The history of emotions appears to include two prominent methodological approaches (at the very least): one explores the ways in which people in the past theorized, talked about, and understood emotions intellectually or scientifically (a historical or intellectual historical approach); the other attempts to reveal traces of the emotional lives of past people by examining and interpreting the many and varied artifacts of their cultures and their actions (a literary/cultural historical approach). The broad aim of this paper is to suggest a context in which the evidence derived from the literary/cultural historical approach could be organized to produce productive models for understanding and talking about the emotional life of a society. A narrower aim is to demonstrate how the idea of love – as an idea unrelated to past love theory – in the specific example of early modern Ottoman culture and society can be seen to describe (and, in a sense, to constitute) one, possibly central feature of an Ottoman emotional ecology.

As used in the ‘life sciences’ the term ‘ecology’ encapsulates the notion that beneath the vast complexity, multiplicity and variability of interactions in the natural world there are stable systems and processes that are interdependent, persistent, discernable and usefully describable in the form of data-based scientific hypotheses.