How can the concept of nostalgia illuminate the culturally specific ways in which societies understand the contested relationship between the past, present, and future?
The word nostalgia was invented in the late seventeenth century to describe the debilitating effects of homesickness. Now widely defined as a sense of longing for a lost past, initially it was more closely linked with dislocation in space. By exploring some of its many textual, visual and musical manifestations in the tumultuous period between c. 1350 and 1800, this volume resists the assumption that nostalgia is a distinctive by-product of modernity. It also forges a fruitful link between three lively areas of current scholarly enquiry: memory, temporality, and emotion.
The contributors deploy nostalgia as a tool for investigating perceptions of the passage of time and historical change, unsettling experiences of migration and geographical displacement, and the connections between remembering and forgetting, affect and imagination. Ranging across Europe and the Atlantic world, they examine the moments, sites and communities in which it arose, alongside how it was used to express both criticism and regret about the religious, political, social and cultural upheavals that shaped the early modern world. They approach it as a complex mixed feeling that opens a new window into individual subjectivities and collective mentalities.

Edited by Harriet Lyon and Alexandra Walsham

Introduction: Early Modern Nostalgia: Memory, Temporality, and Emotion - Harriet Lyon and Alexandra Walsham
Rhetorics of Nostalgia
Pastoral Nostalgia in the Long Fourteenth Century - Hannah Skoda
'That Antwerp's Golden Age may return one day': Nostalgia as a Rhetorical Device in the Schoolbooks of a Sixteenth-Century Schoolmaster in Exile - Alisa van de Haar and Theo Lap
Figures of Nostalgia
Good King Harry? Nostalgia for Henry VIII in Early Modern England - Harriet Lyon
Remembering Lot's Wife: The Sin of Nostalgia in the English Atlantic World - Alexandra Walsham
Communities of Nostalgia
Exiles from England or an England in Exile? Nostalgia, Temporality and Catholic Émigrés from Tudor England - Frederick Smith
Memory, Nostalgia, and the Formation of a Greek Migrant Community - Niccolò Fattori
Sites of Nostalgia
'This instrument is still there, but no longer functions': Chorography, Nostalgia, and Politics in the Aftermath of the Eighty Years' War - Raingard Esser
Family and Nostalgia in the Early Modern Iberian World - Antonio Urquízar-Herrera and Enrique Soria Mesa
Sounds of Nostalgia
Sung Farewells: Listening for Nostalgia's Futures in the Long Fifteenth Century - Matthew S. Champion
'When this Old Hat was New': Ballads, Nostalgia and Social Change in Early Modern England' - Andy Wood