The articles featured in this special issue contribute to a contemporary réévaluation of the history of the passions: how they influence and arise from sensory perception, how they are embodied and performed. Since the very beginnings of French literary history, lyric and narrative texts have portrayed a dynamic interplay between sense impressions, emotional response, and action.1 In learned and popular accounts alike, medieval sources reveal elaborate sensory constructs bridging the inner and outer worlds, governing the formulation and expression of emotional states in often surprising ways. ...Lyons and Hogg investigate the somewhat anomalous cases of wonder and anger, which Descartes and Aquinas, respectively, identified as the passions that have no opposite.54 We therefore invite our readers to follow the suggestive interconnections between these articles to explore how the notions of passion, perception, and performance evolved in pre-modern France.