The Feeling Heart is an exciting and lively contribution to the growing fields of the history of emotion and affect studies. Here the heart is variously (to select just a few examples) ablaze, pierced, wounded, engraved, amalgamated, exchanged, anatomized, and entombed, as the volume productively expands discussions of the heart across periods, places, genres, and disciplines.

The volume's twelve essays are split into three thematic sections. In the first (“Meaningful Hearts”), Patricia Simons traces the emergence of the flaming heart in European visual culture as a symbol of intense emotion. Exploring love imagery in the translation of Yvain from French into Old Norse (Ívens saga), Chloé Vondenhoff illuminates a literary and cultural change of heart; that few heart references are carried through to the Icelandic translation reveals more than an effort to abridge the text, Vondenhoff argues, but represents cultural negotiations of the heart from a symbol of love to one of courage, from the physiological to the cognitive, and from itinerant to bounded. Carol J. Williams's examination of troubadour songs—with a particular focus on Dante and Arnault Daniel—positions the singing voice as able both to express the feeling heart and to transmit such heartfelt feeling to others. Bronwyn Reddan closes the section with a move forward to Charles Perrault's Dialogue de l'Amour et l'Amitié (1660), where the heart is figured as a battleground on which emotions fight for control over the feeling subject.

The volume's second section (“Embodied Hearts”) explores the significance of the heart as both organ and symbol. Kathryn L. Smithies's chapter attends to the relationship between courage and the heart in Jean Bodel's leave-taking poem Les Cognés (ca. 1200); as his body is destroyed by leprosy, Bodel turns to his heart in his struggle toward death and salvation. Connections between the heart and mind that appeared in earlier chapters come to the fore in Clare Davidson's affective reading of the Middle English “cognizant heart”; here, distinctions between emotion and reason, and between feeling and thinking, are productively complicated as the heart functions “as a metonym for emotional consciousness” (118). Informed by the Bakhtinian grotesque, Colin Yeo reads early modern English poems in light of contemporary anatomical thought, demonstrating how heart imagery was used to “unnerve and disturb” (135). Susan Broomhall concludes this rich section with an exploration of Catherine de’ Medici's cardiotaphs—heart tombs commissioned for her husband and sons—as emblematic representations of emotional, gendered, and political experience.

The collection's final part (“Productive Hearts”) demonstrates the heart's affective potential. Reading the meditations and prayers of Saint Anselm of Canterbury (1033–1109), June-Ann Greeley considers Anselm's public and intensely private ruminations on the heart that would inspire a new form of emotional devotion. Eleonora Rai continues to unpack the spiritual potential of the heart in an examination of Mary's heart as both a site of conversion and a pathway to Christ in early modern Jesuit devotion. Analyzing the icon of the heart on eighteenth-century love tokens, Bridget Millmore combines the history of emotions with the history from below to demonstrate how these tokens “expressed the feelings of their giver” (215), and how the language of the heart extends to affective objects. In the collection's closing essay, Elizabeth C. Macknight traces the heart through a substantial private archive (spanning France, Saxony, and England across the period 1371–1962), charting its appearance in letters, diaries, and a coat of arms which aptly displays a flaming heart, bringing the collection full circle.

As the editors point out, the given structure is just one way to approach the collection, and a number of the essays could sit comfortably in another section (5). The introduction does valuable work in pulling through some connections across the collection, although gestures within the essays themselves would perhaps help to ensure that these productive cross-currents—which are a real strength of the volume—are not missed by readers who come to the collection for specific essays.

The Feeling Heart celebrates the heart's “ability to communicate meaning and emotion, to forge communities, and even to shape the subsequent dynamics of response from others” (14). In many ways this notion also characterizes this collection, which models a cross-disciplinary approach for future scholarship in the history of emotions and beyond.