Brian Cummings is Anniversary Professor of English at the University of York, UK. Freya Sierhuis is Anniversary Research Lecturer at the University of York, UK.

Contents: Introduction, Brian Cummings and Freya Sierhius; Part I Intersubjectivity, Ethics, Agency: Passion and intersubjectivity in early modern literature, Christopher Tilmouth; Affective physics: affectus in Spinoza's Ethica, Russ Leo; Donne's passions: emotion, agency and language, Brian Cummings. Part II Embodiment, Cognition, Identity: Melancholy, passions and identity in the Renaissance, Angus Gowland; Montaigne's soul, Felicity Green; Uncertain knowing, blind vision, and active passivity: subjectivity, sensuality and emotion in Milton's epistemology, Katharine Fletcher. Part III Politics, Affects, Friendship: Friendship and freedom of speech in the work of Fulke Greville, Freya Sierhuis; A passion for the past: the politics of nostalgia on the early Jacobean stage, Isabel Karremann; 'Not truth but image maketh passion': Hobbes on instigation and appeasing, Ioannis D. Evrigenis. Part IV Religion, Devotion, Theology: 'A sensible touching, feeling and groping': metaphor and sensory experience in the English Reformation, Joe Moshenska; 'Tears of passion' and 'inordinate lamentation': complicated grief in Donne and Augustine, Katrin Ettenhuber; Passions, politics and subjectivity in Philip Massinger's The Emperor of the East, Adrian Streete. Part V Philosophy and the Early Modern Passions: The fallacy of 'that within': Hamlet meets Wittgenstein, Daniella Jancsó; 'The greatest share of endless pain': the spectral sacramentality of pain in Milton's Paradise Lost, Björn Quiring; 'Not passion's slave': Hamlet, Descartes and the passions, Stephan Laqué; Afterword, Brian Cummings and Freya Sierhuis; Bibliography; Index.

Framed within a wide range of ideas, including politics and religion, this volume makes new connections between embodiment, selfhood and the passions. It explores new ways of negotiating the boundaries between a cognitive and bodily approach to emotion, and in the process suggests both new models of the self and new models for interactive and inter-disciplinary history.