Books in the Emotions of the Past series

What are emotions? How do they relate to other mental states? And what is their specific structure? This book discusses these questions, focusing on medieval and early modern theories. It pays particular attention to the question of how we can change our emotions and thereby improve our mental life.

Envy and Jealousy in Classical Athens examines the sensation, expression, and literary representation of envy and jealousy in Classical Athens.

For all the interest in emotions in antiquity, there has been little study of positive emotions. This collection aims to redress the balance with eleven studies of emotions like hope, joy, good will, and mercy that show some of the complexity these emotions play in ancient literature and thought.

This book traces the genealogy of early Chinese conceptions of emotions, as part of a broader inquiry into evolving conceptions of self, cosmos and the political order. It seeks to explain what was at stake in early philosophical debates over emotions and why the mainstream conception of emotions became authoritative.

The Elegiac Passion is a study of the central role of jealousy in Roman love elegy, both the detailed ways in which it is represented and the ramifications of these features for the nature of the genre itself.

Disgust is an essential human emotion that has remained mostly neglected, even in modern, "emotional turn" scholarship.

This book explores the uniquely Roman articulation of pride as a negative emotion and traces its partial rehabilitation that begins in the texts of the Augustan poets at the time of great political change using a combination of a lexical approach and a script-based approach that considers the emotion as a process.