Bowels, emotion, and metaphor in early modern English sermons

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article argues that a rhetorical approach to the history of the emotions helps balance the emphasis on humours that characterises recent scholarship in what has been called the “new humoralism.” By examining sermons by a range of figures, including John Donne, but with a focus on Richard Sibbes’s 1639 volume Bowels Opened, the article reveals the extent to which emotions could be understood in the early seventeenth century as God-given, rather than stemming from bodily humours. In this religious context, emotions are less about the body than they are about the spirit – a point that shows how sermon studies can contribute to a more accurate understanding of how emotions were thought to work in the early seventeenth century. In particular, Bowels Opened helps us see how early seventeenth-century sermons express emotions through metaphor, and how these sermons represent emotions as the metonymic effects of God’s movements within the soul.