The Stomach and Early Modern Emotion

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.