The Emotional Body in Religious Belief and Practice

Abstract

The stimulus for a renewed interest in the history of emotions and the senses in the twentieth century can be traced back to the ‘Annales School’ of social history, founded by Lucien Febvre and Marc Bloch. Many humanities scholars reject the insistence of science and psychology on a set of universal innate emotions, and argue instead for their cultural and historical specificity. Science’s taut binary of biology and emotion fails to satisfactorily explain the chronological and cultural distribution of certain emotions more broadly, such as sympathy and sociability in the eighteenth century, or the instrumentalization of feelings in political and national agendas. Medieval sensory systems were understood as open perceptual frameworks, as distinct from post-Enlightenment closed ones, allowing materials, images and sounds to be transmitted and received. Studies of religion and material culture have revealed the fluid alignment of sensory and emotional engagement in relation to material objects.