The description of mourning in Anna Stanisławska’s autobiography: The context of early modern theory of emotion

Abstract

Summary Anna Zbąska née Stanisławska, a lady of the Polish high aristocracy, wrote the story of her life in 1685 after the loss of her father, a divorce from her first and the deaths of her second and third husband, all of which she experienced in the course of approximately 16 years. She told her life as a narrative in lamentations, in a series of 77 dirges (treny) in which she mourned her beloved ones as well as her own – childless, fruitless – life. Though it has been frequently noted in recent research that the text is dominated by the expression of mourning, this central aspect has not been made a subject of a study in its own right. This article aims to examine the description of mourning by Stanisławska and her way of handling her afflictions by discussing them in the context of conceptualizations of emotions in the seventeenth century.