Rather than being properties of the individual self, emotions are socially produced and deployed in specific cultural contexts, as this collection documents with unusual richness. All the essays show emotions to be a form of thought and knowledge, and a major component of social life—including in the nineteenth century, which attempted to relegate them to a feminine intimate sphere. The collection ranges across topics such as eighteenth-century sensibility, nineteenth-century concerns with the transmission of emotions, early twentieth-century cinematic affect, and the contemporary mobilization of political emotions including those regarding nonstate national identities. The complexities and effects of emotions are explored in a variety of forms—political rhetoric, literature, personal letters, medical writing, cinema, graphic art, soap opera, journalism, popular music, digital media—with attention paid to broader European and transatlantic implications.

Impurity of Blood analyzes the proposition of Spanish racial thought in the late 19th and early 20th centuries that racial strength came from a fusion of different groups, rather than from a kind of racial purity. By providing a history of ethnic thought in Spain in the medieval and early modern era, and by studying the formation of racial thought in Spain's nascent human sciences and its political and cultural manifestations leading into the Franco regime, it provides a new view of racial thought in Europe and its connections to the larger twentieth century formation of racial thought in the West.

This book explores how notions of deviancy and social control are dramatized in the novels of the late nineteenth-century Spanish realist author Benito Pérez Galdós. Galdós’s treatment of prostitutes, alcoholics, beggars and vagrants is studied within the context of the socio-cultural and medical debates circulating during the period. Drawing on Foucault’s very specific conceptualisation of the idea of control through discourses, the book analyses how Galdós’s novels interacted with contemporary debates on poverty and deviancy – notably, discourses on hygiene, domesticity and philanthropy. It is proposed that Galdós’s view of marginal social groups was much more open-minded, shrewd and liberal than the often inflexible pronouncements made by contemporary professional voices.

The poor and the sick-poor have always presented a problem to the governments and churches of Europe. Whose responsibility are they? Are they a wilful burden on the honest working population, or are they a necessary presence for the true Christian to live the true Christian life? In the 18th and 19th centuries what happened to the poor and the sick-poor in the north and south of Europe was different. In the north there occurred first the Reformation in the 16th century, which changed attitudes to the poor, and then the advent of industrialisation, with its far-reaching effects of pauperisation of people both in town and countryside. In the Catholic south, where industrialisation did not appear so soon, the Catholic Church introduced a programme of reform at all levels but along traditional lines. This included the founding of new orders dedicated to the care of the poor and sick, of new institutions within which to house and care for them. At all times it was taken for granted that it was a necessary aspect of being a Christian that one should give for the care of the needy, and that this was not the duty of the state or of secular institutions. The secularising movement did however reach the southern countries by way both of the Enlightenment and - more drastically - in the form of the Napoleonic invasions. But after the defeat of Napoleon, the Church reasserted its right to administer and control the support of the poor and sick, and this situation continued until 1900 in most areas. Moreover the effects of industrialisation and the concomitant increase in population did make itself felt in the south in the course of the 19th century, which put great stress on the institutions for poor relief and health care for the poor. All this is still relevant today, since the situations that governments and the Catholic Church found themselves confronted with, and the stark choices they had to make, are being replayed to some extent today. Who is responsible for the poor, who is to blame for their being poor? How should their poverty be relieved, how should the health care of the many be funded? These are still live issues today. While complete in itself the present volume also forms the fourth and last of a four-volume survey of health care and poor relief in Europe between 1500 and 1900, edited by Ole Peter Grell and Andrew Cunningham

In the early modern centuries a body of popularized medical writings appeared, telling ordinary people how they could best take care of their own health. Often written be doctors, such books gave simple advice for home treatments, while commonly warning of the dangers of magic, quackery, old wive's tales and faith-healing. The Popularization of Medicine explores the rise of this form of people's medicine, from the early days of printing to the Victorian age, focusing on the different experiences of Britain, the Continent and North America.