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Through the analysis of an extensive biographical source material – the life description of Swedish clergyman Pehr Stenberg – this article examines how love was framed as a cause of illness in everyday contexts in late eighteenth-century Sweden. Love was perceived as an emotion that could cause both physical and mental forms of illness. Although lovesickness has been regarded as an illness that could be used by afflicted individuals to communicate emotions, this source material indicates that illnesses caused by love were regarded as actual afflictions. In the framing of these illnesses, conceptions of female fragility were reinforced as love was perceived to have a particularly destabilising power on women.

Focusing on the life description of clergyman Pehr Stenberg, this article examines the internal processing of romantic jealousy in a late 18 th -century Swedish context. During his lifetime, Stenberg wrote a vast life description with the intent of documenting his innermost thoughts and feelings. In this account, the romantic jealousy that plagued Stenberg during his second marriage is described in intimate detail. Using this extensive and complex account to conduct a micro-historical exploration of romantic jealousy, this article displays jealousy as an entangled emotion by examining its relationship to key contemporary beliefs, thoughts and ideals, as well as to other emotions. Consequently, jealousy in relation to love and marriage, honour, psychological and physical pathology and religion is examined. Although comprising a single account, the Life Description of Pehr Stenberg manages to display the multidimensional nature of romantic jealousy and the very historically specific ways in which we explain and process our emotional experiences.