Was Love Invented in Sixteenth-Century England? A Few Comments on Liah Greenfeld’s Theory of Emotions

Authors

• Dmitri Panchenko, St. Petersburg State University and Higher School of EconomicsFollow

Keywords

cultural theory of emotions, history of romantic love, Shakespearean love, Catullus and love

Abstract

According to Liah Greenfeld, there are three kinds of emotions. Primary emotions (such as pain, pleasure, fear, positive and negative excitement, hunger, and satiation) and secondary emotions (such as affection, sorrow, and anger) can be observed in both animals and humans. However, most human emotions ⎯ tertiary emotions ⎯ are more complex. “These, though not unusual among our pets, do not exist in the wild. Tertiary emotions are emotions such as love, ambition, pride, self-respect, shame, guilt, inspiration, enthusiasm, sadness, awe, admiration, humility and humiliation, sense of justice and injustice, envy, malice, resentment, cruelty, hatred; one can go on almost indefinitely. They are not capacities of the brain and are not built into the organism, but are products of culture; their explanation is not, therefore, functional or teleological, but historical” (Greenfeld 2013).

Recommended Citation

Panchenko, Dmitri (2026) "Was Love Invented in Sixteenth-Century England? A Few Comments on Liah Greenfeld’s Theory of Emotions," Comparative Civilizations Review: Vol. 95: No. 95, Article 21.
Available at: https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/ccr/vol95/iss95/21