Troubling in (and about) History

Within a book that explores troubling visual representations of the human body, it may be appropriate to question the historicity of the affective experience implied by this designation, and what it may have meant to trouble and/or be troubled in early modernity. The historical semantics of the vocabulary that may have channelled, and played a part in shaping that experience will be worth investigating, given the intrinsic bond between words and things; together with this, one will have to take into account any relevant sociocultural context and imaginable framework of the evolution of such vocabulary over time. This will allow us to reconstruct the sense that the term had for its historical users and to identify shared concepts and related families of words that may have contributed to define that experience. As a lively research field, the history of emotions has recently explored its territory by deploying multiple paradigms of enquiry, some of which may prove helpful for our quest. Dictionaries (both mono- and plurilingual) and other reference books produced in the long 16th!century – as well as modern works of retrospective lexicography – provide some clues to the semantic history of the relevant terminology. A number of fields of knowledge may be evoked to explore the mental horizon that bounded the circulation of that vocabulary and assigned it contexts of meaning and agency (one does things, with words). With these tools the historian should be equipped to investigate the affective palette that may have been employed by men and women who troubled or were troubled by or with the bodies of the past.