ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the evolution of the cultural meanings of happiness in Western Europe from 1100 to 1700. In a difference from the studies on the history of happiness, the general framework for this research will be Cognitive Linguistics. The chapter proposes an analysis of some of the different ways happiness was conceptualized throughout this period by speakers of different historical varieties of the English language. In contemporary literature, happiness is described as a universal emotion valued more or less equally across different cultures. Cognitive linguistics has stressed the importance of conceptual metaphor and metonymy as the two main types of cognitive models through which people comprehend abstract concepts. Differences in the ways in which emotions are construed by people from different cultures are grounded in historical processes of ideological change and, especially, in religious ideas, which play a prominent role in the historical process of development of variation patterns in emotional experience.
