Exploring Emotion in Reformation Scotland

Book excerpt: This book investigates emotion in early modern Scotland, and provides the first exploration of a Scottish individual’s life and writing in light of the recent major advances in the study of emotion. It does this through the example of James Melville, a minister in the Reformed Protestant Church, whose autobiographical writing provides one of the earliest and fullest opportunities to explore the emotional world and range of experiences of an individual, offering the chance for a more rounded analysis of emotional experiences and language than has ever been offered for Scotland at the time. This book contributes a crucial new geographical and cultural context to the expanding world of the history of emotions in the early modern period.