Many Indigenous lowland South American peoples treat the thinking, feeling self as constituted by the process of relating to a panoply of others, including enemies. This need for alterity in the constitution of selves is arguably part of a loose but widespread and enduring pattern – an ‘Amazonian package’ – that also tends to feature claims to the effect that the collective fabrication of beautiful, competent, human bodies is a central purpose of human social life, in the context of a cosmos in which beings with similar bodies perceive each other as human and those with different bodies as non-human. I examine practices and speech genres in which people attribute an evaluative gaze to murdered enemies, sorcerers, would-be lovers, and fishhooks, among other figures of alterity, and I argue that such attributions reflect and reproduce motivating pictures of moral subjects. Over time and motivated by these pictures, people have gone about living their lives such that their evaluative deployments have more or less felicitously interpellated new generations. Morality has thus been central in the reproduction of the Amazonian package. The process, however, is not teleological.

When did the emotions become political? It would be natural to view a formal political analysis of emotions as a classical phenomenon that was reprised under new and more decisive terms in late humanism and reimagined in the eighteenth century. In such a history we would expect to encounter the work of Thomas Hobbes and Giambattista Vico. It would also be natural to take Hobbes and Vico at their word and read this recovery of the political dimension of emotion as a rejection of medieval philosophy. I will propose the opposite: the grounds for this political turn were laid in late medieval scholasticism. The precedent for humanist and Enlightenment-era political thought about emotion lies with a repudiated scholasticism and its reinvention of classical Greek thought. It is the history of rhetoric that reveals this turn to the political. The thread that links these transformations together is the political reception and re-absorption of Aristotle’s Rhetoric and the modern assimilation of the Rhetoric began in earnest with the most influential statecraft treatise of the Middle Ages, De regimine principum, written about 1277 by the scholastic theologian Giles of Rome.

This chapter explores how the concept of sympathy is explored and interrogated in three Elizabethan prose texts: John Lyly’s Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit (1578); Sidney’s The Old Arcadia (c. 1580); and Thomas Lodge’s Rosalynde (1590). Lyly’s Euphues represents an important transitional moment in the history of the concept, as it employs both the earlier Latin form sympathia and the newer English word sympathy to describe the ‘sympathy of manners’ between two male friends: Euphues and Philautus. It is argued that the pair share each other’s emotions because of a common set of circumstances, rather than sympathetic magic or humanist models of friendship. The chapter reads these three prose fictions in the context of other works that reproduce or complicate the notion of a ‘sympathy of affections’ between friends or lovers. Within this discourse we can see the term sympathy increasingly used to describe a correspondence of woe, or what the narrator of Anthony Munday’s translation of Palmerin (1588), in a suggestive modification of the trope, refers to as a ‘sympathy of afflictions’.

The Coda reflects upon the central arguments of the book as a whole, via an exploration of Edward Reynolds’s A treatise of the passions and faculties of the soule of man (1640). The elaborate metaphors used in Reynolds’s treatise have been used by some critics to suggest that, as Gail Kern Paster puts it, the passions ‘act within the body just as the forces of wind and waves act in the natural world’. By contrast, I consider Reynolds’s treatise in relation to his printed sermons, and argue that his conception of sympathy and the passions was spiritual, intellectual, and rhetorical. The fact that Reynolds draws upon variety of classical texts – including works by Homer, Virgil, Horace, and Seneca – as well as scientific and religious concepts, reminds us of the plurality and complexity of early modern emotional experience. This final case study thus demonstrates how my revised history of sympathy speaks to wider critical and methodological debates about early modern passions – and the history of emotions more generally.

The Introduction interrogates the current critical view of early modern sympathy as a physical or occult process. It proposes that literary critics and historians have neglected the coexistence of the emotional and physical senses of the word sympathy in the early modern period. Exploring a broader range of intellectual frameworks – including religious culture, literary theories of imitation, and humanist pedagogy – complicates the idea that sympathy was primarily an automatic or a humoral phenomenon. The Introduction also argues that translations of European vernacular texts, including Du Bartas’s The Historie of Judith (1584) and Montaigne’s Essais (1603), played a significant role in introducing the affective meaning of sympathy to English readers. This expanding emotional vocabulary – along with other material and social changes in the period – led to an increased theorization of pity and compassion, whereby individuals came to be regarded as a connected network of distinct selves rather than a homogenous social group. In this way, the emergence of sympathy as a term and concept prompted a reconsideration of the nature and boundaries of early modern selfhood.

The chapter finds that satisfaction with the investigation in Peru correlates with positive emotions and optimistic prognoses about the future. Different emotional reactions are further associated with voters’ varying propensities to tolerate corruption: positive emotions are linked to severity and negative ones to cynicism. A conjoint experiment shows that the taskforce indeed induces voters to impose greater penalties on politicians than other sources of corruption allegations. The chapter leverages another conjoint to document how voters respond to trade-offs at the heart of prosecutorial efforts, and thus better understand why such investigative choices eventually complicate citizens’ relationship with crusades. The conjoint reveals that Peruvians are reluctant to endorse leniency agreements at the heart of the investigative strategy. Together with additional descriptive survey statistics measuring reactions to other controversies triggered by Lava Jato, the experimental results underscore how hard it is for prosecutors to cement hope in anti-corruption.

This chapter theorises the impact of crusades on voters’ attitudes and emotions towards politics. Optimists expect a message of regeneration that instils hope. Pessimists think crusades tell an all too familiar story of decay, triggering anxiety, fear, anger, and disaffection. The actual outcome, however, is likely more conditional and variable as the crusade progresses. No one likes corruption, so citizens should in principle welcome crusades, but not everyone sees these efforts with the same eyes or draws the same conclusions. First, it matters whether citizens fixate on the crimes revealed during the process, and therefore experience a negative information shock, or also pay attention to the proposed judicial solution to corruption. Second, when voters pay attention to the investigative effort, how do they evaluate it? Fairness and effectiveness evaluations are shaped by voters’ partisan attachments to defendants. Unorthodox investigative tactics can also trigger fairness concerns among partisans and neutral observers. Hope can therefore quickly fade as the inquiry progresses and the consensus around the merits of anti-corruption suffers.

The chapter maps conversations around Lava Jato in Brazil and Peru using focus groups, especially whether voters associate Lava Jato with the problem of corruption or its solution. Peruvians focus mainly on the crimes, the “cockroaches.” Brazilians are divided, with some seeing “superheroes.” This leads Peruvians to voice negative emotions and cynicism. Attitudes in Brazil are more mixed. Analysis of newspapers as well as survey data suggest these differences could be due to contrasting media environments and baseline attitudes towards judicial institutions. The chapter then explores fairness and effectiveness evaluations. The debate is more intense in Brazil due to partisan polarisation. Supporters of the Workers’ Party feel victimised; their rivals passionately defend Lava Jato. This separates those who find reasons for hope from those who derive no satisfaction from the crusade. By contrast, in Peru participants do not see prosecutorial efforts through partisan lenses. They cannot, however, get past their cynicism, and remain deeply sceptical. A citizenry that is hopelessly cynical is prone to stick to its priors about the irredeemably crass nature of politics.

In some key areas of ethics and psychology, Seneca is at pains to distinguish his views from those of the Peripatetic followers of Aristotle. While he probably does not know Aristotle’s works at first hand, Seneca shows some knowledge of the doctrines that were favored by most Peripatetics, gleaned from secondhand discussions in such writers as Posidonius and from at least one summary account that was similar in style to Stobaean Doxography “C,” attributed to Arius Didymus. Passing references throughout his works show a consistent effort to differentiate his Stoic positions from Peripatetic views, especially on the value of externals and on the emotions. Recognition of this fact aids with the interpretation of Epistulae morales 92, which responds point for point to a list of Peripatetic doctrines. In particular, the first paragraph of that letter should be read as accommodating the Peripatetic tripartition of soul to Seneca’s Stoic commitments rather than the other way around.

Ego-documents offer a different perspective on the bilious rhetoric that fills the pamphlets and sermons which constitute the normative sources for enmity in this period. Interior self-examination is rare, but writers betrayed their sentiments when they commented on an event or recorded matters for a moral or satirical purpose. The different purposes in writing, the distance between self-reflection and social reality, the style of a text and how it changes over time are themselves as significant as the content in exploring the enmity through the lens of ego-documents. The subject is a vast one. It limits itself to considering personal reflections about public enemies; the varieties of emotions that writers negotiated when describing their enmities; the experience of civil conflict and fashion for stoicism in the seventeenth century; family breakdown; and, finally, through the lens of a particular manuscript diary, it shows how the emergence of new social identities around 1700 changed the perception of enmity.

In the early treatise On Anger, Seneca struggles to reconcile what he thinks is required of a therapeutic treatise with the view of emotions to which he is philosophically committed. In book 1 and the first part of book 2, he states the Stoic position with great clarity: that anger, like any emotion, consists essentially in a judgment by the rational mind; that the moment this voluntary judgment has been made, anger becomes unmanageable; that involuntary corporeal responses (pre-emotions) that occur prior to that assent are not themselves anger. Even the contested passage in De ira 2.4 can be read consistently with Stoic orthodoxy if one recognizes that the “third movement” described there is a further response that goes on beyond anger, namely the impulses of post-rational feritas as described in 2.5. Seneca’s recommendations for the management of anger in the remainder of the book mainly accord with this theoretical framework, in that they concentrate on the period before assent. At one point in book 3, however, he does offer a stratagem for managing anger in full swing, in tension with his own theoretical position.

The Introduction lays out the book. It introduces the concept of democratic discontent, explaining how it differs from milder forms of political displeasure and how it can manifest in different forms like populism, ethnonationalism, conspiracism, and antipathy to democratic regimes. It then briefly describes the conflict between economic and cultural approaches to discontent, showing that both make valid findings, yet neither hypothesis is totally consistent with existing research. To overcome this impasse, the chapter introduces the affective political economy theory of economics, emotions, and culture, where emotions induced by economic troubles prime large groups of citizens to embrace culturally discontented narratives; cultural discontent then produces various forms of discontent, based on local conditions. Finally, it lays out the book’s empirical approach, discussing the use of mixed methods to test the theory, including experiments, observational surveys, and qualitative analysis and comparison of cases; this section also justifies the case selections. This section advises different kinds of readers about which sections they might find most interesting and which might be less relevant, especially regarding statistically dense sections of the book.

In Chapter 4, we consider both women’s and men’s accounts of the birth of their first child. In our focus on birthing experiences, we consider both women’s and men’s experiences separately and explore similarities within couples. For women, we reflect on orientations to ideas of ‘natural’ birth, and for men we focus on accounts of emotional responses to the birth of a child, and their experiences of cutting the umbilical cord (or not). For both women and men, we focus on issues with receiving support while in hospital, experiences of traumatic birth, and men’s involvement in the birth of their child. Overall, this chapter highlights similarities between women and men within some of the couples, as well as marked differences for some couples. The chapter explores how in some instances birthing is naturalised, while in other instances it is seen as highly mediated.

This chapter describes and justifies the book’s theoretical framework, which proposes that economics influences democratic discontent by fomenting cultural discontent, with emotions connecting economics and culture. After briefly discussing the economic consequences of the Great Recession and the collapse of the commodities boom, it explains the affective intelligence theory (AIT) of emotions. AIT conceptualizes emotions as continuously operating surveillance systems, producing specific motivational and cognitive patterns that are not tied to the situation that aroused them. Given this, the chapter proposes that economic turmoil generates resentment and anxiety, which primes large groups of citizens to become aggressive, hostile toward outgroups, and hyperattentive to threatening information. Individuals so influenced gravitate toward social narratives that emphasize group conflict and prejudice against opposing social groups, thus fomenting cultural discontent. This, in turn, produces democratic discontent. The chapter concludes by discussing various contextual factors that may inhibit or intensify this theoretical process or prevent discontent from manifesting in certain ways.

Emotions are some of the most discussed aspects of the experience of art, and it has even been argued that emotions are synonymous with art. This chapter will delve into how art simultaneously conveys and evokes emotions, a feature that helps to distinguish the experience of art from experiences in other areas of life. The chapter will also discuss the developments in research methodologies and trends in the scientific study of art that have brought our understanding of art from being based mainly on anecdotal evidence to being empirically-founded. The longstanding issues associated with emotions and art, as well as present state-of-the-art research on the role of emotions in aesthetic experiences, will also be presented. Finally, the chapter will identify some of the questions and challenges for future research in emotions and art.