Naama Cohen-Hanegbi’s book unites research into emotions, medicine and religion to show how emotions were central to the social fabric of the Western Mediterranean between 1200 and 1500. The medical profession’s necessary involvement with matters of the soul took physicians into the realms of natural philosophy and theology, and the book deals with moments of convergence and contestation between medical, philosophical and religious discourses of emotions. To understand how emotions were conceived first requires an understanding of the medieval concept of the body-soul, which comprehended emotions as residing between the two. The body was integral to how emotions manifested (shaking, trembling) but emotions were also thought to take place within the body, often in the heart or the head. As Cohen-Hanegbi describes in the helpful Introduction: ‘moods, emotions, and feelings “happened” to the material body’. She is careful to examine both theoretical and practical advice by learned physicians as well as considering the ‘local and social contexts of medical practice’. This gives the book depth and adds to the existing literature on medicine and emotion which, according to Cohen-Hanegbi, has tended to focus on the intellectual development of theoretical medical understandings of emotions, or on specific emotions. Instead, she takes as her starting point the idea that physicians were active agents in constructing and promulgating emotional and behavioural norms.

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