Introduction

In this chapter the authors return to the European scene and issues of emotional repertoires treated in three studies ranging from the High Middle Ages to the early nineteenth century. Repertoires represented by emotion words and rhetorical and performative expressions of emotions are important tools for the historical analysis of emotions, particularly in periods when few attempts were made to systematize theories of emotions. The author shows how this emotionology was carefully staged in ritualized practices described in guidebooks and autobiographies, while at the same time being derided by its critics as 'the disease of Enthusiasme'. Anne Vila, American professor of French literature, studies the passions and pathologies attributed to French gens de lettres. Art and music is the theme, starting with American art historian Pamela W. Whedon's analysis of musical images in the paintings of the French artist Antoine Watteau. The issue of gender appears with its focus on bodies, sexuality and historical theories of emotions.