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The Stomach and Early Modern Emotion
- University of Toronto Quarterly
- University of Toronto Press
- Volume 79, Number 2, Spring 2010
- pp. 800-818
- 10.1353/utq.2010.0228
- Article
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This essay explores the importance of the stomach in early modern understandings and expressions of emotional experience. In it I demonstrate how the prevalence of the word stomach and the variety of its connotations in early modern writing - most of which have become obsolete - reflect the much greater role assigned to the organ in feeling and thinking in the pre-Cartesian mind-body model of the period. In addition, I argue that in discourses and representations of complex emotion in medical texts, treatises on the passions, and fictive literature, the stomach is a site through which gender, ethnicity, and class hierarchies are mapped and maintained.