Introduction : The language of affect from late antiquity to early modernity

The surge in history of emotions research worldwide has produced innovative readings of past cultures. This research has allowed us to comprehend more fully the ways in which people experienced their own society, and has uncovered myriad theories, taxonomies, and hierarchies of affective states which were at play, and indeed, at times, in competition, in societies from antiquity to modernity. These new understandings have allowed us to see how emotions in the past mediated between individuals, groups, and their larger societies. They have helped historians reconsider how institutions, and categories such as class, gender, sexuality, and subjectivity, were formed, made strange, and reformed through different emotional practices. The history of emotions has also illuminated our own affective connections with that past, in conjunction with our present deployment of emotions in art, politics, and science.