Powerful feelings : emotional practices of the Tudor court in early modern literary culture

Uniting literary analysis, theories of affect from the sciences and humanities, and an archival-based account of Tudor history, this project examines how literature reflects and constructs the emotional dynamics of life in the Renaissance courtly sphere—with hopes of showing why emotionality, as a primary mode through which historical subjects embody and engage their world, should be adopted as a fundamental lens of social and textual analysis. Spanning the 16th Century, chapters on John Skelton and Henrician satire, Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, Sir Philip Sidney and Elizabethan pageantry, and the Essex circle demonstrate how the dynamics of disgust, envy, frustration, and dread guide literary production in the early modern court. By aligning Renaissance discourses of emotion with current trends in empirical and theoretical research, the study provides a new context for an "affective" analysis of literature.