Emotions, identity and propaganda

Abstract

This chapter analyzes the concurrence of emotional discourse as it relates to the forming of group identities in confessional and in anti-Ottoman propaganda. It focuses on the 1580s and 1590s, when a marked increase in confessional pamphlets coincided with a wave of anti-Ottoman writings in the wake of the outbreak of hostilities on the Ottoman border in 1593. The long series of conflicts between the Ottoman Empire and the christianitas that were triggered by the fall of Constantinople in 1453 and that culminated in events such as the Long Turkish War and the Great Turkish War at the end of the seventeenth century had a heavy impact on the political culture of European reigns. “The negative influence”, Thomas Kaufmann has prominently argued, “of the Ottomans on the cultural identity of late medieval and early modern Europe can hardly be overestimated”. Furthermore, emotions and emotional language played an essential, yet still underestimated, role in both settings.