ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that the method outlined by Terence Cave, in Pre-histoires I and Pre-histoires II, opens up fresh possibilities regarding a question: how can one write history in a way that tkes into account emotions? The passions and psychological factors for which Cave finds textual evidence in representations of Pyrrhonism by Gianfrancesco Pico della Mirandola, Rabelais, and Henri Estienne variously include anxiety, impatience, more anger, and even a kind of mental fever which Estienne describes as curing his bodily one homeopathically. The very phrase 'the history of the emotions' implies the use of a modern category — emotion — to study, say, pre-modern experience, for which it is inevitably a distorting lens. Emotions, on the other hand, while they are an important part of experience, and are even acts of thought, are evanescent, existent only in their immediate context, and as such cannot be re-enacted later.
