This volume spans the fourteenth to nineteenth centuries, across Europe and its empires, and brings together historians, art historians, literary scholars and anthropologists to rethink medieval and early modern ritual. The study of rituals, when it is alert to the emotions which are woven into and through ritual activities, presents an opportunity to explore profoundly important questions about people's relationships with others, their relationships with the divine, with power dynamics and importantly, with their concept of their own identity. Each chapter in this volume showcases the different approaches, theories and methodologies that can be used to explore emotions in historical rituals, but they all share the goal of answering the question of how emotions act within ritual to inform balances of power in its many and varied forms.

Autorentext
Merridee L. Bailey is a Senior Research Fellow in the ARC Centre for the History of Emotions, The University of Adelaide, Australia. She works on the history of England and Europe in the later medieval and early modern periods and is the author of Socialising the Child in Late Medieval England. 
Katie Barclay is a DECRA fellow in the ARC Centre for the History of Emotions, The University of Adelaide, Australia. She is the author of Love, Intimacy and Power, and numerous articles on family life and emotions. Her current research looks at intimacy amongst the Scottish poor.

Inhalt
Chapter 1: Emotion, Ritual and Power: From Family to Nation; Merridee L. Bailey and Katie Barclay.- Part One: Familial and Personal Rituals: Local and Community Networks.- Chapter 2: Gift-Giving and the Obligation to Love in Riquet à la houppe; Bronwyn Reddan.- Chapter 3: Intimacy, Community and Power: Bedding Rituals in Eighteenth-Century Scotland; Katie Barclay.- Chapter 4: Late-adolescent English Gentry Siblings and Leave-taking in the Early Eighteenth Century; Lisa Toland.- Part Two:  Civic and Nation Building: Power Created, Power Reinforced.- Chapter 5: Shipwrecks, Sorrow, Shame, and the Great Southland: The Use of Emotions in Seventeenth-Century Dutch East India Company Communicative Ritual; Susan Broomhall.- Chapter 6: Ritualized Public Performance, Emotional Narratives and the Enactment of Power: the Public Baptism of a Muslim in Eighteenth-Century Barcelona; François Soyer.- Chapter 7: Ritual Encounters of the 'Savage' and the Citizen: French-Revolutionary Ethnographers in Oceania, 1792-1803; Nicole Starbuck.- Chapter 8: Channelling Grief, Building the French Republic: The Death and Ritual Afterlife of Léon Gambetta, 1883-1920; Charles Sowerwine.- Part Three: Religious Rituals: Relationships with the Divine and the Political.- Chapter 9: Emotions and the Ritual of a Nun's Coronation in Late Medieval Germany; Julie Hotchin.- Chapter 10: Miraculous Affects and Analogical Materialities. Rethinking the Relation between Architecture and Affect in Baroque Italy; Helen Hills.- Chapter 11: Political Ritual and Religious Devotion in Early Modern English Convents; Claire Walker.- Chapter 12: Moravian Memoirs and the Emotional Salience of Conversion Rituals; Jacqueline Van Gent.- Chapter 13: The Transformation of Sabbath Rituals by Jean Crépy and Laurent Bordelon: Redirecting Emotion through Ridicule; Charles Zika.- Chapter 14: Afterword: Ritual, Emotion, and Power; Harvey Whitehouse & Pieter François.