Undergraduate Course: Emotion, Spirituality and Mysticism in Early Modern Christianity (DIVI10005)
Course Outline
| School | School of Divinity |
College | College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences |
| Credit level (Normal year taken) | SCQF Level 10 (Year 3 Undergraduate) |
Availability | Available to all students |
| SCQF Credits | 20 |
ECTS Credits | 10 |
| Summary | This course examines the attitudes towards and experiences of emotion in early modern Christianity. It engages with the philosophical, theological, liturgical, social, physiological, cultural, and political factors which shaped Protestant and Catholic spirituality and mysticism in the 16th and 17th Centuries within a diversity of geographical contexts. Through its engagement with a variety of primary and secondary sources, the course looks at the ways in which religion was experienced by and cultivated the emotional lives of ordinary and marginalised people. It also explores the continuities, ambiguities, and discrepancies within and between early modern Christian emotional cultures. |
| Course description |
Academic Description:
This course enables students to examine and evaluate early modern Christian attitudes towards and experiences of emotion. The course looks at the ways in which religion was experienced by and cultivated the emotional lives of ordinary and marginalised people. This is achieved through the reading and examination of primary and secondary sources from a range of different national, confessional, and gender identities. Students will be encouraged to consider these sources in relation to early modern philosophical, theological, liturgical, social, physiological, cultural, and political factors which shaped Protestant and Catholic spirituality and mysticism in the 16th and 17th Centuries. Students will also be urged to situate these perspectives into the broader history of European Reformations and the continuities, ambiguities, and discrepancies within and between early modern Christian emotional cultures.
Syllabus/Outline Content:
The course is structured thematically and chronologically. It begins with an introduction to the methodologies and issues in the disciplinary study of emotions in history. This is followed by an exploration of early modern understandings (philosophical/physiological) of the nature of the emotions. The course then moves to the emotional cultures of Lutheran Germany, Roman Catholicism in the Mediterranean, and Scottish Reformed Protestantism. Each of these investigations is simultaneously used to explore a particular concept crucial to early modern Christian emotionality more broadly: conversion, sanctification, and sincerity (or self-examination). The course then probes more closely emotional states intrinsic to early modern Christian spirituality: doubt and despair, assurance, mystical experiences. These discussions are also used to engage with broader themes such as mental illness, theological doctrine's perceived and real impact upon the emotions, and gender. The course then explores marginalised emotional cultures in early modern England and in the non-Western world, examining the unique experiential and political challenges these contexts presented early modern Christians. The final week revisits the themes of the course and provides an opportunity for students to discuss important topics from across the syllabus and receive feedback on their final essay plans.
Student Learning Experience Information:
Every week students will participate in two primary activities. The first will be a lecture on the theme of the week, with an opportunity to ask questions. The second will consist in class discussion of the set readings. Students will be allocated a week in which they present a summary of the primary text and its major themes for 5-10 minutes, before facilitating the last half hour of class discussion with support from the lecturer. Students will be graded for their presentations and leadership of class discussion on assigned weeks, and formative feedback will be provided. Students will complete two further summative assessments: a coursework essay at the midpoint of the semester, and a final essay at the end of the semester. Students will be offered an opportunity for formative feedback on their final essay plans.
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Entry Requirements (not applicable to Visiting Students)
| Pre-requisites |
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Co-requisites | |
| Prohibited Combinations | |
Other requirements | None |
Information for Visiting Students
| Pre-requisites | Visiting students interested in early modern religious history or the history of emotions would benefit from this course. |
| High Demand Course? |
Yes |
Course Delivery Information
| Not being delivered |
Learning Outcomes
On completion of this course, the student will be able to:
- Interpret and critically engage with primary and secondary texts.
- Explain key themes in early modern Christian emotional cultures.
- Identify the continuities and discontinuities between the emotional cultures of different confessional Christian traditions.
- Use a variety of methodological approaches used in the disciplinary study of emotions in history and appreciate the strengths and limitations of these historiographical instruments.
- Analyse intellectual, social, political, and religious factors in early modern Christian cultures.
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Reading List
Indicative Bibliography:
The History of Emotions:
Susan Broomhall (ed.), Early Modern Emotions: An Introduction (New York: Routledge, 2017).
Ian Burkitt, 'Emotional Reflexivity: Feeling, Emotion and Imagination in Reflexive Dialogues', Sociology 46, 3 (2012), 458-472.
Brian Cummings and Freya Sierhuis (eds.), Passions and Subjectivity in Early Modern Culture (Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2013).
Mary Holmes, 'Researching Emotional Reflexivity', Emotion Review 7, 1 (2015), 61-66.
Gail Kern Paster, Katherine Rowe, and Mary Floyd-Wilson (eds.), Reading the Early Modern Passions: Essays in the Cultural History of Emotion (Philadelphia: University of Philadelphia Press, 2004).
Jan Plamper, The History of Emotions: An Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015).
William Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling: A Framework for the History of Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).
Morris Rosenburg, 'Reflexivity and Emotions' in Social Psychology Quarterly 53, 1 (1990), 3-12.
Barbara Rosenwein, Generations of Feeling: A History of Emotions, 600-1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016).
Barbara Rosenwein, 'Worrying about Emotions in History¿, American Historical Review 107, 3 (2002), 821-45.
Barbara Rosenwein, 'Problems and Methods in the History of Emotions', Passions in Context 1, 1 (2010), 1-32.
Monique Scheer, 'Are Emotions a Kind of Practice (and is that what makes them have a history)? A Bourdieuian Approach to Understanding Emotion', History and Theory 51, 2 (2012), 193-220.
Peter N. Stearns and Carol Z. Stearns, 'Emotionology: Clarifying the History of Emotions and Emotional Standards', The American Historical Review 90, 4 (1985), 813-836.
The Nature of Emotion:
Noga Arikha, Passions and Tempers: A History of the Humours (New York: Harper Perennial, 2008).
Eric D'arcy, 'Introduction' in Summa theologiae. Volume 19, The emotions (1a2ae. 22-30), ed. Eric D'arcy (London: Blackfriars in conjunction with Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1967).
Ian Drummond, 'John Duns Scotus on the Passions of the Will' in Emotion and Cognitive Life in Medieval and Early Modern Philosophy, eds. Martin Pickavé and Lisa Shapiro (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).
John Dryden, 'Passions, Affections, and Emotions: Methodological Difficulties in Reconstructing Aquinas's Philosophical Psychology', Literature Compass 13, 6 (2016), 343-50.
Susan James, Passion and Action: the Emotions in Seventeenth-Century Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997).
Peter King, 'Emotions in Medieval Thought' in The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Emotion, ed. Peter Goldie (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 167-188.
Simo Knuuttila, Emotions in Ancient and Medieval Philosophy (Oxford: Clarendon, 2004).
Nicholas Lombardo, Logic of Desire: Aquinas on Emotion (Washington D. C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2011.
Richard Sorabji, Emotion and Peace of Mind: from Stoic Agitation to Christian Temptation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).
David Sytsma, 'The Logic of the Heart: Analyzing the Affections in Early Reformed Orthodoxy' in Church and School in Early Modern Protestantism: Studies in Honor of Richard A. Muller on the Maturation of a Theological Tradition, eds. Jordan J. Ballor, David S. Sytsma, and Jason Zuidema (Leiden: Brill, 2013).
Conversion in Lutheran Germany:
Carols Eire, Reformation: The Early Modern World, 1450-1650 (Yale: Yale University Press, 2016).
D. Bruce Hindmarsh, Evangelical Conversion Narrative (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005).
Susan Karant-Nunn, The Reformation of Feeling: Shaping the Religious Emotions in Early Modern Germany (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010).
Pekka Kärkkäinen, 'Emotions and Experience in Martin Luther' in Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Religion (Oxford University Press, 2016).
Laura Kounine, Imagining the Witch: Emotions, Gender, and Selfhood in Early Modern Germany (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018).
Kathleen Lynch, Protestant Autobiography in the Seventeenth-Century Anglophone World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).
Alister McGrath, Luther's Theology of the Cross: Martin Luther's Theological Breakthrough, 2nd ed. (Malden: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011).
Rebecca Oettinger, Music as Propaganda in the German Reformation (Abingdon: Routledge, 2016).
Andrew Pettegree, Reformation and the Culture of Persuasion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).
Robert Scribner, The German Reformation (London: Macmillan, 1986).
Robert Scribner and Lyndal Roper, Religion and Culture in Germany, 1400-1800 (Leiden: Brill, 2001).
Sanctification in Mediterranean Catholicism:
Jodi Bilinkoff, The Avila of Saint Teresa: Religious Reform in a Sixteenth-Century City (London: Cornell University Press, 1989).
John Bossy, Christianity in the West, 1400-1700 (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1985).
Michael Buckely, 'Ecclesial Mysticism in the Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius', Theological Studies 56 (1995), 452-463.
Adrien Demoustier, 'Ignatian Contemplation and the Contemplative Way', The Way Supplement 103 (2002 ), 16-24.
Carols Eire, Reformation: The Early Modern World, 1450-1650 (Yale: Yale University Press, 2016).
Philip Endean, 'The Concept of Ignatian Mysticism', The Way Supplement 103 (2002), 77-86.
Marcia Hall and Tracy Cooper (eds.), The Sensuous in the Counter-Reformation Church (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013).
Edward Howells, 'Spanish Mysticism and Religious Renewal: Ignatius of Loyola, Teresa of Avila, and John of the Cross' in The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Christian Mysticism, ed. Julia Lamm (New York: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013), 422-436.
Edward Howells, John of the Cross and Teresa of Avila: Mystical Knowing and Selfhood (New York: Crossroad, 2002).
R. Po-chia Hsia, The World of Catholic Renewal, 1540-1770 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
Franz Jalics, 'The Contemplative Phase of the Ignatian Exercises', The Way Supplement 103 (2002), 25-42.
Steven F. Ostrow, Art and Spirituality in Counter-Reformation Rome: The Sistine and Pauline Chapels in S. Maria Maggiore (Cambridge University Press, 1996).
Rowan Williams, Teresa of Avila (London: Geoffrey Chapman, 1991).
Sincerity in Reformed Scotland:
John Coffey, Politics, Religion and the British Revolutions: The Mind of Samuel Rutherford (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).
Jane Dawson, 'Discipline and the Making of Protestant Scotland' in Worship and Liturgy in Context: Studies and Case Studies in Theology and Practice, eds. Duncan Forrester and Doug Gay (London: SCM Press, 2009).
Mark Elliott, 'Spiritual Theology in Bruce, Howie, Johnston, Boyd, and Leighton' in The History of Scottish Theology, Volume I: Celtic Origins to Reformed Orthodoxy, eds. David Fergusson and Mark Elliott (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019).
Michael Graham, The Uses of Reform: 'Godly Discipline' and Popular Behaviour in Scotland and Beyond, 1560-1610 (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1996).
Crawford Gribben, The Irish Puritans: James Ussher and the Reformation of the Church (Darlington, England: Evangelical Press, 2003).
Crawford, Gribben, 'Preaching the Scottish Reformation, 1560-1707', in The Oxford Handbook of the Early Modern Sermon, eds. Hugh Adlington, Peter McCullough, and Emma Rhatigan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).
Stephen Holmes, Sacred Signs in Reformation Scotland: Interpreting Worship, 1488-1590 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015).
Nikki Marie, 'Reconciling Performance: the Drama of Discipline in Early Modern Scotland, 1560-1610' (PhD Thesis, Edinburgh, 2013).
David Mullan, Narratives of the Religious Self in Early-Modern Scotland (Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2010).
David Mullan, Scottish Puritanism, 1590-1638 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).
Alec Ryrie, Being Protestant in Reformation Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).
Leigh Eric Schmidt, Holy Fairs: Scottish Communions and American Revivals in the Early Modern Period (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989).
Margo Todd, The Culture of Protestantism in Early Modern Scotland (London: Yale University Press, 2002).
Marilyn J. Westerkamp, Triumph of the Laity: Scots-Irish Piety and the Great Awakening, 1625-1760 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988
Louise Yeoman, 'Heart-Work: Emotion, Empowerment and Authority in Covenanting Times', (PhD Thesis, St Andrews, 1991).
Melancholy, Doubt, and the Demonic:
Michelle Brock, 'Internalizing the Demonic: Satan and the Self in Early Modern Scottish Piety', Journal of British Studies 54 (2015), 23-43.
Michelle Brock, Satan and the Scots: The Devil in Post-Reformation Scotland, c.1560-1700 (Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2016).
Michelle D. Brock, Richard Raiswell, and David R. Winter (eds.), Knowing Demons, Knowing Spirits in the Early Modern Period (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018).
Julian Goodare, Lauren Martin, and Joyce Miller (eds.), Witchcraft and Belief in Early Modern Scotland, (Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008).
Nathan Johnstone, The Devil and Demonism in Early Modern England (Cambridge, 2006).
Nathan Johnstone, 'The Protestant Devil: The Experience of Temptation in Early Modern England' in Journal of British Studies 43, 2 (2004), 173-205.
Frank Luttmer, 'Prosecutors, Tempters and Vassals of the Devil: The Unregenerate in Puritan Practical Divinity', Journal of Ecclesiastical History 51, 1 (2000), 37-68.
Charlotte-Rose Millar, Witchcraft, the Devil, and Emotions in Early Modern England (London: Routledge, 2017).
Darren Oldridge, The Devil in Early Modern England (Sutton, 2000).
Darren Oldridge, The Devil in Tudor and Stuart England (Stroud, 2010).
John Stachniewski and Anita Pacheco, 'Introduction' in Grace Abounding with Other Spiritual Autobiographies, ed. John Stachniewski and Anita Pacheco (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998).
Erin Sullivan, Beyond Melancholy: sadness and selfhood in Renaissance England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016).
Assurance and the Antinomian Controversy:
Theodore Dwight Bozeman, The Precisianist Strain: Disciplinary Religion and Antinomian Backlash to Puritanism to 1638 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004).
Jerald Brauer, 'Types of Puritan Piety', Church History: Studies in Christianity and Culture, 56, 1 (1987), 39-58.
Charles Cohen, God's Caress: The Psychology of Puritan Religious Experience (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986).
David Como, Blown by the Spirit: Puritanism and the Emergence of an Antinomian Underground in pre-Civil-War England (Stanford California: Stanford University Press, 2004).
Leif Dixon, Practical Predestinarians in England, c. 1590-1640 (London: Routledge, 2016).
Charles Hambrick-Stowe, The Practice of Piety: Puritan Devotional Disciplines in Seventeenth-Century New England (Chapel Hill, North Carolina: The University of North Carolina Press, 1982).
Janice Knight, Orthodoxies in Massachusetts: Rereading American Puritanism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994).
Peter Lake, Moderate Puritans and the Elizabethan church (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982).
Perry Miller, The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1954).
Alasdair Raffe, The Culture of Controversy: Religious arguments in Scotland, 1660-1714 (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2012).
John von Rohr, The Covenant of Grace in Puritan Thought (Atlanta, Georgia: Scholars Press, 1986).
Alec Ryrie and Tom Schwanda (eds.), Puritanism and Emotion in the Early Modern World, (Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016).
Tom Schwanda, Soul Recreation: the Contemplative-Mystical Piety of Puritanism (Eugene, Origen: Pickwick Publications, 2012).
Owen Watkins, The Puritan Experience (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1972).
Mystical Ecstasy: A Gendered and Sexualised Experience:
Todd Billings, Calvin, Participation, and the Gift: the Activity of Believers in Union with Christ (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).
Kathleen Crowther, 'Sexual Difference' in The Oxford Handbook of the Protestant Reformations, ed. Ulinka Rublack (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017).
Carlos Eire, 'Ecstasy as Polemic: Mysticism and the Catholic Reformation', Irish Theological Quarterly 83, 1 (2017), 3-23.
Susan Hardman Moore, 'Sexing the Soul: Gender and the Rhetoric of Puritan Piety', Studies in Church History 34 (1998), 175-186.
Elizabeth Harvey, 'Anatomies of Rapture: Clitoral Politics/Medical Blazons' in Signs 27, 2 (2002), 315-346.
Ann Hughes, Ann, 'Puritanism and Gender' in The Cambridge Companion to Puritanism, eds. John Coffey and Paul C. H. Lim (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).
Julia Lamm (ed.), The Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Christian Mysticism (New York: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012).
Thomas Laqueur, 'Orgasm, Generation, and the Politics of Reproductive Biology' in Representations 14, 1 (1986), 1-41.
Margaret Masson, 'Typology of the Female as a Model for the Regenerate: Puritan Preaching, 1690-1730', Signs 2, 2 (1976), 304-315
Bernard McGinn, Mysticism in the Reformation, 1500-1650 (New York: Crossroad, 2017).
Bernard McGinn, Mysticism in the Golden Age of Spain, 1500-1650 (New York: Crossroad, 2017).
Bernard McGinn, The Persistence of Mysticism in Catholic Europe: France, Italy, and Germany 1500-1675 (New York: Crossroad, 2020).
Elizabeth Reis, 'The Devil, the Body, and the Feminine Soul in Puritan New England', The Journal of American History 82, 1 (1995), 15-36.
Guy Richard, 'Clavis Cantici: A 'Key' to the Reformation in early modern Scotland?' in Reformed Orthodoxy in Scotland: Essays on Scottish Theology, 1560-1775 (London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2015).
Ronald Rittgers and Vincent Evener (eds.), Protestants and Mysticism in Reformation Europe (Brill, 2019).
Radical and Prophetic Religious Movements in England:
Teresa Feroli, Political Speaking Justified: Women Prophets and the English Revolution (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2006).
Hilary Hinds, George Fox and Early Quaker Culture (Manchester University Press, 2011).
Rachel Knight, The Founder of Quakerism: A Psychological Study of the Mysticism of George Fox (London: Swarthmore Press, 1922).
Phyllis Mack, 'Women as Prophets during the English Civil War', Feminist Studies 8, 1 (1982), 18-45.
J. F. McGregor and Barry Reay (eds.), Radical Religion in the English Revolution (London: Oxford University Press, 1984).
John Morrill, 'The Religious Context of the English Civil War', Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 34 (1984), 155-178.
Geoffrey Nuttall, The Holy Spirit in Puritan Faith and Experience (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1992).
Debra Parish, 'Anna Trapnel: Prophet or Witch?' in Women on the Edge in Early Modern Europe, eds. Aidan Norrie and Lisa Hopkins (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2019), 113-136.
Barry Reay (ed.), Popular Culture in Seventeenth-Century England (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1985).
Barry Reay, The Quakers and the English Revolution (London: Temple Smith, 1985).
Liam Temple, Mysticism in Early Modern England (Boydell, 2020).
David Underdown, Revel, Riot and Rebellion: Popular Politics and Culture in England (London: Clarendon Press, 1985).
Conversion in Catholic and Protestant Missions:
Liam Brockey, Journey to the East: The Jesuit Mission to China, 1579-1724 (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2008).
Ananya Chakravarti, 'The many faces of Baltasar da Costa: imitatio and accommodatio in the seventeenth century Madurai mission', Etnográfica 18, 1 (2014), 135-158.
Ananya Chakravarti, 'Between Bhakti and Pietà: Untangling Emotion in Mar''h' Christian Poetry', History of Religions 56, 4 (2017), 365-387.
Ananya Charkravarti, The Empire of the Apostles: Jesuits in Brazil and India, 16th-17th C (PhD Thesis, Chicago, 2012).
Lawrence Clayton, Bartolomé de las Casas and the Conquest of the Americas (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011).
Lawrence Clayton, Bartolomé de las Casas: A Biography (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012).
James Fujitani, 'Penance in the Jesuit Mission to Japan, 1549-1562', The Journal of the Ecclesiastical History Society 67, 2 (2016), 306-324.
Alexander Henn, Hindu-Catholic Encounters in Goa Religion, Colonialism, and Modernity (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014).
R. Po-chia Hsia, A Jesuit in the Forbidden City: Matteo Ricci 1552-1610 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).
R. Po-chia Hsia, Matteo Ricci and the Catholic Mission to China, 1583-1610: A Short History with Documents (Cambridge, MA: Hackett Publishing Company, 2016).
Girolamo Imbruglia, The Jesuit Missions of Paraguay and a Cultural History of Utopia, 1568-1789 (Boston: Brill, 2017).
Obed Omar Lira, 'Bartolomé de las Casas and the Passions of Language' (PhD Thesis, Harvard, 2017).
Andreeu Martinez d'Alos-Moner, Envoys of a Human God: the Jesuit Mission to Christian Ethiopia (Leiden: Brill, 2015).
David Thomas Orique and Rady Roldán-Figueroa (eds.), Bartolomé de las Casas, O.P. (Boston: Brill, 2018). |
Additional Information
| Graduate Attributes and Skills |
- Critical thinking and reflection (developed through lectures, tutorials and coursework essays)
- Historical analysis and comparative evaluation (developed through tutorials, presentations, and coursework essays)
- Oral communication skills (developed through tutorials and presentations)
- Working within a team (developed through small group work in tutorials) |
| Keywords | History of Emotion,Spirituality,Mysticism,Lutheran,Roman Catholic,Reformed Protestant |
Contacts
| Course organiser | Mr Nathan Hood
Tel:
Email: |
Course secretary | |
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