Matters of Engagement: Emotions, Identity, and Cultural Contact in the Premodern World
ISBN: 9780429488689
Platform/Publisher: Taylor & Francis / Routledge
Digital rights: Users: Unlimited; Printing: Unlimited; Download: Unlimited



By drawing on a broad range of disciplinary and cross-disciplinary expertise, this study addresses the history of emotions in relation to cross-cultural movement, exchange, contact, and changing connections in the later medieval and early modern periods.

All essays in this volume focus on the performance and negotiation of identity in situations of cultural contact, with particular emphasis on emotional practices. They cover a wide range of thematic and disciplinary areas and are organized around the primary sources on which they are based. The edited volume brings together two major areas in contemporary humanities: the study of how emotions were understood, expressed, and performed in shaping premodern transcultural relations, and the study of premodern cultural movements, contacts, exchanges, and understandings as emotionally charged encounters. In discussing these hitherto separated historiographies together, this study sheds new light on the role of emotions within Europe and amongst non-Europeans and Europeans between 1100 and 1800.

The discussion of emotions in a wide range of sources including letters, images, material culture, travel writing, and literary accounts makes Matters of Engagement an invaluable source for both scholars and students concerned with the history of premodern emotions.


Daniela Hacke is an internationally renowned cultural historian and Full Professor of Early Modern History at Freie Universität Berlin.

Claudia Jarzebowski , partner investigator at the Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions since its founding in 2011, researches and publishes on early modern global history and applies polycentric perspectives with a focus on agency, gender, and ethnic and religious/spiritual creolization. Her second book, Childhood and Emotion. Children in Early Modern Europe, was published (in German) in 2018.

Hannes Ziegler is Research Fellow in early modern history at the German Historical Institute London.

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