Mari Eyice

About me

About me
I am a PhD in history and I work as a researcher and teacher at the Department of History. I recently finished my doctoral thesis on emotions during the Reformation period in Sweden and have begun a new project about emotions and disability in the early modern period. Both projects originate from an interest in the lived experience of early modern people. With inspiration from current trends in cultural history, I see bodily and emotional experiences as significant for understanding how early modern people exeperienced their existence. Moreover, I am especially interested in bodily and emotional experiences in the context of religious practice, since religion was a key part of early modern life.

Research
The Outer Periphery of Empathy
In this project, I study empathy through the lens of early modern disability. Research about empathy has grown rapidly during the last decade. However, while there are a number of studies showing the importance of an historical perspective on empathy, there is a lack of scholarship that sufficiently considers the role of the body for empathy. This study combines the two research fields of history of emotion and disability history to argue that bodily practices are vital in the shaping of emotions and that differently functioning bodies are socially significant. Using a variety historical sources where disabled people were active agents, the project aims to analyse how physical disability was experienced, how disability correlated with other social categories such as age, gender and social status, which emotional practices were formative in the experience of disability and which norms were formative for the understanding of disability. Ultimately, it assesses how these practices and norms together shaped empathy in the context of early modern disability. The project will result in new knowledge about the lived experience of people with disabilities during the 16th- and 17th centuries, new insights into the emotional practices of the period and deepen our understanding of the historically changeable forms of empathy. The study will also highlight the benefits of combining history of emotion with disability history, thus providing theoretical insight valid for both fields.

The project is funded by the Swedish Research Council and will run for three years from 2020. It will involve research visits to Tampere University, Cambridge University and Queen Mary University London, in addition to achival research in Sweden. 

An Emotional Landscape of Devotion
An Emotional Landscape of Devotion is my doctoral thesis, in which I explore how the Reformation in Sweden was experienced by 16th century people through an examination of emotional practices. I argue that religious texts such as prayer books, sermon collections and instruction manuals were formative for the religious setting of the 16th century and that the use of these texts would therefore involve emotional practices for the 16th century Christian, thus creating an emotional experience of the Reformation for the Christian who used these texts.

The thesis has shown that religious texts from the early Reformation, ca 1526–1571, were abundantly emotional but that the emotions they would create in the Christian who used them would vary both depending on the type of emotional practice that the texts would entail and depending on when during the period examined the texts were from. There was a greater span of different emotions in the earlier texts examined, while the emotions in the later texts examined were more uniform, thus possibly creating a more forceful emotional experience of the Reformation.

The results of this thesis question the view in previous research that the Reformation in Sweden lead to an intellectualisation of religion. It shows that emotions were central in 16th-century religious experience, which concurs with recent research on the Reformations around Europe, in which the spatial, social, corporal, material and emotional aspects of religious experience in the 16th century have been highlighted.