Early Puritanism and the Vocabulary of Affections

• In Event: Languages of Dissent I: "Inner Voices"

Abstract

Thirty years ago, Charles Lloyd Cohen (God’s Caress: The Psychology of Puritan Religious Experience, New York: Oxford University Press 1986) anticipated much scholarly attention to the affective life of the past by experimenting what an affective turn on the study of the English Reformation may look like. In the wake of the boom in the history of emotions, Susan Karant-Nunn (The Reformation of Feeling. Shaping the Religious Emotions in Early Modern Germany, Oxford: OUP 2010) has offered a detailed analysis of the German case throughout the confessional spectrum. Taking these ground-breaking works as a point of departure, the paper intends to return to a sample of English texts by further questioning their affective vocabulary, with an aim to assessing in what relationship it was with a variety of contemporary scholarly discourses on passions and how it related to the experience and developments in their wider social context.

Author

• Alessandro Arcangeli, Università degli Studi di Verona