ABSTRACT

The recent overview by Michael Champion, Raphaële Garrod, Yasmin Haskell, and Juanita Feros Ruys of the Latin terms affectus and affectio from Antiquity to the neo-Latin writings of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries reaches the conclusion that even though the concepts denoted by these two terms were not always related to our ‘modern understanding of emotions,’ they often referred to ‘individual states akin to emotions or to emotional capacities.’ 1 The main achievement of this very useful diachronic overview is that it lays the foundations for future research in mapping terms and concepts of emotion from the premodern period. One of the next challenges arising from this overview is to conduct synchronic research on what happened to the nouns affectus and affectio when they were translated into vernacular languages. This might throw further light on how emotion has been conceptualized in the past, in both religious and secular contexts.