bodies of their communities, from their own physical bodies, and from the vital rationality of their human minds, and thus to investigate the ways in which the lack of emotional wellbeing experienced by the suicides forces them to the edges of society’s, and their own, consciousness.

This study is devoted to the emotional experience of the famous Renaissance sculptor, goldsmith, and writer, Benvenuto Cellini (1500–1571), as it is portrayed in his life writing, the Vita. Providing the variety of arguments on the connection between the artist and contemporary intellectuals, who attended the Florentine Academy (1540–1583) together, I demonstrate that Cellini’s literary production can be examined productively against the background of Neoplatonic thought. In particular, Marsilio Ficino’s On Love, first published in the vernacular Italian in 1544, helps to establish an explanation of what Cellini meant when he decided to play the cornet while falling in love simultaneously with a young boy and girl, or  how he justified kicking or punching his servants, or why he did not kill his adversary, the artist Baccio Bandinelli, when he had the chance. These cases of radical affectivity are inscribed into Ficino’s concept of the “melancholy genius” manifesting melancholic madness. In Cellini’s Vita, the latter can not only turn humans almost into beast, literally (for example, in a bat); but, properly tempered by the means of music and poetry, as well as of individual and collective magic, it elevates one’s soul “on high,” which corresponds to the Neoplatonic concept of divine madness.
___________________________________________________________________________________________________
Table of Contents
Introduction
Chapter 1.  Benvenuto Cellini and the Florentine Academy
1.1 Why did the Italian academies emerge?
1.2 Academic movement before the Florentine Academy
1.3 The Florentine Academy
1.4 Benvenuto Cellini’s writings in the context of the Florentine Academy
Chapter 2.  “Essendo io per natura malinconico”: Benvenuto Cellini and the Ficinian Legacy
2.1 “Grand theories” and “grounded” early-modern artists
2.2 Marsilio Ficino’s On Love
2.3 “Melancholy genius” concept
2.4 (Neo)Platonic love
Chapter 3.  “Tu ten sei gito a contemplar su ’n Cielo l’alto Fattore”: Benvenuto Cellini Ascending on High
3.1 Esoteric knowledge and censorship
3.2 “Furor divino” and “diabolico furore”
3.3 Different kinds of furor divino in the Vita
Conclusion

This paper provides information sources and ideas for challenge and adventure activities. Main information sources are listed: libraries, ERIC, and several publishers and programs. Some useful publications are described that provide activities and ideas related to outdoor education, environmental issues, games, special populations, educational theory and practice, corporate experiential learning, facilitation, and adventure. Specific annual workshops in outdoor recreation and leadership are listed, as well as adventure organizations that offer training opportunities. Four sets of group activities for challenge and adventure programs are described: the spider's web, 2B or Knot 2B (group problem solving with ropes and knots), raccoon circles (group challenges using 1-inch tubular climbing webbing), and the lycra tube (group activities using five yards of lycra sewn into a tube). (SV)

This book follows the hybrid and contradictory history of magic realism through the writings of three key figures-art historian Franz Roh, novelist Alejo Carpentier, and cultural critic Fredric Jameson-drawing links between their political, aesthetic, and philosophical ideas on art's relationship to reality. Magic realism is vast in scope, spanning almost a century, and is often confused with neighbouring styles of literature or art, most notably surrealism. The fascinating conditions of modernist Europe are complex and contradictory, a spirit that magic realism has taken on as it travels far and wide. The filmmakers and writers in this book acknowledge the importance of feeling, atmosphere, and mood to subtly provoke and resist global capitalism. Theirs is the history of magic-realist cinema. The book explores this history through the modernist avant-garde in search of a new theory of cinematic magic realism. It uncovers a resistant, geopolitical form of world cinema-moving from Europe, through Latin America and the former Soviet Union, to Thailand-that emerges from these ideas. This book is invaluable to any reader interested in world modernism(s) in relation to contemporary cinema and geopolitics. Its sustained analysis of film as a sensory, intermedial medium is of interest to scholars working across the visual arts, literature, critical theory, and film-philosophy.

"The history of emotions" is the first accessible book on the theories, methods, achievements, and problems in this burgeoning field of historical inquiry. Historians of emotion borrow heavily from the disciplines of anthropology, psychology, philosophy and neuroscience, and stake out a claim that emotions have a past and change over time. This book introduces students and professional historians to the main areas of concern in the history of emotions, discussing how the emotions intersect with other lines of historical research relating to power, practice, society and morality. Providing a narrative of historical emotions concepts, the book is the go-to handbook for understanding the problems of interpreting historical experience, collating and evaluating all the principal methodological tools generated and used by historians of emotion. It also lays out an historiographical map of emotions history research in the past and present, and sets the agenda for the future of the history of emotions. Chiefly centring on the rapprochement of the humanities and the neurosciences, the book proposes a way forward in which disciplinary lines become blurred. Addressing criticism from both within and without the discipline of history, "The history of emotions" offers a rigorous defence of this new approach, demonstrating its potential to lie at the centre of historiographical practice, as well as the importance of this kind of historical work for our general understanding of the human brain and the meaning of human experience.

Contents
Introduction
1. Historians and Emotions
2. Words and Concepts
3. Communities, Regimes and Styles
4. Power, Politics and Violence
5. Practice and Expression
6. Experience, Senses and the Brain
7. Spaces, Places and Objects
8. Morality
Conclusion

Musik und Emotionen haben Konjunktur, und zwar nicht erst seit Emotionen in Wissenschaft, Ratgeberliteratur und Journalismus zu einem der Hauptthemen geworden sind. Die Verbindung zwischen diesen beiden ephemeren Phänomenen geht bis in die Antike zurück, und sie ist weit komplexer als es die weitläufig bekannte Formulierung, Musik sei die Sprache der Gefühle, erahnen lässt. Im vorliegenden Band werden zum ersten Mal Herangehensweisen aus der Historischen Musikwissenschaft, der Tanzwissenschaft und den Sound Studies mit Ansätzen aus der Emotionsgeschichte verbunden, um den vielschichtigen Zusammenhang zwischen Musik und Emotionen aus einer kulturhistorischen Perspektive zu beschreiben.

The Standard Babylonian Gilgamesh Epic is the best known of the Mesopotamian narratives to survive to the present day. It has been the subject of numerous studies and analyses over recent decades, but many of its features remain to be fully explored. This study, conceived as a contribution to the larger task of defining the (or, rather, a) system of emotions prevalent in Mesopotamia, specifically examines and compares those characters in the Standard Babylonian Gilgamesh Epic who take counsel before acting—who take thought for consequences and outcomes—and those who demonstrate unthinking willfulness, and who act (without taking counsel) on the basis of impulse and overwhelming or excessive emotion.

We take music’s expressive power for granted. Yet, this aspect poses many puzzling problems for musicological research. One of them is how to approach the effect of music historically since satisfactory sources about music’s emotional qualities are rare and one needs to be cautious in transferring results of recent music psychology or cognitive musicology back to the 19th century. Therefore, the present article proposes a kind of historical music psychology. Developing a method partly inspired by systematic musicology, yet clearly historical, this study offers a possible solution to that problem. It does so by way of a case study on two specific and closely related kinds of loud music passages that have been labeled the ‘Glorifying Hymnic’ and the ‘Majestic Chorale’ respectively. It provides a definition of these types of music passages and—combining qualitative and quantitative approaches—it investigates the contemporary perception of these passages using evidence from contemporary witnesses. The sample focuses on orchestral music such as symphonies, concertos, symphonic poems, and overtures including works from Beethoven, Berlioz, Mendelssohn, Bristow, Brahms, Saint-Saëns, Tchaikovsky, Cliffe, and many other composers. In a final step, the article explores the dissemination of the ‘Glorifying Hymnic’ in 19th-century music and draws attention to contemporary historical events in an attempt to link the expression type of the ‘Glorifying Hymnic’ to historical events and phenomena such as nationalism, religion, and imperialism.

This article presents John Chrysostom’s views on mourning and tears with some of his Graeco-Roman philosophical predecessors in the background (Aristotle, Seneca and Plutarch). While Chrysostom’s views on mourning over the dead have much in common with the consolatory and philosophical writings of his pagan predecessors, his teaching on mourning over the living bears witness to an early Christian transformation in mourning. While Chrysostom urges his congregation to avoid excessive mourning over the dead, as advised many Graeco-Roman philosophers before him (although Chrysostom gives the additional reason that it compromises the Christian belief in the resurrection), he actively encourages mourning over the living. It is not the dead whom one should mourn for, but sin and sinners, because mourning over the dead can do nothing for them, while mourning with tears over sinners – both oneself and others – provides tremendous benefit both for the one who mourns and the one who is mourned for. Chrysostom identifies the proper place for such mourning to be not in public for outward display, but in private prayer. This alteration in the context (private rather than public) and objects of mourning (the living rather than the dead) qualifies it as an emotion– according to Aristotle’s definition (who himself had not considered mourning to be an emotion) – in that it is tied up with the interpersonal ramifications of actions,
alters one’s judgements, is ‘action-ready’; and is accompanied by pleasure and pain. Mourning was largely viewed as an obstacle to the philosophical life in pre- and non-Christian contexts, but due to the transformation of its understanding and function in the early Christian world, it was given a central role in the ‘philosophical’ life among Christians, as witnessed in the writings and preaching of John Chrysostom, who was influenced by contemporary ascetic thought and practices, in which mourning with tears had a central role. It holds such an important place in the preaching and ascetic program of John Chrysostom that he would have his hearers live in perpetual mourning.

Beyond the institution of marriage, its norms, and rules, what was life like for married couples in Greco-Roman antiquity? This volume explores a wide range of sources over seven centuries to uncover possible answers to this question.

On tombstones, curse or oracular tablets, in contracts, petitions, letters, treatises, biographies, novels, and poems, throughout Egypt, Greece, and Rome, 107 couples express themselves or are given life by their contemporaries and share their experiences of, and views on, marital relationships and their practical and emotional consequences. Renowned scholars and the next generation of experts explore seven centuries of source material to uncover the dynamics of the married life of metropolitan and provincial, famous and unknown, young and old couples. Men’s and women’s hopes, fears, traumas, joys, endeavours, and needs are analysed and reveal an array of interactions and behaviours that enlighten us on gender roles, social expectations, and intimate dealings in antiquity. Known texts are revisited, new evidence is put forward, and novel interpretations and concepts are offered which highlight local and chronological specificities as well as transhistorical commonalities. The analysis of married life in Greco-Roman antiquity, from ongoing vetting process to place where to find security, reveals the fundamental yearning to be included and loved and how the tensions created by the sometimes contradictory demands of traditional ideals and individual realities can be resolved, furthering our knowledge of social and cultural mechanisms.

https://www.routledge.com/Married-Life-in-Greco-Roman-Antiquity/Challet/p/book/9780367345044

""Early and medieval Chinese texts on sexual body techniques frame sexual pleasure in a gendered way. The texts display a psychodynamic scenario for sexual encounters between men and women wherein the woman is staged in her full potency, as emitting fluids and ejaculating, as experiencing uncontrolled muscular spasms and having immense pleasure (kuài 快) during the enfolding events. Male ejaculation is seen as a short-time pleasure (zàn kuài 暫快); it is considered better to avoid it, and instead attempt to stay in an intermediate state of bliss, and eventually to experience illumination, by way of controlled counter-measures and by being fully focused to female bodily signs, to which the male partner should be prepared to react adequately.

Keywords
Sexual body techniques, gendered conception of sexual pleasure, male and female ejaculation, textual study, early and medieval China""

This short thought piece focuses on the novel contributions the authors of Lived Nation make to the study of the nation, and to the new history of experience. It discusses the historiographical origins of the new history of experience, especially in its links to the history of emotions, and the boundaries of this exciting new historical approach. It further points to promising innovations as other subfields start to implement this approach, specifically in the history of childhood and youth, and the history of disability.

The article discusses theoretical presuppositions
for an analysis of traumatic memories in literature.
The work, operating the same theoretical concepts
that psychoanalysis uses for interpretation of trauma,
analyses literature as a site for keeping memories of the
traumatic experience from the past. A work of literature
builds a communication channel to share a subjective
experience of a traumatic event with a community, a
circle of readers, or members of a culture or society.
In this way, the experience creates cultural representations
of collective memory that partially open up the
present possibilities for our memory of ourselves. The
article sees the stories “The Press Has Been Permitted”
(„Spauda leista“) by Gabrielė Petkevičaitė-Bitė and “A
Sad Fairy-Tale” („Liūdna pasaka“) by Jonas Biliūnas
as inter-related by the way in which their authors turn
back to the historical past of their country. In their
works, the writers present the historical past through
individualized life stories of separate persons. There
is one more aspect to these texts that relates the two
stories with each other and serves as a motivation for
comparing them and analyzing them as the site of traumatic
memory: both of the stories introduce mentally
disordered characters who make other people turn
back to the past. Moreover, both Petkevičaitė-Bitė and
Biliūnas took on responsibility to tell their stories due
to a less obvious reason: each of them had their own
personal experience marked by an injury. This kind of
experience, always pushing its way into the consciousness,
was constantly reminding the authors of itself and
served as another strong impulse for writing. Both of
the writers used the possibility of turning back to the
historical past in order to perceive their own story in a
wider context of a community experience.
Key words: trauma, sites of traumatic memory,
psychoanalysis, literature.

The research conducted by this paper has been largely updated and elaborated in my MA-thesis "Senses and Passions of Benvenuto Cellini"; you are more than welcome to check it out. // The article aims to rethink the several stereotypes of Romantic tradition, which are still reproduced in regard to Benvenuto Cellini and his Vita. Using the approaches of intellectual history and iconographical studies, the present study pays attention to the coherent system of lay, scientific and ‘secret’ knowledge of the epoch lurking under the surface of the simplicity and even naivety of the author’s language. I argue that this autobiographical writing embodies a certain type of culture of the self deeply rooted in contemporary medical, alchemical and magical contexts. Organized around the concept of “getting pleasure,” Cellini’s practices of the self are built into the Neo-Platonic picture of the world. Analyzing the two passages of Vita, I demonstrate the author’s spiritual ascent from the corporeal suffering to union with ‘the One’ by means of individual and collective magic rituals, transforming his Life into a work of art.

By spelling out the affective dimension of admiration, this paper challenges the view of admiration as a trustworthy means of detecting morally desirable qualities in exemplars. Such a view of admiration, foundational for the current debate on exemplars in moral education, holds that admiration is a self-motivating emotion essentially oriented toward the good and the excellent. I demonstrate that this view ignores the affective aspects of admiration explored widely in the history of philosophy on which the debate on moral exemplars substantially draws. Focusing on Spinoza, Smith, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche, I bring to light their largely skeptical views of the moral value of admiration. These thinkers indicate that admiration can be influenced by, and is often conflated with, other emotions, and can arise in us through behavioral mimicry; moreover, admiration is often oriented toward the mediocre and corrupt, is contagious, self-referential, collective, and has limited motivational power. Their remarks on the affective dimension of admiration call into question admiration’s applicability and usefulness in moral exemplarity.

This article seeks to explore the images based on the Rāmayāna tradition within archaeological, cultural and literary contexts in late fifth and early sixth century ce. It uncovers elements of politico-religious agency, art and historical knowledge. Narrative panels, spatially located largely in central and north India, narrativise the episodes set in the forest represented in the Aranaya and Kishkindhākānda. Evolution of narrative complexities through placement, composition and representational devices in terracotta and stone relief sculptures at sites such as Nachna Kuthara and Deogarh is traced. Rāma's idealised character, expressed through renunciation, benevolence, ameliorative power, authority and dharma, emerges within the physical and emotional landscape of Rāmayāna imagery. Ideal and deviant behaviour is represented through narratives based on Ahalya, Anusuyā, Śūrpanakhā, Vālin and such characters. The construction of the 'other' in form of monkeys and demons, vānaras and rāksasas, in the visual discourse, and the fascination with devotion, romance and heroism that is projected through these is seen as a thread that runs through the Rāmayāna narratives. The article examines the early Rāmayān a panels found from central India during the fifth and sixth centuries from a perspective which suggests that art historical knowledge can be a significant source of information and interpretation, providing insights into mainstream and alternate socio-religious beliefs, rituals and practices to validate ideas about the same garnered from literary and epigraphic sources. This reading of early Rāmayān a sculptural panels found within architectural settings and independent terracotta plaques seeks to examine the layers of signification

This article moves at the crossroads of particular processes of change in the 16th and 17th centuries' perceptions of love and passion, which have been described as shifts in the collective mentalité. Taking some literary notions of suffering as its departure point, it proceeds to the investigation of writings the main concern of which was how to resolve crisis and suffering. Thus, it tackles the issue of the basic fabric of daily life from the perspective of a logic of the concrete. Methodologically referring to the triangle relation between terms for pain, the relevant concepts and the bodily facts, it seeks for insights on the corporeal realities of pain and suffering in 17th century China, which also provide information about the cultural interface in the experience of pain. The present article argues that, in order to integrate concepts and words with corporeal realities of emotion and suffering, it is necessary to go beyond conceptual metaphors and to explore the social fabric in particular historical periods and geographical regions of China.

One conception of collective emotion is that of one token emotional disposition, episode, or attitude with many participants. Such emotions are a collective’s. This conception has been criticized on phenomenological and ontological grounds, and it has recently been depicted as a piece of political ideology. This paper focuses on Max Scheler’s conception of collective emotion which some of those who are sympathetic to the idea in the recent debate have endorsed. It is argued that while it withstands the phenomenological and ontological objections, the issue of political ideology has to be taken seriously.

En hommage posthume à Jean Starobinski (1920-2019) à l’occasion du centenaire de sa naissance, nous esquissons ici sa pensée sur les « raisons du corps » en la reliant à certains champs de recherche contemporains. Prolongeant le «tournant somatique» des années 1980, les «tournants émotionnel» et «intéroceptif» du XXIe siècle prétendent réintégrer le corps dans l’histoire, dans les sciences humaines et dans les sciences neurocognitives. Les interroger à la lumière de la critique starobinskienne fait ressortir leurs limites. Inversement, lire celle-ci au regard de ces «tournants» met en relief sa manière unique d’articuler l’histoire et la phénoménologie ainsi que son intérêt constant pour l’expérience corporelle de soi et pour la conscience du corps propre, dont les «raisons» se métamorphosent en une expression littéraire qui fera corps avec elle.

This article provides an optic for understanding the genre of the Marathi love lyric, lavani (lāvaṇī), and its emotionality. The genre reached its greatest popularity during the turn of the nineteenth century, receiving broad popular support as well as patronage from the Maratha State. Often contrasted with the povada (povāḍā), defined essentially as a heroic ballad that recounts the feats of larger than life historical persons, the two have been seen in tandem, paired for their characterization of masculine valour and feminine eros. Each genre, relying on the other to form a complete picture, providing the appropriate context in a dialogue of genres. Despite the contrast and obvious references to warfare in the povada, however, most scholars have not acknowledged the eros of lavani as a product of its historical circumstances. Instead, generations of scholars have often characterized lavani as immoral, about women who are ready to swindle heroic men out of their hard-earned riches – riches earned from plunder and warfare in the eighteenth century.

In this article, I steer away from moralizing discourses, and instead historicize the lavani’s aesthetics and emotionality within the contexts of warfare, displacement, and slavery – the material conditions under which lavani reached its apex. I consider the emotional language of the lavani as a desire for social intimacy, attachment, and protection, rather than an attempt at duplicity. The Maratha State frequently sold slaves for revenue generation, and often even granted slaves in lieu of payment; these activities disproportionately affected women. In reading the lavani genre, especially the woman’s voice, within its historical contexts, therefore, I argue for a materialist understanding of the lavani’s emotionality.