Love and other emotions

Abstract

This chapter argues that love played a role within early-modern Europe, fundamentally shaping how people interacted with each other and did so in gendered ways. For some early-modern writers, romantic, spiritual and communal love was experienced as similar strong sensations or desires, differing only in the object at which love was directed. The chapter argues that neighbourly love may have been especially important for women, who used it to exercise agency and even power within their families and communities. As a masculine emotion, women’s exercise of love, like their position in society more broadly, was framed by gendered expectations around appropriate loving behaviour. The exercise of Christian love was a significant sociable activity that brought rich and poor together as a community, as neighbours, and it was an act that produced not only love, but pleasure, gratitude, social order and harmony.