Thanks in particular to the impact of phenomenological perspectives, in past years a growing interest in 'emotion' and 'affect' has manifested across the Humanities. Following (and drawing on) the previous 'turn', which focused on the senses as means of interacting with the world, this 'emotional turn' promises to bring us closer to the ways in which people of the past experienced the world. An unavoidably inter- and trans-disciplinary endeavour, the study of emotion is currently stalled (or at least slowed) by debates on the possibility to reconstruct what people from the past felt. The project "Crafting Emotion: The Late Antique Panegyris as Embodied Experience (ca. 330-ca. 500)" argues that the annual celebration of the Christian martyrs, as staged in the course of the fourth and fifth centuries CE, provides us with an ideal case study. The character of the audience, which was made of people with diverse social, cultural, and even linguistic backgrounds, and the ultimate goal of the event, namely to establish the celebrated martyr as a model for those who participated, seem to have convinced the bishops who designed the experience to rely on what they've known to be constant physiological and psychological mechanisms. The result was a multiple-days celebration during which a sequence of actions affected the physiology and cognition of those present an worked to bring them to a common relationship with the martyr.

This paper introduces the project, its goals and methodology, as well as preliminary results.

Dr. Vladimir Ivanovici, Institut für Kirchengeschichte, Christl. Archäologie und kirchl. Kunst, Universität Wien