Rafä Borys¿awski is an Associate Professor at the University of Silesia, Poland.

Alicja Bemben is an Assistant Professor at the University of Silesia, Poland.

Driven by their curiosity about how emotional catalysts function in history, the volume's authors offer a collection of texts that give insight into the emotional aspects of particular events, processes, texts, and works of history; they show how history happens because of emotions.

Introduction: Emotions as the Engines of Change Part 1: Narrating Past Emotions 1. The Wonders of Creation: The Affective Poetics of Alterity in the Old English Letter of Alexander to Aristotle 2. Nice Guys Finish Last: Emotional Leaders and Political Action in Selected Íslendingasögur 3. The Deceit of Emotions: Henry More's Conception of Passion and Religious Polemic in Early Modern England 4. How British Lyric Poetry Came to be Angry After Three Hundred Years of Stiff Upper Lips 5. Empathy, "Empathic Unsettlement," and Human-Animal Relationships in Zakes Mda's The Whale Caller and J.M. Coetzee's Disgrace Part 2: Emotive Histories, Emotional Historiographies 6. Cicero and His Daughter Tullia: Grief and History in a Latin Epistolary Collection 7. "They Could Not Let Her Go with Dry Eyes . . .": Manifesting Emotions in the Encomium Emmae Reginae 8. Worlds Emerge, Worlds Collapse: Traumatic Affect in Medieval Historiography and the Reception of Sturlunga Saga in the Twentieth Century 9. Controlling Female Emotions. Monstrous Births and Maternal Imagination in Iceland 10. Disgust and Parasites in Nineteenth-Century Science and Fiction Part 3: Emotions Shaping History 11. The Guilt, the Trial, and the Execution: The Case of the Cross at Cheapside Revisited 12. Love, Actually . . . Pricing Romantic Love in Nineteenth-Century Greece 13. Melancholia in Contemporary Spain: Digging Up a Past That Did Not Pass Away 14. Persecutory Anxiety and the Fear of Death as Emotional Qualities of the Cultural Revolution in China 15. Historical Understanding-A Romance of Many Dimensions