Recent scholarship has begun to view human-made cultural products, such as literature and works of art, not only as reflective of contemporary ideas, norms and social or theological conceptions, but as active agents in shaping these notions. This collection investigates how various forms of cultural expression, including romances, philosophical treatises, chronicles, murals, decorative objects and illustrations, contributed to the construction of cognitive, emotional and sensual human experiences in the medieval and early modern periods.

Delving into multiple case studies of literary texts and works of art created around the globe for different communities and individuals, the chapters unravel the influence of cultural products on learning emotional norms in each setting, and explores the role of emotional rhetoric in the educational process of those individuals and communities. Not only do these cultural artifacts offer insights into the significance of particular emotions, or reveal the underlying systems of feeling prevalent in the community, they demonstrate how the texts and images themselves reinforced, challenged and reshaped what that society perceived to be valuable or detrimental.

Bringing reception studies and the history of emotions together, this collection makes an important contribution to the history of emotions in premodern contexts, and in relation to literary studies, material culture and art history.