This collection of essays offers a major reassessment of the meaning and significance of emotional experience in the work of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. Recent scholarship on early modern emotion has relied on a medical-historical approach, resulting in a picture of emotional experience that stresses the dominance of the material, humoral body. The Renaissance of emotion seeks to redress this balance by examining the ways in which early modern texts explore emotional experience from perspectives other than humoral medicine.The chapters in the book seek to demonstrate how open, creative and agency-ridden the experience and interpretation of emotion could be. Taken individually, the chapters offer much-needed investigations into previously overlooked areas of emotional experience and signification; taken together, they offer a thorough re-evaluation of the cultural priorities and phenomenological principles that shaped the understanding of the emotive self in the early modern period. The Renaissance of emotion will be of particular interest to students and scholars of Shakespeare and Renaissance literature, the history of emotion, theatre and cultural history, and the history of ideas.

IntroductionRichard Meek and Erin SullivanPart I The theology and philosophy of emotion1: The passions of Thomas Wright: Renaissance emotion across body and soul Erin Sullivan2: The scripture moveth us in sundry places: framing biblical emotions in the Book of Common Prayer and the Homilies David Bagchi3: This was a way to thrive: Christian and Jewish eudaimonism in The Merchant of Venice Sara Coodin4: Robert Burton, perfect happiness and the visio dei Mary Ann LundPart II Shakespeare and the language of emotion5: Spleen in Shakespeares comedies Nigel Wood6: Rue even for ruth: Richard II and the imitation of sympathy Richard Meek7: Whats happiness in Hamlet? Richard ChamberlainPart 3 The performance of emotion8: They that tread in a maze: movement as emotion in John Lyly Andy Kesson9: (S)wept from power: two versions of tyrannicide in Richard III Ann Kaegi10: The affective scripts of early modern execution and murder Frederika Bain11: Discrepant emotional awareness in Shakespeare R. S. White and Ciara RawnsleyAfterword Peter HolbrookIndex