Dafna Nissim – författare

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.

This collection of essays focuses on the way blurred boundaries are represented in pre-modern texts and visual art and how they were received and perceived by their audiences: readers, listeners, and viewers. According to the current understanding that opposing cognitive categories that are so common in modern thinking do not apply to pre-modern mentalities, we argue that individuals in medieval and pre-modern societies did not necessarily consider sacred and secular, male and female, real and fictional, and opposing emotions as absolute dichotomies.The contributors to the present collection examine a wide range of cultural artifacts – literary texts, wall paintings, sculptures, jewelry, manuscript illustrations, and various objects as to what they reflect regarding the dominant perceptual system – the network of beliefs, worldviews, presumptions, values, and norms of viewing/reading/hearing different from modern epistemology strongly predicated on the binary nature of things and people. The essays suggest that analyzing pre-modern cultural works of art or literature in light of reception theory can lead to a better understanding of how those cultural products influenced individuals and impacted their thoughts and actions.