Introduction – Cora Fox, Bradley J. Irish, and Cassie M. Miura

Part I: Rewriting discourses of pleasure

1 Happy Hamlet – Richard Strier
2 Therapeutic laughter in Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy – Cassie M. Miura
3 The pleasure of the text: reading and happiness in Rabelais and Montaigne – Ian Frederick Moulton
4 Pleasure and the 'rustic life' – Ullrich Langer

Part II: Imagining happy communities

5 The theology of cheer, Erasmus to Shakespeare – Timothy Hampton
6 ‘My crown is called content’: positive, negative, and political affects in Shakespeare’s first tetralogy – Paul Joseph Zajac
7 Solidarity as ritual in the late Elizabethan court: faction, emotion, and the Essex Circle – Bradley J. Irish
8 Merriness, affect, and community in Shakespeare’s Merry Wives of Windsor – Cora Fox

Part III: Forms, attachment, and ambivalence

9 Happy objects and earthly pleasure in Thomas Traherne’s devotional poetry – Leila Watkins
10 Trust and disgust: the precariousness of positive emotions in Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi –
Lalita Pandit Hogan
11 ‘My heart is satisfied’: revenge, justice, and satisfaction in The Spanish Tragedy – Eonjoo Park
12 All’s Well That Ends Well? Happiness, ambivalence, and story genre – Patrick Colm Hogan

Afterword – Michael Schoenfeldt

Index

Exploring literary culture as a record of how early modern subjects imagined and experienced positive emotions – like happiness, cheer, tranquillity, contentedness, trust, satisfaction, or solidarity – this volume brings together interdisciplinary work on emotion and affect to reread the history of good feelings.

Taken together, these wide-ranging essays demonstrate that the European Renaissance was a time of intense reflection and evaluation of happiness and its related positive feelings in cultural realms as diverse as the court, the public theatre, the church, and in various areas of intellectual debate. While melancholy has been regarded as the defining cultural emotion of the early modern, this volume highlights literary negotiations of positive emotions and at the same time reveals the ways in which contemporary distinctions between positive and negative emotions and affects have falsely framed these cultural products. The positive is never simply good or desirable, but instead reflects cultural structures and systems that are both profoundly necessary for social life and at the same time flawed by inequalities and exclusions. Moreover, the essays reveal in their methodological diversity how the fertile intersections between studies in the history of emotions, modern affect theory, and the contemporary cognitive sciences enrich critical accounts of how positive emotions were cultivated and experienced.

Tracing the ways these textual representations of positive emotions illuminate emotional life in early modern Europe, the volume offers exciting new paths for research into what it means for human individuals and communities to be happy and well, both in the past and the present.